Most distributed teams consist of people from different cultures, working from their home country. While working remotely is in itself a challenge, cultural differences influence collaboration underneath the surface. As human beings, we believe we can work with anyone from any culture. But after some time, we realize we’re not understanding each other properly. Culture influences communication through different beliefs about openness, responsibility, hierarchy and work in general.

As the title of the article implies, we believe that teams need to 'manage' cultural differences. It's not something that can or should be 'overcome'. And it's also something that can be seen as positive, as bringing additional viewpoints to a team.

What Is Culture?

It’s not always clear what we mean by ‘culture’. It can refer to habits within a group of people from a certain country, company or any other level.

Within a country, people form certain behaviors; there are values and norms that shape how we act; we communicate in different ways. But often, we are not aware of this, and we’re not able to recognize other people’s behavior within the context of their own culture. While the country culture influences collaboration, the solutions to intercultural challenges lie on the company and team level.

How Culture Influences collaboration in distributed Teams

From our experience at the team level, culture influences the way we collaborate in various ways:

If our teammates have a local mindset, they might prefer to work with people in their own city, speaking their own language. What distributed teams need, however, is a global mindset, where people are interested in getting to know the others and learning about the cultures involved. Having too many people with a local mindset on your distributed team runs the risk of creating an 'us versus them' mentality. 'We over here' flock together and we know how stuff works. 'Those people over there' make all the mistakes and they don’t understand what we need. This type of attitude often derails the whole team.

Task versus relationship orientation:

People in the West (especially in the U.S.) are often task and goal oriented. They want to get their stuff done. People in the U.S., for example, make quick decisions on hiring a certain vendor. If the vendor has what they need, they decide overnight to give him the project. If he screws up, they as easily pull the project back. In Asia, people are very social and believe in building long term relationships. They want to know whom they are going to work with, and they would rather spend several months fostering the relationship before granting a project to a new vendor. But within Asia, there are vast differences. Hugo has recently moved to Indonesia and noticed that people in Jakarta move very fast. After a first talk, proposals are asked and confirmations follow within days.

Europe is somewhat in between (with vast differences between the countries within Europe!).

Level of openness:

Another big influencer is the level of openness. Do I keep my opinions to myself or will I voice them easily? Here we again have a west-east divide. Dutch are very open, however, people in Asia tend to be less open, especially when authority is involved, i.e., “I’m not going to contradict my boss or project manager”. That may be seen as disrespectful. If the boss is in the West and I’m in the East, then my Western boss in turn will keep asking me to be more open or proactive. And I might get confused, because I’m not used to being allowed or even stimulated to voice my ideas. If my boss tells me “This is the way to do it,” I’d rather do that exactly, even if I think it’s a crazy idea. This behavioral difference impacts most of the agile ceremonies. For example, in sprint planning if a product owner asks 'Can you take more user stories?', regardless of the possibility, people in some Asian cultures tend to say "Yes" always, which defeats the whole purpose of doing planning. Similarly, in retrospectives, people hesitate to share real challenges and problems (e.g. because a superior might get offended by it).

Tendency to always say "Yes":

An interesting case, often discussed in global organisations is Indian people always saying ‘yes’.Ged Robertsof TCS wrote an articlein one of Hugo’s ebookstitled 'Cultural Differences or How I Managed to Learn to Work with Both Dutch and Indians Without Losing My Hair'. The following excerpt describes the ‘yes’ well:

When I first started working for an Indian company I was given a very sound piece of advice. I was told the following, Ged, there are three ways an Indian person will say “yes” when asked whether they can do something and the response will have one of the following three meanings:

1. Yes I can do that,
2. Yes I can do that (it will take me nineteen hours per day but I can do that) and
3. Yes I can do that (actually I can’t do that, but you are the customer and I cannot say no to a customer)

If you wish to be successful in any relationship with an Indian company, your challenge is to understand which version of “yes” you have just heard. When we probe deeper mainly into the version #3 of “yes” we find a number of cultural items at play.

The first aspect is the extreme levels of customer focus and customer centricity which plays within the Indian psyche. Concepts like 'the customer is always right' and 'the customer pays our wages' (management just handles the money) are prevalent throughout the culture. The second aspect is that there is an assumption that someone will always say yes, consequently if you want the business or you want to maintain the relationship then saying yes ensures that that relationship stays with you. Although there is the worry that the commitment is given without any thoughts to the consequences, this relentless level of customer focus has lead to some quite amazing achievements. Consequently, many times the version that you hear is not version #3 or version #1, but version #2.

This kind of behavior hampers the collaboration and trust between distributed teams. It also fades out the transparency within a team that is the core of agile teams.

How to work with the cultural differences

The above shows that culture is relevant. It impacts organizations, teams and outcomes. To work with the influence of culture, we've developed a set of questions organizations can ask. These questions help create awareness of the impact of culture. It also helps identify what possible pain points exist. We've also defined a set of 'virtues': behaviors that help organizations manage cultural differences in distributed teams. And we've described some practices that can be used to address culture.

Questions

The below questions are a good starting point for cultural awareness. They are best used in a facilitated team session with people from the respective cultures. They can also be shared online as a survey or in a trello board (columns with questions, tickets with answers and discussions). They are meant to be 'played with'.

• Are we experiencing impact from cultural differences?
• Do we have an 'us versus them' paradigm?
• How do we deal with differences?
• What will we do to get the differences to the surface?
• How comfortable is each culture with being open, sharing matters of mind and heart?
• What's the impact of cultural differences if we're collocated versus distributed?
• How much hierarchy do we have in our organization?
• How does each culture perceive hierarchy?
• How much 'self organisation' do we expect?
• What can we do to get everyone on the same level of 'self organization'?
• To what degree does language have impact?
• Does everyone have the same understanding of saying 'no'?

Virtues

To effectively work in a multi cultural distributed team, there's a handful of behaviors that help people work with cultural differences:

• Empathy: accept differences, 'jam' with them
• Awareness: becoming aware of the differences
• Openness: sharing what's on your mind
• Trust people more than process
• Transparency

Awareness of cultural differences is the starting point to 'acceptance'. Once we become aware that certain behaviors of other people originate from their cultural background, we generate understanding. With this understanding, we can move on to accept the differences as a fact of our situation. Based on this acceptance, we can find ways to organize work 'around' them.

Empathy means 'putting yourself in the shoes of another person'. People with high degrees of empathy tend to be good listeners. They are strong at experiencing and feeling what someone else experiences and feels. This heightened understanding helps people to collaborate better across cultures.

Complete openness (or honesty) means: I have an image about something (an object, a situation) in my mind. If I am 100% open, I will share that image with you as it appears in my mind. I'll share any information I have in my mind with you; I will not change or hold back anything that matters in this situation. Openness helps people understand each other. It helps teams to inspect what's going on and adapt in order to achieve the outcomes they're after.

Transparency is the key to build trust among team members. Being distributed it is even more important to be transparent and share achievements as well as challenges and co-create the solutions. If some discussions and acts of any team member do not resonate with your culture, be transparent and share your perspective.

We create processes to bridge cultural gaps, however, trust is more important to make processes suit to your work style, hence, trusting people has higher value than following processes.