You’ve successfully built a remote global team, or you might be underway, now is the challenge of enabling a collaborative environment for your culturally diverse team.
To achieve this, your duty is to teach your employees how to deal with colleagues in a multicultural environment and work-out effective collaboration. A few simple and easy tips such as the ones presented in this article, can help you bring cultural intelligence in your team.
When you don’t address cultural intelligence in your remote global teams…
When employees are not aware of cross-cultural practices, they naturally see things through a culture-bound lens. Though a team can work like this for short-term, however, in the long-run, it can create coordination issues between members from opposing cultures.
An Example
For example, a coordination issue can be identified in a team with members from the three culture categories we know of. (these 3 culture groups are presented in the Lewis model and are named as: linear-active, reactive and multi-active)
Assume a group of three employees, each from a separate Lewis category. The employee from the county that falls in the ‘multi-active’ group is likely to behave emotionally. On the other hand, remaining two members from the other two groups expect polite behavior. This influences coordination between the employees and limits their capacity to work effectively as a team.
Tips for creating a culturally intelligent remote global team
Three tips can help you organize and establish practices that minimize cross-cultural conflicts and improve coordination among your remote global employees.
- Make your employees learn the importance of polite etiquettes such as kindness, empathy and respect.
- Formulate a professional code-of-conduct.
- Discourage culturally insensitive language and behavior.
Emphasize on polite étiquettes
When your remote employees are aware of polite etiquettes, it drastically improves cross-cultural coordination at your virtual workplace.
Using polite etiquettes means that a person conducts themselves with kindness, empathy and respect. These behaviors are universally accepted across all cultures and creates room for acceptance of cultural differences.
To inspire polite behavior in your teams, connect with them and make them aware of cultural differences that can exist. Meanwhile, portray a desirable company culture that reflects cultural friendly values such as kindness, empathy and respect. This way you inspire change in your employees and they are more willing to adapt to the company culture.
Set professional code of conduct
It’s not always likely that your team works with perfect coordination even when applying polite etiquettes. Some employees might still find it difficult to connect.
To make your team more culturally intelligent, it’s even better to have a set of professional code of conduct at your organization.
This set of rules define a friendly criteria that is followed by every team member, irrespective of the culture. For example, it can address professional codes of: punctuality, dressing and interrupting discussions when asking questions.
Having a professional code of conduct can minimize employee struggle with multiple cultures. It acts as a diversion that focuses employee attention on their work.
Discourage culturally insensitive language and behaviors
In all your efforts of creating a culturally intelligent workforce, employees might still make mistakes while dealing with colleagues.
Take such events as an opportunity to highlight and discourage culturally insensitive language and behavior.
Remember, you cannot bring cultural awareness in a single day. So, it’s advised that you address conflicts with an empathy mindset and help your employees find out and correct flaws in their conduct.
