Geographically dispersed teams have become a reality in most large workplaces. Organizations pressed to reduce costs are shifting work from high-cost locations to lower-cost locations.
This is a politically fraught question, for all sorts of obvious reasons. I’m not going to address the political issues; that is a topic covered exhaustively by a lot of other books. This book is about challenges faced by managers, and this chapter will be focused on that.
Note Outsourcing is when work that was previously done in-house is done by an employee of a different company.
Offshoring is when work previously done in one country is moved to people in another country.
Nearshoring is a type of offshoring that uses people in nearby time zones to increase overlap between peoples’ work schedules.
The challenges for dealing with all these types of team distributions are similar. In all cases, you are communicating and trying to forge a cohesive team across boundaries of space, time, and culture.
Outsourcing and offshoring have caused a tremendous change in the way that information technology work is done. Coordination must be done across geographical and organizational boundaries. Cultural differences between people in different companies, regions, and countries have to be overcome. The challenges faced by IT managers today are different in scope and flavor from the challenges that were faced by previous generations.
The most difficult challenge is making a team out of this diverse group of people, separated by language, geography, time zone, and culture.
A lot of the analysis done by companies focuses strictly on the cost of salaries and benefits for comparable professionals in different locations. This sort of analysis is naïve and incomplete.
There are increased transaction and efficiency costs associated with both offshoring and outsourcing. These include increased travel and communication costs associated with managing the remote team members, as well as risk mitigation costs associated with doing business in a country with a different regulatory structure. In some cases, companies have found that these additional costs outweigh the savings in salaries and benefits, and they are reversing the process (commonly known as onshoring or insourcing.)
Advantages and Risks of Global Teams
Executive management tends to overstate the economic benefits associated with offshoring to lower-cost locations. To someone who is not directly on the firing line, one system administrator looks like another system administrator, and the primary difference is the salary.
For people who have spent their careers managing technology directly, this type of thinking glosses over a lot of the bigger issues. There are a lot of advantages to having the technology staff closer to their internal customers.
- Communications efficiency. In-person communication is simply more efficient than remote communication. Eighty percent of the content of a conversation is nonverbal. Video conferencing and telephones allow some of the nuanced nonverbal information to come through but not all of it. Some functions, such as requirements gathering, are much more efficiently gathered face-to-face.
- Ease of coordination. Informal conversations allow back-channel communications to occur that can improve efficiency. It is much easier to request a small clarification, or for an improvement to come out of a quick conversation. When you are in a different time zone than the requester, where you lose a business day to ask a question, you are more likely to just proceed based on your best judgment.
- Local control. It is never as easy to manage people remotely as locally. Management by walking around becomes impossible when you manage people in remote locations.
- Cultural norms. Cultural differences are less likely to garble communications or implicit assumptions about requirements.
- Cohesion. A sense of teamwork is easier to foster when people are closer together.
- Local responsiveness. It is easier to perform troubleshooting and product enhancement exercises with local people.
- Uneven workload expectations. If all the escalations go to the remaining small group of employees at the home office, those people end up having to resolve all of the hard problems with a reduced staff.
- Loss of core competencies. If outsourcing is done too aggressively, an organization runs the risk of giving away its strategic advantage to a competitor or supplier, rather than bidding out commodity work. Managers need to have an understanding of which functions are strategic advantages to the organization, and which tasks can be outsourced without losing a core competency.
Having said that, there are some legitimate advantages to dispersing the team globally:
- Avoid groupthink. People from different locations and cultures bring different assumptions to the table. This can help avoid groupthink, as assumptions are challenged by having a more diverse group of team members.
- Standardized, documented processes. Pressure increases to improve documentation of procedures. This can result in lowered defect rates if handled properly.
- More work hours in a day. “Follow the sun” scheduling has the potential to allow teammates to have better work life balance. Once processes are set up, and a culture of trust is in place, project teams can continue to work problems around the clock.
Agreements to outsource or offshore functions usually include stringent SLAs (Service Level Agreements), which are going to have to be met. If you can get the distributed parts of your team working together smoothly, it will make a big difference in your ability to comply with your SLAs.
Coordinating efforts across time zone boundaries can be difficult. Communications and responses are delayed. IT people are used to being able to ask clarifying questions to nail down requirements. But with time zone differences, a few rounds of clarifying questions and waiting for answers can mean delays of days or weeks.
In the next the following sections, I discuss several techniques that can help reduce the impact of this problem:
- Create a project rhythm.
- Set an expectation of synchronization.
- Create a place for people to introduce themselves.
- Collaborative technologies.
- Standardize the format for common requests.
- Standardize the process used to execute common requests.
- Have some team members adjust their schedules to overlap. These employees can bridge information to the rest of the team.
- Schedule team status meetings with team members from different regions.
- Schedule travel to remote locations to allow in-person contact.
- Celebrate accomplishments.
You won’t have the advantage of the natural rhythms of meal and break times when you are dealing with remote team members. Artificial rhythms will need to be built into project schedules and team formalisms such as staff meetings. Create a place where it is natural for your team members to collaborate. Chat rooms, conference bridges, scheduled calls, and project milestones are all tools that you can use to create these rhythms.
Your team members need to learn that you expect them to synchronize regularly with their remote colleagues. Ask explicit questions about what the conversation was like the last time they touched base. You may need to ask to be cc’d on emails initially so that you can make sure your team members are getting into the habit of synchronizing with remote team members regularly.
Team members need a space where they can express their individuality to the rest of the team. Social media tools offer a number of different ways for people to create profiles or personal summaries that other team members can view.
These introductions should include information about team members’ professional histories and expertise. That way people know who might be able to help them with a question they have about the xyz protocol.
You do have to keep an eye on how much time is spent on this social media. As with a lot of things in life, there is a balance between making use of the tool and wasting project time.
There are quite a few technologies available to make it easier to collaborate over distance:
- Email.
- Voice mail (or video mail).
- Discussion groups.
- Groupware packages. (These allow collaborative authoring.)
- Revision control.
- Ticketing systems.
- Workflow tools.
- Whiteboarding and desktop sharing. (These frequently have a facility to record sessions for people in other time zones.)
- Calendaring and scheduling applications.
Richer applications, such as video conferencing, allow for a broader bandwidth communication, but at the cost of additional time and effort. The appropriate technology needs to be matched to the goal behind the communication.
For common requests, your team members probably find themselves asking for the same information over and over. Generate a template that requesters need to fill out for these types of requests. This may be a web form, it could be a questionnaire, or it could be a spreadsheet. When a request arrives without the template information, push it back to the requester to fill out the form.
Compliance benefits everyone: the requesters are more likely to get what they want faster; your team is able to get its work done better; and the defect rate drops way down. Mention these benefits to your peers in the requesting teams when you introduce these templates; there is no reason you should not be able to get buy-in as long as your template is reasonable.
- Ask for exactly what you need. Questions may need to be reworked a few times until the customer base understands them.
- Get feedback from your customer community on the initial drafts of the template. Clarify points that need clarifying.
- Do not ask for information that the customer is unlikely to have. If it is information that your team can figure out, find a way to script or standardize that process to reduce the time and effort your team spends on research while also reducing the defect rate.
If the team becomes disciplined about using standard processes, it will be easier for tasks to be handed back and forth between team members in different time zones. For example, if Fred in the United States is building a system, he can tell Samir in India that he is up to step 16 in the standard build process, and he can point him at the system request template for the needed information. After his shift, Samir can hand the build back to Fred for completion, and let him know that he is up to step 23.
It can take a while to get all the common processes documented and standardized. This is a lot of work, so team members will need to see some early wins to see the benefits of organizing things this way. Pick some early win processes to be documented and standardized. Ideally, these should have the following characteristics:
- Common requests are going to give the most return on the investment of time and effort.
- The requests need to have a lot of commonality in how they would be executed. If they do not, you need to rethink how you are characterizing requests.
- If you have a good procedure in place already, that will save some of the up-front preparation time.
- Multistep procedures are the easiest to transfer across time zones.
If people are resistant to transferring tickets midexecution, it may take some extra sales and mentoring time on your part to get things jumpstarted. Once it gets going, team members will start to see the benefits for themselves.
- They don’t have to stay late as often to finish a high-priority request; the ticket can be completed by someone on the next shift.
- Issues get resolved quicker, which makes the requesters happier.
- It demonstrates the value of the team members in all the different regions. This helps deal with questions about whether the rest of the jobs are going to be offshored.
Make sure that the master company retains control and ownership of these standard operating procedures. In the event that a contract with an outsourcer comes to an end, the last thing the organization needs is to have to redraft operating procedures at the same time a team transition is taking place.
Some team members can be allowed to move their schedules earlier or later in the day to overlap with their colleagues in other time zones. This overlap allows more time for communications and handovers. It helps avoid the problem with questions not being able to be answered until the beginning of the next shift.
Bridge employees also help build trust relationships between people in the different regions. Having familiar people in the other locations helps to break down cultural barriers, and it helps to create a dynamic of trust and teamwork across the different employee populations.
Staff meetings across the regions allow team members to see what other team members are doing. This helps reduce resentments about work load, and it can help bring different perspectives to bear on common problems.
These will need to be scheduled at the beginning of one team’s work day and at the end of another team’s shift. There is no convenient way to schedule them; everyone will need to give a little for these to work.
Because the reasons for offshoring and outsourcing are frequently to achieve cost savings, it may be difficult to get a travel budget, and you will lose time when you are travelling. Even with all that, there is no real replacement for face-to-face contact when building a team.
Your team will really come together when they see substantive things that were accomplished by the team. Technical people like to get things done. When they succeed, find ways of celebrating. Here are a few ideas:
- A congratulatory email from someone high up the organization’s food chain.
- Individual awards or certificates for each person’s part in the project.
- A web page touting the accomplishment to the world, with specifics.
- Arrange for an edible treat to be delivered to team members in each site on the same day.
Language and cultural differences can interfere with how effectively a team is able to work together. Misunderstandings can sap a team’s energy.
Different people from different cultures communicate in radically different ways. These are not always clear to people who are not used to working with people from the other countries in question.
These differences include differences in etiquette (dos and don’ts), values, beliefs, patterns of thinking, patterns of communication, among others.
It is easy to find lists of these differences. Here are a few frequently observed differences between Indian workers and their western colleagues:
- Indians engage in small talk less easily than their western counterparts. In some cases, technical training courses actually discourage students from engaging in small talk to avoid embarrassing exchanges.
- Inquiries about time schedules get different responses from different cultures. Indian respondents typically do not include time to deal with any difficulties. Managers can work around this by probing to find out which if any projected issues have been included in the time estimate.
- People from the southern part of India use what is sometimes called the “Indian wiggle” in which the head is shaken side to side. This is frequently misinterpreted by westerners as indicating “no” (i.e., as in a western “head shake”), when it really indicates anything from “I agree” to “I hear you.”
- Indians frequently use a “wobbly yes” rather than saying “no.” Western managers need to watch for a less-than-firm “yes” and drill down if necessary.
All of these are examples of differences in cultural norms. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to fall into the pattern of expecting that everyone else communicates the same way you do—after all, isn’t that what makes “sense?”
There are no rights and wrongs here, just differences. Managers need to learn to understand and value different team members from different cultures. And they need to set a tone within the group where people are not meant to feel badly about who they are or where they live. Folks are just folks. Technical people are, by and large, hard-working, dedicated people. It is not easy for anyone to achieve technical competence. Value your people, no matter what their background is.
There have been several different efforts to characterize cultural differences in measurable ways. One of the more effective ways of breaking things down was put forward by Geert Hofstede1 and Edward Hall.2 Some of the axes of cultural orientation that they proposed include the following:
- Power orientation. This refers to the emotional distance between subordinates and superiors. Most Asian cultures and Russia tend to have more autocratic leadership cultures, while the United States, Israel, and most European countries tend toward more participatory cultures. When working across these cultural norms, someone from a more participatory culture may need to put forward extra effort to get input or constructive criticism from someone whose cultural leadership norm is less participatory.
- Relationship orientation. This can be expressed as individualism vs. collectivism. In general, wealthier cultures tend to be more individualistic than less wealthy cultures. This is true even within specific countries or even regions of particular countries. Managers need to be particularly sensitive when criticizing employees in a group. Reprimands should be handled individually.
- Uncertainty orientation. This axis has to do with a comfort with ambiguity, and a preference for rules and expectations to be set out explicitly.
- Future orientation. Cultures with a high future orientation value delaying gratification to improve the situation in the future. East Asian cultures, such as China, Japan, and Korea all have very high future orientation scores.
- Communication orientation. Low-context cultures listen more to what is said rather than considering the tonal and peripheral information about the communication. High-context cultures like to consider the context of a communication, which may not be apparent in an email. Northern European and US cultures are generally considered low-context cultures, whereas southern European, Latin American, and Asian cultures are high-context cultures.
- Destiny orientation. This is sometimes called fatalism, and reflects the extent to which someone believes they can control the future.
- Universalist orientation. This is the extent to which people believe that the same rules apply to everyone.
- Information processing orientation. Richard Nisbett performed research showing that Asians are more likely to see relationships and context, while westerners are more likely to see categories and taxonomies.3 Different people are going to see the same situation differently.
These observations are generalizations, of course. Any time you are dealing with human beings, you need to get to know them as individuals to understand how they think and how they will react. But the cultural orientation axes are useful to help you think about how people are different, and how best to communicate with different people.
Even when English is used as the standard language, there are significant differences between how people from different cultures will understand the same set of English words.
Sometimes, this is a result of how the English word translates back to the speaker’s native language. Sometimes, it is a result of words having a different connotation in different places. For example, the word contractor can be understood in India to mean a janitor, and a vendor is someone who sells things in the market. Consultant is a more appropriate word to use in India for someone who is providing services to your team.
For another example, consider what someone from Latin America means when they say now. Depending on the context, it may mean right away, or it could mean by the end of the business day. Spanish has more than one word that translates to now, so this is not a matter of a cultural difference so much as an incorrect translation of intent.
Beyond what words mean, many Americans have difficulty understanding accents of people from other countries, even of native English speakers from countries like India. Written communications can help bridge the gap while the American ear becomes accustomed to the different accent.
The key is to keep communications simple:
- Avoid slang and idioms. Use international English, with no sports metaphors.
- Be aware of words that may have different meanings for different cultures.
- Be explicit about expectations. State requirements and dates clearly and concisely.
- Break up long messages into paragraphs and bullet points. Keep sentences short and simple.
- Repeat urgent requests through multiple channels (e.g., email and phone conference).
- Request feedback to try to track down questions.
- Follow up verbal requests with something in writing.
Above all, clarify and follow up. Even when you think something is clear, it may not be understood on the receiving end.
Summary
There are few things as rewarding as coming to understand how people in another culture live their lives. Being able to manage people from another cultural background is challenging, but it can open up new ways for you to understand yourself.
Whether you are managing people from another culture, another time zone, or another city, the key will be clear and constant communication. When you manage a team that is all local, you get used to managing by walking around. When you manage a distributed team, get used to managing by communicating clearly, concisely, and repeatedly.
Discussion Questions
- What information will an offshore team member need as part of your most frequent service requests? What are some options for communicating this information to the offshore team member?
- One advantage of global teams is that support can be on a hand-off basis rather than an on-call basis. Which activities can be supported by an offshore team member?
Further Reading
Carmel, Erran, and Paul Tjia. Offshoring Information Technology. Cambridge: UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Hofstede, Geert. Cultural Constraints in Management Theories. Academy of Management Executive, 7 no. 1 (1993): 81–93.
Nisbett, Robert E. The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently, and Why. New York, NY: Free Press, 2003.
1Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 2001).
2Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1976).
3Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently, and Why (New York, NY: Free Press, 2003).