Respect Everyone’s Culture

In India, companies don’t just hold ribbon-cutting ceremonies when opening new offices or starting new ventures. They also hold Puja ceremonies, in which a Hindu priest asks for the divine blessings of Lord Ganesha, Goddess Lakshmi, and all planets. The proceedings, which can take multiple hours, include the lighting of candles, chanting, the recitation of Sanskrit hymns, and a number of other rituals. I know because in 2009, I had the honor of traveling to Bangalore and participating in a Puja ceremony to mark the opening of a new Kronos office in India. With other Kronites in attendance, a priest in a white robe draped garlands of white flowers around my neck while reciting a prayer. I lit a golden ceremonial lamp and, with a dot of red in the middle of my forehead (a bindi, it’s called), joined assembled executives and employees in prayer.

I had never done anything like this in my life, and I was humbled by it—also a bit nervous. Fearing that I would somehow make a mistake, I did everything the priest asked. When I didn’t understand something, I peppered James, one of the leaders of our India operation, with questions. “It’s extremely important for a large number of employees that the gods are invoked as per Hindu traditions,” James says. “Seeing their American CEO so keen to be an active participant in the rituals made a big impression and gave our early employees a sense of personal connection.” But it was more than that. Our India employees had taken a risk in signing on with Kronos. Our brand was unknown in the India market, and our business of workforce management was also largely unfamiliar. By taking part in the Puja ceremony, I helped employees feel more comfortable with Kronos. Seeing that I was doing my utmost to understand their religious rituals, they felt more confident that our leadership team would respect the uniqueness of the India market and give them a measure of autonomy, rather than imposing decisions from our headquarters.

Some people wonder whether companies can remain amazing places to work as they expand their footprints. Can companies sustain high engagement when their workforce becomes more diverse and geographically dispersed? Don’t these employees have disparate needs, and doesn’t growth dilute the original culture?

Growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of engagement—quite the contrary. Over the past decade, we’ve pursued a strategy of aggressive global expansion, hiring Kronites or signing on partners throughout the world. Our business has performed better in some countries than in others, but across the board we’ve sought to spread our WorkInspired culture to create environments in which employees love to work. To date, we’ve won “Best Place to Work” awards in Australia, Canada, China, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Also, our engagement scores in virtually every country run above the country average, and in some cases far above. In 2017, 95 percent of our Australia workforce was positively engaged, compared with a 2016 national average of only 63 percent. Our China workforce reported a 90 percent engagement level, much better than the national average of 66 percent. Levels like these establish our organization as a premier employer, making recruiting and retention easier and less expensive. They enable us to serve our customers better and to innovate more readily. In almost every respect, they make us more competitive.

How did we do it? It comes down to respecting everyone’s culture. As CEO, I make a personal effort to participate in local cultural traditions and to communicate in culturally sensitive ways. Meanwhile, we consciously extend our culture to all Kronites, regardless of who they are and where they work. We’ve discovered that people of different cultures bring a rich tapestry of ideas and norms to the workplace. Celebrating these cultures and letting people be themselves opens up a wealth of opportunities, and it certainly makes work more fun and interesting.

If the organization you lead is embarking on a global strategy, or if you’ve been assigned to manage a global team, I urge you to open your heart and cultivate a posture of flexibility and open-mindedness. It’s unbelievably enjoyable to do, and it helps the business. Rather than assuming you always know best, listen to the needs and desires of employees around the world, and adapt your practices and policies accordingly. Reach out to employees, regardless of where they work, soliciting feedback and taking meaningful action. Send a message that all employees matter, and that the organization is committed to respecting differences and empowering everyone to succeed. By remaining open-minded and by parting with the idea that the entire world revolves around us and our norms, our companies and teams can make the most of our diverse workforces.

WORKINSPIRED IS GLOBAL-READY

It’s easy to talk about openness and cultural sensitivity, but quite another task to put these values into practice. The good news is that if you embrace the principles, organizational policies, and leadership practices we’ve examined so far in this book, you’re already moving in the right direction. In our experience, WorkInspired by its very nature encourages Kronites to treat colleagues around the world with respect, and to maintain an attitude of flexibility and curiosity. In this way, WorkInspired has made Kronos “global-ready,” giving us a head start on integrating all personnel into our organization and helping us to foster strong engagement worldwide. It has also positioned our leaders to inspire and motivate people across geographic divides through our own behavior.

Take the principle of trust. I’ve described how we empower employees by explicitly encouraging leaders and managers to trust their people. Rather than micromanaging, we assume competence and give Kronites latitude to exercise their own judgment. Translated into a global context, that principle leads me and others at Kronos to give our people, regardless of where they reside, a great deal of autonomy. As a general rule, I’m happy if our regional or division leaders consult me on business decisions, but I don’t interfere. In fact, when our corporate processes impede our local teams, I will encourage them to engineer their own solutions to pressing business issues. If our corporate training programs aren’t giving employees in China or India the skills they need, our regional leaders can devise and implement their own training because we trust their judgment. If certain human resources policies aren’t appropriate for a particular market, we’ll adjust accordingly. Because of this flexibility, Kronites around the world feel more valued and empowered. As Jaime, head of marketing for Latin America, says, “We feel we have the power to manage our challenges and make decisions immediately.”

Another element of our culture’s emphasis on caring for people and helping them to feel safe also leads us to welcome Kronites around the world and forge emotional bonds with them. I’ve described the e-mail I wrote in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to reassure Kronites that our company would “always provide a caring environment that is supportive and encouraging,” and that we would “be fully supportive of our employees of all backgrounds, faiths, and genders, no matter where they live, who they love, or where they worship.” In that e-mail, I also took the opportunity to specifically reassure certain of our global employees, writing, “For our cherished staff in China and Mexico, I want to state clearly that you are an important part of our organization, and we will continue to invest in our operations in these regions to grow and support our staff, customers, and partners. This same standard applies to ALL Kronites around the world. We will set our own pace, make our own decisions, and choose the way we do business that creates positivity and unification of spirit and purpose.”

Among the hundreds of responses I received from Kronites, many came from employees outside the United States. They were astonished and reassured that their CEO would take such a firm stance on behalf of inclusion. One of our Mexico employees wrote: “Your words give me confidence to keep on working as always, with great enthusiasm day by day with the great team we have in Mexico. From my heart, thank you very much.” I didn’t conceive this e-mail specifically with our global employees in mind, but because I sent it and because I took care to mention them specifically, I was able to nurture their loyalty and engagement. They perceived that our culture of safety extended to them, even though they spoke a different language and worked in another country.

Our culture produced a similar outcome in the wake of the 2017 earthquake in Mexico. Immediately after the quake struck, teams at our corporate headquarters spent hours checking on our Mexico colleagues. We learned that homes had been damaged, and public transportation in Mexico City was extremely limited, so our corporate team booked hotel rooms near the office as a precaution. We launched our Emergency Management Notification System, sending out a polling text message that asked employees in Mexico if they were safe. Fortunately, we were soon able to account for all of our employees. The next day, engineers inspected our building in Mexico City and determined that it was safe.

Four years earlier, our leaders in Mexico had asked for funding to relocate to a new office building, in part because they needed more space, but also because the existing building wasn’t constructed in compliance with current earthquake regulations. Our corporate leadership worked with our leaders in Mexico to find new offices in a modern, seismically ready building. These efforts and our swift actions made them feel respected and cared for. “We feel that the company is very human,” said Jaime. “And [that] the most important [concern of Kronos] is our people.” We’d listened to the needs of Kronites abroad and seen to their safety—not because of some special corporate initiative or strategy, but because WorkInspired implicitly tells us to do so.

Overcommunication, another principle within our culture, also helps us welcome our global workforce. I’ve mentioned my habit of kibitzing (engaging in informal conversations) with Kronites. I do this with our leaders throughout the world. When I visit our overseas locations, I spend time beforehand reviewing who works in that particular region. When I arrive, I try to shake hands and say hello to every Kronite, remembering their names and asking about their families, just as I do with Kronites back home. In addition, I send greetings to regional Kronites celebrating holidays such as Diwali (the Indian festival of lights) and Chinese New Year. These small actions, practiced continuously, communicate respect for our employees, giving Kronites a sense of connection to the company.

“It’s very important to us,” Jaime says of my visits, “because we feel that our CEO cares about us, and how [our business] is working in Mexico. He wants to hear not only the good things, but also the challenges we have—how he can help us.”

Our culture’s commitment to family first also renders us more open and welcoming to people of other cultures. By prioritizing family so explicitly, we instantly create bonds and find common ground across cultural boundaries. “A message about family values works very well in China,” says Max, our country manager there. “People understand that and very easily connect it back to Chinese culture.” The pervasive sense of Kronos as a family itself also provides us with a conceptual framework for understanding and accommodating difference. James, in India, explains: “It’s much easier to reconcile differences when you consider yourself as belonging to a single entity, the family. Within that family, each of us has our different personalities, attitudes, styles, and skills. But that overriding umbrella exists, and at Kronos it allows us to amalgamate a myriad of
cultures.”

In describing our culture as “global-ready,” I don’t mean to suggest that our organization is perfectly open-minded and global in its orientation. Dave, a Kronite who led efforts to enhance our international business through what we called our Global Growth Office, notes that issues like distance, language, and local work practices sometimes create misunderstandings and misplaced expectations. On one occasion, leaders wondered why we weren’t selling more of our products in Germany. Although at first glance it might have seemed that our disappointing sales owed to a performance failure on the part of our sales team, it turned out that a cultural issue was at play. Germans have stringent expectations about the privacy of their data, and weren’t comfortable with a cloud solution in which data would be hosted outside of their country. We expanded our approach and wound up offering German customers the option of hosting their data within Germany.

Geographic and cultural distance can also make it more difficult for Kronites around the world to get the attention of teams back home in the corporate office so that they can resolve problems as they arise. Several years ago, our Latin America operation ran into trouble when a Brazilian customer in the hospitality business asked for special adjustments to our products so that they would better fit its specific needs. It was hard for our Kronites in Latin America to obtain the support they needed from colleagues elsewhere in the company. Seeing how great this business opportunity was for us, senior leaders jumped in to help facilitate the desired product adjustments. Within 30 days, the adjustments were made, and our sales effort succeeded. That customer in Brazil now has 600 of its restaurants using our software. In retrospect, the episode represented a great learning opportunity as to what it takes to become a successful global enterprise. As we discovered, being global requires that employees concentrate extra hard on listening to the needs of their colleagues from different cultures and understanding their local requirements. This need for extra attention extends to small practices that inform our daily work. As Dave notes, “We used to have a lot of 3 a.m. meetings set up for folks in Asia, just because others in the organization forgot to consider time zone differences.” We’ve made progress on that issue, but similar issues still crop up. “We’ve been international for a long time,” Dave observes. “We’re still learning how to be global.”

Notwithstanding such difficulties, our culture has greatly facilitated our global expansion, allowing us to leverage the power of our people in distant markets. “Whenever I visit our international offices, I’m always amazed at how well our culture has traveled, especially the openness to learning and the sense of trust,” Dave says. If tension still exists between the twin needs for standardization and adaptation to local markets, it helps a great deal that our corporate culture values inclusion, kindness, respect, and trust. Simply by applying that culture as evenly as possible, we can bring our people together while simultaneously respecting their uniqueness and granting them autonomy over their slices of the business.

OPTIMIZING YOUR CULTURE FOR GLOBAL GROWTH

Mindful of how challenging a global strategy can be even with a strong, unifying culture in place, we’ve taken a number of additional steps to encourage employees and our organization to better respect everyone’s culture, regardless of where they work. We’ve even gone beyond cultural difference, strongly encouraging Kronites to respect one another regardless of their national origin, religion, gender, and race and other forms of diversity. If you run a global organization or team, consider the following:

Focus Team Members Explicitly on Global Issues and Perspectives

No matter how much respect your organization or you personally show for different cultures, cultural misalignments will still crop up, and people throughout the organization will at times fail to appreciate the unique circumstances and norms of local markets. A company also risks missing opportunities it never knew existed when employees and managers unduly focus on their own immediate contexts.

Recognizing that we had work to do in this area, we decided to make a global focus an explicit part of our WorkInspired culture. In Chapter 4, I described how we codified our culture by defining three core competencies—character, competence, and collaboration—and based 40 percent of Kronites’ performance evaluation on how well they lived those principles. In defining collaboration, we specifically included a plank called Global Perspective. As we explained, Kronites who embrace a global perspective will keep abreast of important trends that impact the business or organization, understand how our organization operates within a global context, and help other Kronites to adopt global approaches. Further, Kronites should endeavor to understand the “unique challenges and constraints involved” in working globally, and the “unique business dynamics across cultures.”

By integrating Global Perspective into our core competencies, we instantly made it part of every Kronite’s job description, ensuring that we would hold one another accountable for thinking globally. Although it’s a never-ending process, U.S.-based Kronites across the organization have become more conscious of differences across markets and have made efforts to adjust. As Dave observes, those 3 a.m. meetings for colleagues in Asia stopped once we articulated expectations that employees maintain a global mindset. More generally, “it wasn’t until we really started codifying some of these elements that the folks at headquarters started taking notice of our international team members and made sure that their voices were included.”

Expose Team Members to Global Contexts

Jessica, an operations analyst on our marketing team, helps our sales and marketing teams deploy technology to automate their processes. After just a year and a half on the job, she decided she wanted to push herself out of her comfort zone and experience what it’s like to work in a different culture. So she applied to our Marketing Exchange Program. Applicants to the program travel to another region in which Kronos operates and spend up to two weeks working with local teams on a specific project applicants have proposed. Recognizing that our sales force in the United Kingdom would benefit from learning how to use our customer relationship management tool, Jessica proposed traveling to the United Kingdom to conduct trainings. She also wanted to inform her U.K. colleagues about how teams in the United States had been onboarding customers from around the world once they’d signed on to our products. That way, these colleagues could better prepare customers in European markets for the process.

Jessica’s proposal was approved, and in 2017 she spent two weeks in the United Kingdom. It was a great experience for her. Not only did she transfer valuable knowledge to her British colleagues, helping them to work more efficiently and serve customers better, but she developed her own presentation skills, discovering how to communicate ideas in ways that different audiences could understand and appreciate. Further, she built her confidence and forged new connections with her colleagues abroad. “It was a mix of excitement and nerves in arriving there,” she said, “but the warm welcome I received was definitely a great feeling.” As Jessica related, she became familiar with the entire U.K. operation during her trip, and she continues to stay in touch with a number of employees there after her return home.

To build a global sensibility in your workforce as well as a general spirit of openness, there’s no better way than to allow employees to embed directly with teams in other regions. It’s one thing to be aware of and respect cultural differences, quite another to actually experience them firsthand. Alumni of our Marketing Exchange Program report that the experience makes them more comfortable collaborating with employees in their home office, too. They’ve experienced how open their colleagues in other countries are to collaboration, and how interesting and refreshing their viewpoints are, so they become more willing to cross departmental or functional boundaries.

Another employee, Nichole, spent a week in Mexico helping our team plan KronosLIVE, a customer conference held in the region. An event manager responsible for strategy, promotion, and execution of KronosWorks, our large annual customer conference with 3,000 attendees, Nichole was excited to spread the best practices she had learned to help build the regional event. As she reported, she “felt like I was part of the team, and everyone welcomed me with open arms.” Since returning to the United States, she has noticed that “the fact that I have had [the experience in Mexico] has made me more comfortable collaborating with groups that I’m not normally engaging with.” She feels more open and eager to engage with others, is even more excited about her work at Kronos, and is more loyal to the company. As both Jessica and Nichole learned, working in and experiencing different cultures is fun. It adds energy, zest, and interest to your life. It pushes you in new directions, even as it helps you build new skills that you can apply in your work. Give more employees the opportunity to work abroad, and they’ll come away loving their job and the company they work for.

As a Leader or Manager, Go as Far as You Can

It’s important to open yourself up to different cultural traditions, as doing so sets the tone for the rest of your organization and team. In China, it’s commonplace for employees to share an honorary meal with the boss. When I travel there and to other regions, I make a point of partaking in cultural traditions. Although I’m not a big drinker, I make a toast at each table of our employees, since Max, our China country manager, feels that this is appropriate, and I want to show my respect.

I make a point to actively engage with local employees and make them feel part of Kronos. The truth is that I never need to go too far, just show a bit of extra effort to accommodate regional traditions. Our non-U.S. Kronites respect how I try to meet them where they are, and they sense that I don’t approach them with a sense of cultural superiority. They feel closer to the company because of it.

Pursue Diversity and Inclusion Generally

It’s more difficult to instill an ethic of openness and respect for other cultures if your company or team itself isn’t diverse, and if your organization doesn’t openly embrace inclusion. We explicitly affirm to our employees our dedication to inclusion, and our deeply held respect for all employees, no matter their ethnic background, gender, or other points of difference. As I said in my e-mail to Kronites after the 2016 presidential election: “I want to make it clear that we continue to be fully supportive of our employees of all backgrounds, faiths, and genders, no matter where they live, who they love, or where they worship.” These aren’t just words: they inform how managers and leaders at Kronos behave day-to-day. And as our engagement survey indicates, employees do feel welcomed. In July 2017, 79 percent of Kronites agreed with the statement, “Good ideas are adopted here regardless of who suggests them or where they come from”—significantly above the industry norm of 68 percent. In our industry, only 72 percent of employees agree with the statement that their company “encourages and promotes diversity of backgrounds, talents, and perspective.” At Kronos, 90 percent of employees do.

Despite numbers like these, we know we still have work to do on diversity and inclusion, as does the technology industry generally. Our percentage of ethnically diverse employees runs above the industry average, but it’s still lower than we’d like it to be. We’ve worked hard in this area over the years, but like other technology companies, we contend with a limited talent pool in many of our specific functions. As an industry leader, we have an opportunity to help deepen this pool over time. Doing that would benefit Kronos as well as the technology industry over all. Likewise, our small executive committee (my direct reports) as of this writing is not diverse. To a great extent, this is an unintended consequence of our success with our culture. We’ve had very little turnover among this group, even though recruiters regularly seek to lure these leaders away. As a result, the opportunities we’ve had to elevate new faces to the very top at Kronos have been limited over the past decade.

We have made great strides in improving diversity at levels of management just below the executive committee, outperforming our industry peers in this area. Consider gender. As of 2018, women composed 37 percent of our workforce, as opposed to only 30 percent overall in the technology sector. Of Kronites reporting directly to the executive suite, 47 percent are women. At every level of our organization, we have more women as a percentage of our employees than our industry peers do. The presence of these women gives us strength to draw on when executive level and other senior level positions open up. Over the past 12 months, more than 50 percent of all promotions to vice president have been women—all very well deserved. And I believe we’ll see even more progress going forward thanks to our efforts in this area. Our Women in Business program seeks to address challenges facing women in business today and promotes career and personal development, offering Kronites a chance to partake in special events, mentorships, and networking. Among other programs, we also hold a well-attended Women’s Leadership Forum every year to promote career and personal development and engage women to be active leaders within Kronos.

Our attempts to empower women reinforce the message that Kronos welcomes everyone. That spirit of inclusivity carries over when Kronites encounter colleagues from other cultures. Our organization is open to learning from colleagues throughout the world and adapting to their needs. We’re all a part of the Kronos family.

Get Help When You Need It

When cultural misunderstandings or misalignments crop up—and they do—adapt quickly. But sometimes, your company might not understand where the misunderstanding originates, or what to do about it. In these cases, don’t hesitate to bring in outside help.

When we started doing business in India and began hiring Kronites there, we found that weeks later when it came time for their first day of work, they didn’t show up. Again and again this happened, and we weren’t sure why. So we hired consultants who understood the local labor market, and the India culture generally. As we discovered, new hires in India didn’t feel closely bound to the company before they started working here. It was customary to give 90 days’ notice to their previous employers, and as we all know, a lot can happen in 90 days. Families were also exerting significant influence over young people’s employment decisions, in some cases persuading our new hires to stay at their previous jobs or go elsewhere. We realized that we needed to be far more proactive in engaging with our new hires after they’d signed an offer letter, but before they showed up for their first days. That included keeping in touch with them, their spouses, their parents, and other important people in their lives, and even inviting them to tour our offices. We weren’t just hiring a person, but a whole family! We rolled out what we called our “Red Carpet” program to help our new hires feel as if they were already a valued part of Kronos (which they were). Whereas we might have muddled through without a consultant and figuring out a new best practice on our own, owning up to what we didn’t know and bringing in the needed help allowed us to adapt quickly and improve our operations.

KEEP GROWING CLOSER

I don’t pretend we have the perfect recipe for running a global company, or that our culture is perfectly globalized. But I do think that focusing our organization on respecting other cultures, and on enabling employees in all of our offices to feel a strong attachment to our corporate headquarters, has taken us a long way. It helps explain why we have kept engagement levels above national averages everywhere we operate.

Today, we’re pushing to remedy our deficiencies and become even more culturally sensitive. As one employee observed, “The company is very ‘Boston’ focused, so remote employees, or people in small offices, often seem excluded.”¹ That’s valid. Recognizing that our employee experience has traditionally been stronger at our corporate headquarters than at many of our other locations, we are moving to extend what we offer locally to Kronites who work elsewhere. In October 2017, we held a memorable event at our corporate headquarters not only to recognize the grand opening of our new headquarters but to celebrate our fortieth anniversary. I will forever remember the pride I felt as a marching band from a local university performed in our building’s lobby, as the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and other leaders gave speeches, and as we played a video greeting from our company’s founder, my brother Mark.

On that same day, about 20 of our offices around the world gathered to watch a live stream of our corporate event via a social media channel. Like us at headquarters, they marked the occasion by decorating their workplaces and by passing out special treats to eat. In the future, we plan to extend other Kronos events to our global offices, helping to strengthen the sense of connection Kronites feel to our headquarters and to our corporate culture. At our most recent Take Your Child to Work Day event, 250 children participated in 13 locations around the world. When it comes to culture, distance shouldn’t matter.

What more can you do to tie your faraway teammates closer together? If your organization or team celebrates traditional American holidays like Thanksgiving, can you also find ways of marking holidays that your non-U.S. workers hold dear? Can you communicate more frequently with your team members around the world? When you spend time with them, can you stretch a bit more and adopt their customs? Can you give your team members in different countries a bit more latitude than you otherwise might, signaling that you respect their judgment? Can you think of new ways to give members of your team direct exposure to your non-U.S. markets? Finally, can you better ensure that elements of your culture that build engagement with one part of your workforce apply equally to all employees?

Respecting everyone’s culture requires extra effort, and at times, courage. But you don’t have to be perfect to see extraordinary results. We’ve brought Kronites together, fostering high engagement around the world, even though we continue to learn and grow in this area. As Peter, the head of our Australian operations, says: “From the moment you join Kronos, you are part of the family. It doesn’t matter which culture or country you are from.” We might not always understand one another or attend to one another’s needs, but when it comes to creating a global workplace that people love, a friendly smile, an outstretched hand, and a genuine willingness to listen go a long way.