Internationally Distributed Teams: Challenges of Language and Culture
BY CATHERINE DURNELL CRAMPTON
Recent advances in telecommunication and information technologies have made it feasible for people to work together daily on highly interdependent projects despite being located in different countries. Competitive pressures in a global economy have made such work arrangements not only possible, but often necessary. Using internationally distributed work teams allows businesses to secure essential but scarce expertise, tap into lower-cost labor pools, localize products, and work around the clock.
The competitive pressures and opportunities have outrun our understanding of how to carry out interdependent work under such conditions. For the past ten years, I have been studying distributed work. In the past three years, I have focused on the international context with the support of a research grant from the National Science Foundation. With colleague Pamela Hinds of Stanford, I have intensively studied twelve internationally distributed software development teams from two major multinational companies to gain new understandings of the processes, challenges, and strategic contexts of their work. We studied teams whose members were distributed across two locations: the United States, Western Europe, or India. Some of the teams we studied had members in one U.S. location and one Western European location. Other teams had members in the Western European location and one Indian location. Still other teams had members at one U.S. location and one Indian location. This allowed us to analyze whether the phenomena we observed occurred in teams across all locations, only in a particular cross-national relationship, or just in teams involving a particular country and culture. We interviewed all team members and managers on location, did some follow-up interviews eighteen months later, observed work and communication processes in all the locations, and collected some survey data.
One of the most striking patterns we found in the data is unanimity as to the value of face-to-face meetings with remote colleagues, and occasional travel to spend time with them at their location. We heard this from people from both companies, at all organizational levels, from every team, and in every location and culture. Distributed team members who had never met face-to-face often said they delayed contacting each other by e-mail or telephone about project matters because of uncertainties including the remote partner’s availability and receptiveness at a particular time, communication problems involving language or accents, and how the remote partner would react. Often, team members tried to find another way to get the information they needed. While contact might eventually be made, delay itself can be costly to a project, and information received indirectly can be incomplete. Moreover, people who had never met face-to-face often reported poor response to their inquiries. After having met face-to-face, however, people reported less trepidation and delay. They also reported improvement in the responsiveness of remote partners.
It is clear that visits to a remote colleague’s location bring benefits beyond those gleaned by meeting face-to-face at one’s own location or a central location. People gained a great deal of understanding simply by experiencing the conditions under which their remote partners work, and seeing how people at that location work together. For example, one person from India said he was convinced that a German colleague whom he had never met face-to-face did not like him because of what he perceived as the colleague’s rude treatment in e-mail and on the telephone. When the Indian colleague traveled to Germany, however, he observed how the German colleagues interacted with each other and realized their style of communication is more direct and brief than Indian norms. “I realized,” he said, “that he actually was softening his communication for me.” This realization greatly reduced his defensiveness when dealing with his colleague.
Similarly, a European woman traveled to the U.S. location of her remote team members and quickly realized how important it is for the European colleagues to reply to an inquiry from the United States on the same day it is received, even if the inquiry arrives near the end of the European work day. When this does not happen, the U.S. group loses a full day of work waiting for the European colleagues to return to work the next morning and reply. She said she knew this intellectually before visiting her American colleagues, but she only realized its importance after experiencing the consequences herself.
Finally, when colleagues who normally work from distributed locations are able to sit down together for a short time at the same work station, they seem to glean a more accurate understanding of each other’s capacities and working styles. For example, a team leader in the United States confessed that he had doubts about the abilities of two people working on his team from India because they always seemed to be asking a lot of questions. When these two colleagues visited his U.S. location, it took less than two days for him to understand that the colleagues actually were two of the most capable people on his team. “I realized that they were asking a lot of questions because we had not been giving them enough information,” he said. “I also realized the people working on my team here ask questions all the time, but these are not as noticeable as e-mailed inquiries from abroad.” After site visits, distributed colleagues also reported a much better sense of who at other locations should be included in decisions or distribution of information.
Despite strong agreement by project managers and team members about the value of occasional travel to remote partners’ locations, there are major challenges. One problem is that it is difficult to quantify how travel affects project outcomes. Therefore, project managers often settle for less travel than they think is needed, particularly when they have to justify expenditures to executives above them. They look for specific reasons to request the travel they think is necessary, such as training or attendance at a special event. Beyond cost considerations, we also found travel to be limited by problems in obtaining visas, particularly in the post-9/11 world. Finally, travel often is not symmetric across locations. For example, in our study, more personnel traveled from India to Western Europe and the United States than vice versa. This means some locations lack the insight held by colleagues at the locations from which more travel is occurring.
In addition to examining the process by which distributed colleagues develop comfort in working together, we also are studying how language proficiency impacts distributed work. In both companies we studied, the lingua franca was English. However, one company headquarters is located in Germany, and the mother tongue of many project managers, team leaders, and team members is German. Although many of the German colleagues spoke English well, they usually felt they could articulate their message more accurately and easily in German. Few of their colleagues from the United States or India could speak German.
Language often was a hot potato in the sense that someone always was uncomfortable—either a German speaker using English, or an English speaker witnessing a conversation in German or encountering documentation or e-mail in German. Company policy stipulates that English is to be used for all formal purposes, but if a German speaker can’t find the right words in English, meetings occasionally shift into German. The accompanying summaries often don’t satisfy English speaking participants, who fume at being excluded.
Although these challenges come through clearly in the data, few people in the company seemed to grasp of all the different points of view and experiences. For example, few English speakers appreciated how hard their German colleagues were working to converse in English, and few German informants were aware of the feelings of exclusion experienced by some of their non-German speaking colleagues; they thought the summaries at the end of meetings sufficed. We believe that building awareness of the perspectives of co-workers with different language backgrounds and proficiencies is an important step in ameliorating the emotional burden felt on all sides. It also is important for managers to reinforce the use of the lingua franca at every turn, and provide language training and confidence-building practice for employees who have a poor command of it. Despite the challenges, internationally distributed work seems to be here to stay. We are exploring the issues described here as well as several other issues to contribute to the success of this important form of contemporary collaboration.
More details are available in “Language Challenges in International Work: The Impact of Uneven Proficiency in the Lingua Franca” by T. Beyene, P. Hinds and C. Cramton, which was presented at the 2005 Academy of Management annual meeting. Cramton (ccramton@gmu.edu) is an assistant professor in the School of Management (http://som.gmu.edu).
