Do you work on a global technical team? Have you only “met” your colleagues over the phone or by video? Are time zones a primary concern when scheduling meetings? Do you find yourself studying other cultures?

If you answer yes to these questions, then you’re likely to be working on a team requiring communication skills unimaginable 20 years ago. From my work with several global teams over the last decade, I’ve learned four basic ways to build successful working relationships in such virtual environments:

• Meet commitments on time and produce quality work.

• Behave in a consistent manner. Be process-oriented, reliable, and predictable.

• Communicate and share information. In fact, overcommunicate.

• Exchange feedback early, even when it might be uncomfortable to share.

These ”rules of the road” will help your team succeed. They touch on techniques for adapting to time zones, understanding cultural contexts, communicating effectively, and building trust.

TIME ZONES Working with people across the globe means few overlapping work hours, so you must take into account differences in time zones, and not just when scheduling meetings or events. A simple example of this is to allow an extra day or two for reviewers across continents to give you feedback. But the greatest challenge for global team members is that they have little or no face-to-face contact. This makes it difficult to develop helpful three-dimensional images of teammates or to rely on visual cues when communicating.

Tip: Take time with your team, and manage your expectations of what the team can achieve at the beginning of the project.

DIFFERENT CULTURES Working in a global team usually means understanding crosscultural issues. Therefore, it becomes crucial to understand the cultures of your various team members. If you have dealings with “high-context” cultures—Latin, Asian (including Indian), or Arab—the rules of engagement tend to be implied, with the following general characteristics:

• Heavy reliance on relationships with friends, family, colleagues, and peers.

• Communication depends on the context of the entire relationship and rarely in isolation.

• A strong need to follow protocol and structure according to stringent traditions.

• Decisions are made slowly based more on relationship continuity than on strict business criteria.

On the other hand, Scandinavian, Germanic, and North American cultures are generally “low-context” cultures, exemplified by more dependence on facts, independent of the source. Context is provided by the message itself and not by the messenger or the relationship. Communication is concise and straightforward, and decisions are made with relative speed and efficiency. People from high-context cultures can find such behavior abrupt and uncomfortable.

Tip: Be sensitive. Communication is the key to working through these differences.

COMMUNICATING How do you communicate effectively with a team spread over several time zones and with team members who speak different flavors of the same language? We all speak at different speeds and express ourselves in different idioms. Is there any hope for clearly understanding each other?
These techniques might help:

• When starting a project with a new team, hold an initial meeting in which all members introduce themselves and describe the job each one is going to do.

• Hold regular meetings throughout the project to ensure everyone is “on the same page.” Follow up conference calls with written minutes to reinforce what was discussed and what individual team members are responsible for.

• Put details of the project in writing, especially for a new team in which everyone speaks in different accents and uses different idioms and colloquialisms.

• Communicate using the most effective technology. For example, decide when e-mail is preferable to a phone call or instant messaging is preferable to a videoconference.

In addition, try to understand everyone’s communication style. For example, for a high-context culture such as India’s, people tend to speak in the passive voice, whereas in North America, people use the active voice.

Tip: Stay committed, don’t lose hope (or patience), and celebrate every step your team takes in the right direction.

BUILDING TRUST The point is to build trust so that the work gets done quickly, efficiently, and with quality. That’s the ultimate goal, and it means being clear about requirements and commitments, being reliable and predictable, and encouraging that behavior in your teammates. Once your relationships are developed to the point of trust, work through any sensitive issues. Most global teams have at least a couple of virtual elephants in the room—consider job security in the United States, colonialism in India, how the East views the West, how the West views the East, and so on.

Tip: The best thing you can do for your team is to be open and honest. And you should reward openness and honesty in the members of your team.

This article is excerpted from “Working in Global Teams,” by Melanie Doulton, which appeared in the October 2006 online version of the IEEE Professional Communication Society newsletter. You can find it at http://www.ieeepcs.org/
newsletter/archive/oct2006/pcsnews_oct2006_globalteam.php,

Melanie Doulton has been working in multicultural, multi-language, virtual environments as a technical communicator for over a decade. She writes and speaks frequently on topics related to the technical communicator’s work environment. She is currently associate manager of an information development group at BMC Software, in Pune, India.