How to effectively navigate cross-cultural environment when you work from home.
By: Anna Bastrakova
Tags: Culture, Workplace, Work From Home, Communication

Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash

This year has been, at the very least, a crash course in emotional intelligence, from testing our ability to foster human leadership, with many employees learning to work from home while juggling their children’s needs, to challenging the ways we build and maintain client relationships, in a flash having had to switch from in-person meetings and business travelling to entirely virtual communications.

Whether some of us like it or not, working from home will stay as a new reality. Therefore, I would like to touch upon its impact on cross-cultural communications — one of my favourite topics. Even under normal circumstances interacting daily with people from different countries and working with global teams lead to various cross-cultural missteps. However, when you have an opportunity to travel frequently in a foreign country, you pick up a lot of nuances that help you better decode the culture and adapt your communication style.

By contrast, if you haven’t spent time in a cultural context, you will be missing out on many clues and subtleties that physical presence provides. The lack of cross-cultural awareness may become especially damaging during conference calls when wildly different realities can cause needless conflict impacting the communication, derailing your meetings, demotivating your teams, and in dozens of other ways making it difficult to achieve your goals.

Erin Meyer, an INSEAD Professor, the international expert on cultural relativity, and the author of “The Culture Map” suggests using the following eight dimensions to help navigate rough waters of the world’s cultures. Such road map is especially beneficial when the contextual clues provided by the physical environment are absent.

- Communicating: Low-context / High-context

- Evaluating: Direct negative feedback / Indirect negative feedback

- Persuading: Principles-first / Applications-first

- Leading: Egalitarian / Hierarchical

- Deciding: Consensual / Top-down

- Trusting: Task-based / Relationship-based

- Disagreeing: Confrontational / Avoids confrontation

- Scheduling: Linear-time / Flexible-time

Looking back at my own experience of managing a portfolio of Korean corporate clients at Citi’s office in Moscow many years ago, I recall one particularly peculiar example of my cultural insensitivity which almost wreaked havoc on the entire Korean desk.

At that time, there was a tradition to hold an annual hospitality event on a cruise boat along the Moscow River. When inviting our clients, I couldn’t imagine that competition between two particular Korean giants was so fierce that the idea of being stuck in a closed space where chances to avoid each other were minimal wouldn’t be welcomed warmly by their senior management. Only the immediate interference of a native Korean senior banker saved peace — I could only guess what reason he had found to withdraw one of the invitations.

In her book, Meyer also discusses another common opinion that “speaking of cultural differences leads us to stereotype and therefore put individuals in boxes with general traits, and instead of talking about culture, it is important to judge people as individuals, not just products of their environment”. The argument which seems quite enlightening at first. However, Meyer continues, “assuming the culture doesn’t matter, your default mechanism would be to view each individual through your own cultural lenses and to judge or misjudge them accordingly”.

In a modern working environment cultural and individual differences are further wrapped up with differences among industries, companies, professions and other groups, but when your success depends greatly on your ability to communicate effectively, learning about cultural context can help you discover a new approach even in a most complex situation.

If there is one positive outcome of the pandemic, it’s that we now appreciate the importance of empathy in building an environment that is more flexible and adaptive to any twists of modern life and soon we’ll see what the future of work holds.