Nearshoring can be an incredible tool for companies of all sizes in North America, it allows for growth potential opportunities that would otherwise be near impossible to capture due to lack of talent availability and high costs of operation. But working with talent from other nations means cultural differences are inevitable, and learning how to navigate them is crucial for a successful collaboration.
This article will explain why it's important for tech companies to understand how cultural differences might affect your collaboration efforts, and offer some tips on how you can navigate them so that they don't become roadblocks along the way!
Welcome to the era of nearshoring
You can’t talk about nearshoring without acknowledging the obvious—hiring people from other countries means dealing with cultural differences. This could be a problem when it comes to communication, workflow, and in-person meetings. In the past, many companies have failed at integrating remote workers with their co-workers because they didn’t understand how to engage with them effectively. Today’s workforce has more options for hiring abroad than ever before so understanding how your company might work together is key!
Here are some tips that new teams should follow:
Start with people from your team
The first step in dealing with the cultural differences between your team, and your new offshore team, is to get to know the people you’re working with. You will be spending a lot of time together so it makes sense to start off on the right foot.
Ask how they feel about onboarding remote team members and address their concerns, make them part of the process and ask them to partner with you in ensuring the collaboration is successful, encouraging them to be communicative along the way. Perhaps most importantly, set the right expectations, the beginning isn't always perfectly smooth but with the right mindset and willingness to work as a team, they'll be working seamlessly in no time.
Learn about each other’s culture
Before you can effectively nearshore, you need to know how your partner's culture works. This is not just about language; it’s about understanding the importance of time, how people work, and how they communicate.
Here's an example, in Western cultures there is a strong emphasis on being prompt—a meeting may start at 9:00 AM and everyone is expected to be on the clock, not a minute earlier, not a minute later. In some countries in the Middle East or Latin America this idea doesn't exist at all; meetings can start later, with everyone arriving together and chatting before getting down to business.
In these places it would be considered rude for someone to arrive early for a meeting; instead, they should arrive right on time or even slightly late (around 5 minutes). Understandably, this kind of behavior will very quickly lead to frustration from you and the team, which is why setting clear expectations about punctuality is important right from the start.
So it's not about jumping to conclusions and judging behaviors at face value, instead, discussing them and defining agreements that everyone can understand and follow.
Focus on the similarities
The differences between cultures can be an important part of understanding how people think and act differently, but they should not be the focus. The similarities are more important. They make up the common ground that we all share as humans and build on that to grow relationships with others.
Getting caught up in the things our new team members do differently is an unfortunate way to create an erroneous image of them in our heads, and letting prejudice take over can most certainly lead to the collaboration falling apart.
A good way to avoid this is to foster opportunities for members of both internal and external teams to chat and get to know each other on a more personal level. In our current era, the world is so connected that it's more likely than not that we are all listening to the same music, watching the same shows; and at work, learning about the same technologies, and dealing with the same struggles. Let these things help individuals connect on a deeper level so that differences become less and less important.
Don’t assume that differences are weaknesses
The first step, then, is to recognize that cultural differences are not weaknesses. They’re simply differences—and if you can be aware of them and sometimes even use them to your advantage, that can help you make your business more successful.
Here's another example: A member of the client team explained he had concerns with a person's commitment to the project. Naturally, troubleshooting questions ensued, and we realized there were no performance issues, no problems understanding requirements, no concerns about punctuality, and no communication barriers, but the client was concerned that this person "didn't participate during meetings". Further discussion revealed that the person did participate, but only ever spoke when they felt they had something valuable to add, unlike his counterparts who were used to casually bouncing their ideas around the room. They just didn't feel comfortable sharing their thoughts before they became concrete ideas due to the nature of their culture.
One approach isn't inherently better than the other, but making sure everyone understands why a person does things differently and how to incorporate it into the team's dynamics makes a huge difference in fostering a collaborative environment.
Learning to adapt
If you’re going to be working with people who are from a different culture than you, it’s important to understand how they will affect your organization. Here are some examples of common cultural differences:
- How people greet each other.
- How quickly information is shared. Some cultures work in teams where there is more sharing of information than others that rely on one person having all the knowledge and making decisions for everyone else.
- The level of formality between colleagues at work—whether employees feel comfortable sharing more details about their personal life.
- How people perceive authority—some cultures treat their leaders as equals whereas others hold their leaders as superior and communicate with them differently
- And many more
We hope that by reading this, you’ve learned some of the most important aspects of nearshoring and how cultural differences can impact your company. There are many ways to overcome these challenges, but remember that it takes an open mind. If you want to start working with a foreign team today, there is no better way to navigate the cultural aspect than partnering with a company that understands and has the experience needed to ensure your collaboration is successful. At Oceans, being there for both our US-based clients and our consultants across Latin America and helping bridge teams and opportunities is part of our day-to-day operation.
