By Batbold Munkhzul
A team is the synergy of its individual parts working together to achieve a common goal. Each individual brings their own strengths and skills to the table, and together they create a powerful force. It is difficult to manage a multicultural team that spans different cultures and locations.
I would like to present a Guidelines for Managing Culturally Diverse Virtual Teams to help to develop the necessary skills and management mindset to be able to find effective solutions in a global virtual environment. This will provide best practices and critical success factors for global virtual teams to minimize risks and maximize benefits. Will increase knowledge of how to work effectively with others from different cultures.
Cultural Diversity refers to the presence of a variety of cultural groups within a society. Cultural groups can share many different characteristics, including things like traditions, values, and beliefs. Diversity ensures that everyone can participate in their own way, which is important for everyone's participation. Virtual teams will always face challenges because it connects people with different work styles, characters, backgrounds and this will cause problems with productivity.
To improve intercultural virtual team communication, here are five simple steps to overcome any challenges:
Build trust. Building trust among team members is essential for virtual teams to operate effectively. Due to less physical interaction and cultural differences, this can sometimes be challenging. In virtual teams, trust is built through interdependence, reliability, and consistency. Quite simply, members of the team should act in the team's best interests, agree with each other's words, and treat each other with respect. In online meetings, team leaders should ensure everyone is having an equal voice, communicate tasks and responsibilities clearly, and ensure that teams are working from distributed locations.
Choose the right communication method and style. Everyone on the team needs access to the right resources at the right time in order to work together effectively. Body language, gestures, and tone are important face-to-face cues that are difficult to transmit in virtual environment. It isn't easy to understand some team members' verbal communication because of their strong accents, even though everyone can speak English. To increase communication effectiveness, a team should choose a lean method such as e-mail. To communicate complex messages with different cultural values, such as gender equality or superior/subordinate relationships, choose a rich medium such as video conferencing.
Direct team diversity. The cultural diversity within intercultural virtual teams is both pros and cons so it's essential to understand and manage the existing diversity effectively. Creating a skills matrix and expertise directory is an important step in recognizing each individual's talents. This will allow individuals with different working modes or different language abilities to digest and contribute ideas according to their preferences. By embracing its diversity, cross-cultural virtual teams can become more effective in decision-making, problem solving and promoting fresh ideas.
Be flexible. There is a great difference in how people value decision-making and scheduling in the workplace across different cultures. Valuing the importance of team harmony can help identify the priorities of your team members. Different cultures have different preferences for how quickly tasks should be completed. For example, some cultures prefer a flexible approach, while others prefer a more rigid time frame.
Motivate into common goal. Effective team leaders make clear what everyone is expected to do and let everyone know that their contributions are important. To achieve common goal, it must be break down into manageable steps. Also, a team leader needs to motivate his team members in a way that will help them achieve their goals. Without a catalyst, team members may lack enthusiasm and be less engaged at work. Each member of intercultural virtual team will be responsible for completing specific steps, and everybody will be working together to achieve success. This way, everyone will be able to work together without any conflicts.
Research shows that racially diverse companies outperform industry norms by 35%. (R. Tulshyan, “Racially Diverse Companies Outperform Industry Norms by 35%,” Forbes, 13-Feb-2015.) This is likely because these companies are more inclusive and tolerant of different cultures, which leads to a more productive and creative work environment.
Having a cross-cultural team offers the greatest opportunity to learn about different cultures and come up with innovative solutions. If you can manage culturally diverse virtual team, they will be able to work together to achieve great success. It is time to value intercultural teams as an asset, not a liability.
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