Managing Cross Cultural Remote Teams | Ricardo Fernandez | TEDxIESEBarcelona

Good afternoon everyone. I have someone joining us here today, so give me a second. Hello. Mark. Can you hear me? Mark there's tons of static. Mark is that you mark king. Can you change your line? This was my normal morning call, now my normal morning is that I wake up between 7:00 and 8:30 in the morning every day, even my children don't jump on my bed, they start screaming, they start hitting each other, they start cry something It always happens and I get out of bed I take advantage of the morning I play a little with them I mean it's a real wonder then I take a few steps and in less than 5 seconds I'm at work I go into my study I open my computer and this is what I see boom 1 2 3 sometimes up to 20 different people with their faces or names on my computer screens 30 different people of more than 10 different nationalities spread all over the world talking non-stop 5 different offices around the world 5 different time zones, chaos total, but it's actually a blast, so I do this for 2 to 6 hours every day of the week.

I currently manage a team of 30 people from 10 very, very, very different nationalities. I actually don't know what's harder, the

remote

part of having to interact with my entire team simply using Skype, video conferencing, phone or email, or the different

cultural

interpretations of everyday things that happen in the workplace. Fortunately, my personal journey has been a bit of a nomadic experience. I was actually born here in Spain and before I was one month old I moved to Africa, then I spent five years in Puerto Rico, then a few more years in Spain, then five years in the Netherlands and then I spent 10 years between Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. please don't try to add all this up, it's a bit chaotic before returning to Europe, I traveled a bit and finally settled in Madrid.

I am not an expert on cultures. I haven't studied about cultures and I haven't read many books about cultures, but I've had hundreds of experiences handling everyday problems that arise when

managing

a multi

cultural

team

remote

ly and I still make a lot of mistakes, so why am I talking about this today? Because this situation that I face every day Happens to most of you, if it hasn't happened already, people want flexibility, people want to choose the word work and they want it now, look at this graph here, so this is what Millennials want from the workplace, they want training, I think we can. everyone agrees you know they want to learn at work and they want flexible work schedules they want to work remotely they want to choose when they work they want to have flexibility during the day they want this above cash bonuses they want this above private health care , they want this up, more vacation, I mean, they want this up, paternity and maternity benefits, people want flexibility, a lot of people on my team, how good it is to work remotely, the reality is that they end up working many more hours, In reality, many hours more and very late. at night, but they love the flexibility they have during the middle of the day and remote work will be even more common because the new generation of managers are looking at their workplace and the great thing about remote work is that you are actually adding a huge employee . benefit for a much lower cost and you're actually creating loyalty for people in the workplace, it's a great addition for people, but with all this flexibility, you know it's actually not easy to make this happen, it's actually difficult enough, there are tons of problems that arise from everyday workplace situations to illustrate how simple yet complex this problem is.

I wanted to share a story that happened to me about two years ago, when I started working remotely with my team in South Africa. I've been doing this for about five years. Um and as always I was sitting in front of my computer in Madrid and I had one of my first conference calls with my team in South Africa, when I qualified and at the end one of my team members tells me I'll call you right now, which I thought, Oh great. I mean, I was actually really excited to get into the details, so I ended the call and waited in front of my computer and waited and waited and waited and then.

After about 15 minutes, I messaged a member of my team in South Africa and said, “Hey, are we talking right now?”, to which he replied yes, right now and sent me this message. He sent me this image describing how South Africans define time. It is not like this? I think that's what we're all thinking right now. You know, we'll talk in a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes for South Africans. Can I say that we will talk in the future, hopefully today, if not tomorrow, maybe someday in the distant future, you don't really know when you are going to talk, how can something as simple as expressions about time lead to such a misunderstanding and this had been an internal meeting, so this was it?

It's not a big deal, but imagine if this had been an external meeting with clients. Cultural differences can lead to big misunderstandings and the distance made it even worse because I couldn't get up from my desk, walk around the hallway and tap the person on the shoulder and say, are we talking now? And of course, this was my first week on the job and I didn't want to look like an idiot. Ask these questions with my own team. Remote work situations can be even more confusing so this week I launched the project in India and it went very well and I wanted to share my excitement with my team so on one of our weekly calls I shared with the rest of the team and told to one of my Indian co-workers: Killing him there and the next day.

To my surprise, I received an email very early in the morning from a member of my Indian team asking me what I did, what I did wrong. Can you give me an advice? Can you tell me how can I do it? improve and it surprised me. I was actually trying to express my enthusiasm and what a great job I had done and I had interpreted something completely different, the exact same sentence in the exact same language, being understood in two completely different ways, the lack of context created. This misunderstanding context is absolutely necessary when working with remote

teams

, so even with two

teams

with the same natural language, such as English, problems are still created due to lack of context, which is why about a year ago I had quite a few communication problems between My teams based in the US and London we had tons of meetings, probably too many nowadays, and in most companies a lot of actions came up, a lot of things were done, but the results were poor, the People didn't communicate well with each other. and people were getting really frustrated, so I needed to do something about it, so I bought 30 copies of a book on how to work with people from different cultures and I gave my whole team this book, here's Aaron Mayer's culture map, and the effect was absolutely incredible, it brought to light in plain sight how different the people on the team are, so you had 30 different people from 10 very different nationalities speaking exactly the same language, in this case English, but we were all saying things that completely different and we act completely different in the same situations, so for example my team in Latin America is very hierarchical so they didn't understand when people responded in a certain way or my team in the US and Netherlands have its headquarters in London.

It seemed completely normal to me that in the middle of a conference call you can interrupt the person and you can say your opinion and other people were not going to this self-awareness at all and bringing this to light was absolutely incredible, it was a key. driving force of our success, so I think we can all agree that remote work is fantastic and now having this flexibility in the workplace is absolutely amazing, but it can actually also lead to loneliness. In my case, for the last five years I have felt quite alone. Sometimes I would sit alone in my small studio in front of my computer and when I was in the office with other people and had to travel, I felt very alone on the road.

I had to attend many conference calls. hotel rooms on trains on airplanes in public bathrooms even you know in horrible situations I had to take calls in the middle of the morning now very late at night at three four five six in the morning I mean really horrible situations both physically and mentally challenging situations , so you have to find a way to be in a comfortable situation. Co-working areas like this are great for solving this problem. I mean, you can feel like you're part of a company. you feel like you are working sitting with other people you can network with other people you can be inspired by other people you know you can inspire other people you can just get out of your chair have a coffee and chat with someone from a completely different company you just feel like work is being done remotely and what coworking areas are absolutely brilliant.

I think there's no doubt about it, but the reality is that you still need physical presence to create a really amazing team, you can have amazing relationships. Through email video conferencing you can establish some kind of relationship between your team but you need physical presence to create empathy and really add empathy to your team so remote work is the future but you need physical presence at least a couple of times. A year to truly build an incredible team, so I want to leave here today with one last thought to share with everyone. I want you to start thinking about what you need to do to be able to wake up in the future, hopefully not in the very distant future. and being able to wake up every morning with your loved ones and your family and being able to take your first call in a place like this, sometimes being away from your coworkers is not so bad, thank you