Description:
Blog post outlines the
energy and the amount of consideration language and cultural differences take
when the working environment is virtual.
Keywords:
language, communication,
virtual working
This blog post is my
personal investigation and real life example of working in an organisation with
more than one native language and virtual co-operation. At university level, we
all know that language and communication is challenging when you don’t share
the same native language. But when you take the discussion in virtual
environment and have it by writing in chat or calling virtual phone calls over
Skype, things demand even more consideration. Welcome to read my experiences.
I work in a digital advertising agency. Our organisation
is a middle sized Finnish company operating physically in Finland, and our
customers and target markets are Germany, the Nordics and Finland. We have
employees in two native languages, Finnish and Swedish, who all speak fluent
English and also several other languages. We work in two offices in Finland
and, occasionally, all over the world. Wherever you have a good enough internet
connection.
We communicate with our
clients in four languages at the moment: Finnish, Swedish, English and German.
There is a lot of virtual and non-virtual communication at the office: video
conferences, phone calls, email and face-to-face. The language in many meetings
is English. There are lots of challenges between several languages and
cultures, and possibilities for misunderstanding.
I did a small academic
research to get some proper references before I tell you my thoughts.
●
Serçe et al (2011, 498) emphasize that communication skills, language
and culture are deeply intertwined.
●
Mukherjee (2012, 276, 279), while defining culture as a part of social
features, highlights the complexity the different cultures bring to
communication and knowledge sharing. According to him, in virtual teams the
cultural differences require more active construction of good relations and
their maintenance (Mukherjee 2012, 281).
●
Crampton (2011, 346, 357-9) discusses the perceiving in virtual team
communication between cultures, and finds the biggest challenges in understanding priorities, knowing did the message got across and interpreting
silence during the virtual discussion. In the virtual communication you are
missing facial expressions, tone of voice and body language, and every interpretation
depends on the recipient.
●
Crampton (2011, 359) especially underlines interpreting silence. He
means the moments you are waiting for the confirmation email, the silent
nodding or thinking yep. Silence can be interpreted in totally yes – or no.
With this setup there is
quite a lot to do for us Finns. I have noticed the communication challenges
with cultural dimensions: way of expressing things, the compliments and small
talk, and interpretation of small talk in messages. Especially Finnish language
is plain and rude in the eyes of other language speakers, and the messages
sound like demanding commands. It’s not that we are rude, but it’s a cultural
matter. Once I explained to our customer, why there is no “please” and “thank
you” words in the Finnish translation. I had to think about the explanation.
When I write a chat
message or email to a familiar colleague, all these misunderstandings are
smaller and more easily avoided. So if I know the person, it is easier since I
know something about the other person’s way of communicating. When the receiver
is unfamiliar, every character matters. It is really easy to sound impolite for
example in email. I have also noticed that people withdraw easily when they are
misunderstood once. The problem is that excessive caution does not take the
message across at all.
The awkward silence when
one specific word from your vocabulary is missing is better to fill with small
talk or explanation of what is in your mind – the silence makes the message
interpretation a lottery. Keeping this in mind, is sending email easier than
direct chatting or Skype calls? It leaves a bit time to read and understand the
message. Depending on personality, it also can avoid making too hasty
conclusions. I feel that in virtual discussion the biggest misunderstandings
come from quick conclusions and unasked questions. You don’t want to seem
stupid by asking too many questions – it is easy and quick to say ‘Yes ok, I
get it’.
From the reference
articles I did pick up one important thought for this blog post. Martins (2004,
815) wrote that it is more important to believe in the matter of what you’re
doing: productive virtual teams communicate more but in less official ways. When
you care, you ask the questions because you are interested. This leads to
successful communication in any language and culture. So, more is really more.
As a conclusion for this
blog post of communicating in a multicultural virtual environment the main findings
are actually pretty pleasant.
●
Get to know people you work with. Have a party, meet your clients.
●
Writing business correspondence letters at university is not stupid. It
makes sense.
●
Do what you like and believe in what you do. Care.
Few further reading about
the subject:
REFERENCE LIST
Cramton, C.D. (2001). The
mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration.
Organization Science, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 346–371.
Martins, L.L., Gilson,
L.L. & Maynard, M.T. (2004). Virtual teams: what do we know and where do we
go from here? Journal of Management, Vol. 30, No. 6, pp. 805–835.
Mukherjee, D., Lahiri, S., Mukherjee, D. &
Billing, T.K. (2012). Leading virtual teams: how do social, cognitive, and behavioral
capabilities matter? Management Decision, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 273–290.
Serçe, F.C., Swigger, K.,
Alpaslan, F.N., Brazile, R., Dafoulas, G. & Lopez, V. (2011).
Online collaboration:
collaborative behavior patterns and factors affecting globally
distributed team
performance. Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 27, pp. 490–503.
Text by Kaisu Koskiaho, a student of Independent Study in English course
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