Two factors that are rarely present in any domestic projects, but cannot be avoided when going offshore, are geographical distance and cultural differences.

Geographical distance might be a factor in terms of unfavorable time zone differences but today most of the offshore service providers ensure that their business hours are adjusted to ensure that you have several hours of overlap per day in common.

However the impact of cultural difference is something that should not be ignored when going offshore. Depending on the location you are offshore outsourcing to, cultural differences can vary from minor if you nearshore, for instance in Ireland or Eastern Europe to a real cultural clash if you offshore to low cost countries in Asia such as India or China.

So far India has been the most favored offshore outsourcing destination and continues to be a dominant player in this field. The Indian service providers have matured over the years in providing offshore outsourcing services and are able to manage cultural differences when working with clients across different geographies. However, one area that has so far not received significant focus is educating their clients on these cultural differences. Unless the clients understand these cultural differences, it is hard for them to understand and appreciate them. For example, if you are in a meeting with an Indian service provider, you will observe that the most senior person in the team from the service provider will lead the discussions and his sub-ordinates would only speak when his / her boss asks them to do so. In UK business culture sub-ordinates can interrupt a conversation at anytime if they have a valuable contribution, but if this etiquette was followed in India it would be considered disrespectful. 

Another typical observation with Indians is that they are never comfortable saying “No”, especially if you are a client. For example, if you go to a store to buy a shirt and realize that the shop is about to close, you can still walk in (even after the till is closed)  and the store will ensure that your needs are being served, even it means that they have to keep the store open for another 30 minutes. In IT project scenarios, project members will not mind compromising their family commitments just because they cannot or do not want to say “No” to their clients.

Most Indians are not comfortable giving bad news. They believe that they should give people good news and when it comes to giving the bad news, they are either very quiet or find alternative ways to communicate the bad news. This is an important aspect to understand as many clients get “surprises” about their project related issues at a very later stage and keep wondering why the issue wasn’t highlighted during the weekly review meeting.

So the key in offshore outsourcing is not just finding the right projects and the right people to deliver them, but building capability within your team to work with in a culturally diverse environment. Though this may sound very difficult, the solution is simple. Most client organization can successfully “bridge” the cultural gaps by implementing the following tips.

1. Training – Most of the offshore service providers have special “western cultural orientation” programmes for their team members working on offshore projects. These training programmes help them to understand the culture of a specific country including business culture. On similar lines it is important for client organizations to build a training programme for their own staff to educate them on the culture of the offshore destination. This can be achieved by

Identifying an internal team member who has experience with both the cultures. For example an organization may have a person of Indian origin who has spent considerable time in India and then moved to your country. Usually a person who has worked in India for a couple of years and then relocated to your country (and spent about 5 to 6 years there) would be the most ideal candidate. This person would be able to educate your team on the cultural differences and can act as a lead trainer.

Seek the services of an offshore advisory specialist. Offshore advisors have vast experience in working with different cultures and have a culturally diverse team who can impart the relevant training to your team members. Most of these offshore advisors understand the cultural differences at different stages of outsourcing and hence are an ideal choice for such training programs

Request that your service providers carry out training programs specifically tailored for your teams. This could also prove useful to a certain extent and has its own limitations based on the vendor’s experience of doing business in that particular geography. Also ideally the cultural training should be carried out prior to engaging with a vendor so that from day one of the interactions, your team is able to leverage their knowledge regarding the business culture of the vendor organization.

Since the business culture of each company is different, it is important for you to educate the service providers about your company’s culture – the attitudes, thought patterns and behavior norms. Many companies ignore this aspect, but this is an opportunity to improve the productivity and experience of their onshore-offshore teams.

2. Visiting the Offshore location – This is very helpful and provides your team members an opportunity to experience what the offshore location is like and how people communicate, behave, work, socialize, etc. However, it is not possible for an organization to send all their team members to the offshore location as it would be an expensive proposition. But sending different people (wherever possible) each time there is a requirement for someone to travel would prove useful. Also ensure that people who have visited the offshore location share their experiences with their colleagues and are made a part of the training programme to make most use of their experience.

3. Organizing Cultural Events – As mentioned above, most of the offshore service providers have training programs for their staff. Also, most of the offshore service providers today celebrate events such as Valentine’s Day, Independence Day (US), Halloween Day, Christmas, etc to educate their teams. On similar lines, clients can organize events (with the help of the offshore advisors, vendors) that are important in the offshore location. This will give the client team a learning opportunity.

4. Movies as a training guide – English movies are seen across the globe and as result, many people worldwide educate themselves, besides entertainment, from these movies. Companies can also adopt a similar learning approach by encouraging their people, who are involved with the offshore projects, to watch local movies / documentaries (with English Subtitles) from the offshore locations.

The tips mentioned above is not an exhaustive “To do” list to bridge the cultural gaps, however it is a guide to help your team members understand and enable them to appreciate the cultural differences that they would come across while working on a day to day basis with the offshore teams.

To summarize, offshore projects have special aspects that managers must be familiar with, such as cultural diversity. The long-held belief that technical qualifications are sufficient to ensure project success has proved to be wrong from everyday on-the-ground experience of global multicultural teams in the offshore outsourcing environment. To ensure the success of the offshore project a multi-skilled, collaborative approach to bridge the cultural gaps is very useful. By learning from others experience, bridging the cultural gap at an early stage can help you avoid the cost in terms of cross-cultural communication blunders, project delays, team conflicts and overall productivity.

Every time people come together with a shared purpose, culture is created. This group of people could be a family, neighborhood, project team, or company. Culture is automatically created out of the combined thoughts, energies, and attitudes of the people in the group.

I often compare culture to electricity. Culture is an energy force that becomes woven through the thinking, behavior, and identity of those within the group. Culture is powerful and invisible and its manifestations are far reaching. Culture determines a company’s dress code, work environment, work hours, rules for getting ahead and getting promoted, how the business world is viewed, what is valued, who is valued, and much more.

Culture shows up in both visible and invisible ways. Some manifestations of this energy field called “culture” are easy to observe. You can see the dress code, work environment, perks, and titles in a company. This is the surface layer of culture. These are only some of the visible manifestations of a culture.

The far more powerful aspects of culture are invisible. The cultural core is composed of the beliefs, values, standards, paradigms, worldviews, moods, internal conversations, and private conversations of the people that are part of the group. This is the foundation for all actions and decisions within a team, department, or organization.

Visible Manifestations of Culture
·Dress Code
·Work Environment
·Benefits
·Perks
·Conversations
·Work/Life Balance
·Titles & Job Descriptions
·Organizational Structure
·Relationships

Invisible Manifestations of Culture
·Values
·Private Conversations (with self or confidants)
·Invisible Rules
·Attitudes
·Beliefs
·Worldviews
·Moods and Emotions
·Unconscious Interpretations
·Standards
·Paradims
·Assumptions

Business leaders often assume that their company’s vision, values, and strategic priorities are synonymous with their company’s culture. Unfortunately, too often, the vision, values, and strategic priorities may only be words hanging on a plaque on the wall.

In a thriving profitable company, employees will embody the values, vision, and strategic priorities of their company. What creates this embodiment (or lack of embodiment) is the culture that permeates the employees’ psyches, bodies, conversations, and actions.

The energy fields that make up a group’s culture are dynamic and change continuously. Culture is created and constantly reinforced on a daily basis through conversations, symbols, rituals, written materials, and body language. It is the small, mundane actions and behaviors that create a culture and can shift a culture.

Creating and sustaining a healthy, vibrant culture requires reinforcement of the culture through daily and proactive conversations and communications. The failure to discuss the values, purpose, and rules within a group often leads to a culture that is at cross purposes with the stated intention of the group. Poor communication creates a lot of confusion and often a crisis of meaninglessness.

Since a culture is created every time a group of people come together to form a team, a company will have many sub-cultures that exist within its main culture. For example, the marketing and technology teams may have different worldviews, jargon, work hours, and ways to do things. A big challenge for today’s company is to create a strong, cohesive corporate culture that pulls all of the sub-cultures together and ensures that they can work as a unified team.

Most companies try to “fix” perceived problems by addressing the parts of the corporate culture that are easy to see. Some quick-fixes include holding Friday beer bashes and company picnics or adding fringe benefits and perks. None of these actions will have a powerful or lasting effect on a company’s culture.

So, if the powerful part of culture is invisible, how can you affect it? Through conversation. Conversations have the power to make the invisible visible. Language is not merely descriptive, it is generative. Language and conversations have the power to generate a new, powerful future and to create a cultural energy field that will support and sustain this future.

The CEO and leadership team of a company have a powerful impact on culture through their conversations and behaviors. Business leaders can pro-actively create a thriving culture by understanding what culture is (and is not) and learning how to have fundamental business conversations.

Unfortunately, most business leaders receive little to no education on how to have powerful conversations that generate culture and actions. Culture building can be learned, but it takes an honest commitment from the leadership team of an organization.

The culture of the organization could probably be described as the environment that surrounds the people at work all of the time. Not only that, but it is also considered to be a powerful element that paves way to shape the work environment, the work relationships and the work processes. In other words, it could also be described as the personality of the organization, meaning to say that the culture of an organization basically highlights what kind of organization it is in the first place.

The organizational culture is basically made up of assumptions, values, beliefs, attitudes and the artefacts of the people in the entire organization. In other words, it is made up of all the real life experiences brought in by the employees in addition to the influence of the organization’s founder, executives and the other managerial staff who are involved in the decision making process of the organization. Having said that, in order to understand the culture of an organization more clearly let us look at some of the characteristics of the organizational culture.

Some characteristics of Organizational culture

The organization culture cannot be created over night but evolves overtime. This is because the culture is made up of values and beliefs shared among the organization members. It is not just possible for an individual to create the culture of an organization alone. Rather it is a combination of the personalities and experiences of all the people working in the organization. To say, everybody who has worked for the organization has some way or the other contributed to shaping the culture. Other than the employees, the founder of the organization in particular and the managerial staff of the organization have too played a role in shaping the culture. There may also be subcultures present within the organizational culture. These subcultures are formed as a result of the different needs and wants of the employees. To say, sometimes the employees may look for rewards that are not offered by the overall company.  As a result, they may form their group   within their own department with their own culture that rewards them with their expectations or fulfils  their needs. The culture of the organization is thus passed on to the new employees through the process of socialization. In other means, the new employees will come to know the culture of the organization in which they work thus by interacting with the other people in the organization. Once formed, it is not an easy task to change the culture whenever possible. This is because cultural change basically requires the people to change their behaviour. It is quite difficult for the people to change their old way of doing things and go into do new things all at once. It has to keep on changing gradually overtime with lot of effort put in.

However, the organizational culture may differ from one organization to another. For example, the culture of a hospital or university is quite different to the culture of a bank. This is because the culture of an organization is quite visible to some extent through their arrangement of furniture, how things are organized, what the people wear and what they talk about etc. Having said that, some organizations have weak cultures while some have strong cultures.  Let us  go look at each of the two types of culture in a bit more detail.

What is a Weak Organizational Culture?

A weak organizational culture is when the people in the organization do not agree on the same basic beliefs and values as applies to the organization, and in stead they tend to have their very own ideas, beliefs and behaviours etc. As a result, the people are controlled by way of using restricted rules, procedures, supervision and bureaucracy within the organization. On one hand, a weak culture may be the result of many subcultures. In other means, a weak culture would rather encourage individual thought and contributions.

To say, this type of culture would be better for an organization that tends to grow throw innovative ideas, and only if the people in the organization could at least have a common goal and help the management to come up with plans for the future,  even their ideas may be different. For example, different departments may have different sub cultures with different believes and ideas but still they should all work for a goal such as helping the organization to grow. But at the same time, if the people  in the group think individually having different goals in mind, then this will no doubt lead to conflicts or cause problems between the people and the management. If this happens, then of course the organization falls into a situation of failure because of the different sub groups trying to fulfil separate goals rather than a common goal. It should be said that weak cultures are easily changeable as they are not stable and the organizations with weak cultures are usually considered to be in efficient and less effective at most times. This is mainly due to the restricted rules, supervision and bureaucracy carried out within the organization.

What is a Strong Organizational Culture?

The  culture of an organization is considered to be strong when the majority of people in the organization tends to hold the same basic beliefs and values as applies to the organization. In other words, it could also be said that an organization has a deep rooted strong culture when the employees respond strongly to the values and thus passes it on successfully to the rest of people. Having said that, a strong culture in particular has many advantages. To say,

A strong culture basically paves way to attract people with talent. What actually means by this is that the talented people in general do go in search of organizations that they think would help them to fulfil what they expect such as better salaries etc. With a strong culture they believe that the organization is in a better position to achieve all those.  The talented people would basically prefer to work for an organization with a strong culture rather than trying to find out places elsewhere. This actually reduces the amount of talented people leaving the organization to a greater extent.  Now a days what people really want is to get engaged in their work and do it with responsibility etc. Hence so, a strong culture do paves the way for people to take the responsibility and work rather than trying to control them with rules and regulation, supervision etc. It is rather important for people to be able to work together and maintain their relationships with the rest of the organization if the organization is to succeed. A strong culture basically helps the people to get to know each other better which will eventually lead to new ideas and greater productivity.  People working in the organization usually find work to be hard and frustrating most of the time. But with a strong culture that is attractive there is no doubt that the people find the work to be interesting and enjoying, which will also pave way eventually to achieve the goals of the organization.

However, in spite of all the advantages, there are times when a strong culture may not exactly be the culture that is needed when it comes to facing the competitive environment. This is because the organization may have to come up with many innovative ideas in order to face the competition rather than sticking on to the old ways of doing things. To say, if the people in the organization are completely following the values and beliefs of the existing culture when it comes to achieving the goals, then they obviously lack the opportunities to think in a much creative or innovative way in order to come up with unique solutions or ideas to face the ever changing turbulent environment.  This is because they all think no beyond than their existing culture. This is basically a draw back in the strong culture. Too, a strong culture is indeed difficult to change at times of need, and needs a lot of effort to do so because people once adapted to the old way of doing things it is unlikely that they are willing to change their behaviour unlike in a weak culture.

Conclusion

It should be said that organization culture may be different from one organization to another. Meaning to say that, some organizations will have strong cultures while the other may have weak cultures. A strong culture is when the majority of people tends to agree on the existing beliefs and values and beliefs in the organization, meaning to so that there is one dominant culture in spite the other sub cultures that exists.  On the other hand a weak culture is when the majority of people disagree on the existing culture but instead forms their own sub cultures.

Having said that, it is also important to keep in mind that no culture can be the right culture. Even though many tend to believe that an organization should have a strong culture in order to survive, it is true to a greater extent but not always. This is because it is indeed vital to always keep of watch of the competitive environment thus because the existing culture may not be suitable for the competitive environment at times. For example, when it comes to facing the competition it more or less needs an organization culture that is open for more innovative ideas. In other words, the organizational culture must fit with the competitive environment and the organization in order to meet the goals. As a result, there is no right or wrong  culture. But the one that suits an organization  best is a combination of both the cultures meaning to say that  a strong culture that is open for the people to express  their very own (new) ideas. In other words a culture that is agreed by the majority of people but still respects the innovative ideas of the people at times of need.