Maybe I will start by answering something I already hear coming in your mind: “that surely won’t apply to me since I’ve been working in UK for XX years.” Well, I am far from convinced it is the case. If you are yourself a foreigner in the workplace you live in, at best you are adapted and work on adaptation mode without knowing, but deep inside there are elements of yourself that probably remain what you were educated as.

Before going further I will quickly recap what culture is about in the context of this article. I am using the definition given by Gert Jan Hofstede: Culture is the unwritten book with rules of the social game that is passed on to newcomers by its members, nesting itself in their minds. In other words, it is the sum of all the rules you have learned when you were a kid without necessary knowing you were learning them. They were just “the way to do things”. There are several depths in what makes culture. If we think of it as an onion with layers, in the outskirt we would have the Symbols made of Words, Gestures, Pictures, and Objects that carry a particular meaning only recognised as such by those who share the same culture. These symbols are easily developed and copied from other cultures. It is the layer that will be the easiest to change.
Then we have Heroes. This layer is made of persons, alive or dead, real or imaginary, who possess characteristics that are highly prized in a culture and thus serve as models for behaviour. Even if we start sharing more and more Heroes via television (mainly Anglo-Saxon shall I say), these models are often specific to the culture you come from. As a Frenchman I shall mention Asterix who might be known outside of France but is unlikely to be perceived as an influential character. Descartes is definitely influential as we even made an adjective out of him: Cartesian. Heroes can be recent or ancient. In all cases they are known by everybody and associated with a role. This layer is obviously more difficult to change than the previous one. You do not replace the influence of Darwin on the British people and history in a snap. No more than you replace Buffalo Bill or Martin Luther King (Please, I do *not* compare Buffalo Bill and Luther King intrinsically but only as names attached to acts and values you respect or despise).
The next layer is made of Rituals. They are activities technically superfluous to reaching desired ends, but within a culture considered as socially essential. They are carried out for their own sake. This goes from ways to greet and pay respect to others, via social and religious ceremonies to discourse and the way the language is used in text and talk. This is becoming really tricky here because you don’t even think about it really. It is the way you shake hands (if you do), the real expectation in asking “How are you doing?”, the way you serve tea, the formula at the beginning and end of a letter, the level of familiarity you allow yourself with people at first encounter and thereafter, how you give a present, a business card, how you invite people and how you visit those who invited you. The list is endless but you understand that none of these thing are summarised somewhere in a book. You “know” them and that’s it. These rituals are very difficult to change for real in your mind. You might adapt slightly but do you really understand the deep meaning of these actions when you learn them as an adult?
The last layer and core of any culture is Values; In other words, the broad tendencies to prefer certain state of affairs over others. These are acquired early in our lives. You still don’t walk that you are already learning them: Evil vs Good; Dirty vs Clean; Dangerous vs Safe; Forbidden vs Permitted; Decent vs Indecent; Moral vs Immoral; Ugly vs Beautiful; Unnatural vs Natural; Abnormal vs Normal; Paradoxical vs Logical; Irrational vs Rational, etc. Believe me: these values are not going to change easily. Once you made up your mind on what is nice and what is ugly, it takes a while to change if ever it does.

Now what, will you ask? Fair enough cultures are making us different and we kind of knew that. Well then: what are the consequences on our business relationships? will I ask in return.

So, I would like to present a situation you could encounter when working with foreigners and the potential consequences of misreading the foreigner’s behaviour. I will aim at illustrating the different layers within the fictional scenario. I will talk about a job interview.

Now what happens during a job interview? First of all we have to convene that this situation is highly charged in rituals. From the chosen room to the chosen desk to the chosen team to run the interview, it is very unlikely that the context of the interview is not carefully thought and managed by the interviewer.

On his/her side, the interviewee will carefully select clothes, time for arrival, general attitude, etc.

In this situation, we have several cultural layers involved:
- the Symbols one (clothes, haircut, colours, etc.);
- the Rituals one with the way to greet each other, the handshake, who sits down first and when, who speaks first, asking permission for taking notes or not, looks into the eyes or down, etc. ;
- Then of course, you have the Values one with judging what is right or wrong, normal or abnormal, etc.

So, you could have an interviewee arriving in suit and tie but with tattoos and face piercings, an interviewer relaxed in casual clothes, an interviewee always looking straight into the eyes when talking, an interviewer asking about a 1 year gap in the CV. What do we have to think about that?

• A suit is rather risk free for the interviewee as it is becoming a general sign of respect worldwide in business when you do not know the person you are meeting with. But in some situation, that makes you look like a follower depending on the country you are coming from. As a Frenchman, I have to say that you more and more rarely see any suit and tie in the IT business in France. On the other hand, I would not think twice about it for a job in UK as it is the basic rule to wear a suit.
• Regarding piercing and tattoos, once again I could imagine that in UK (up to a certain level of course) but hardly in France for a managing job. I remember working for a huge bank in the city and having my manager (on the customer’s side) being a lady, biker and tattooed. That never bother anybody around that she was in charge of a big department. I can hardly imagine the same thing in France. You’d have to hide your tattoos carefully. This is even truer about piercings.
• Is looking straight in the eyes a good thing or not? If you refer to a previous article of mine, you can see that this is the case in USA and most probably in most Anglo-Saxon countries. But I remember talking with a friend of mine from Congo about Congolese students who were perceived as not trustworthy by French teachers because they were never crossing your eyes with theirs. What happens is that it is a sign of disrespect to do so in Congo. Therefore these very teachers should have read that as respectful students rather than dodgy ones.
• What about the 1 year gap in the CV? That is definitely a sin in France. Everyone in Voltaire’s country knows how to hide a gap in a CV. There are tricks and formulas you will use to pretend you were working when in fact you were raising your kids or travelling around the world. Do the same in Australia and as I understand you become dodgy as everyone expects you to get out and travel for a while, one day. So if you did not do it yet, the employer might think you will in the future and be less keen to hire you. Same CV, two conclusions.

What is important to understand is that there is absolutely no right or wrong in either side of the interview. In both sides people will do what they have been taught to do when they were kids. This has nothing to do with the language you talk and speaking English, German or French will not tell you the rules we are talking about. This is why I am always smiling when I hear someone saying that they have given responsibility of an office abroad to someone based on the fact that this person knows the language. This is nowhere near enough. Culture is all about these things you don’t “see” unless someone told you to look at them. And the most treacherous part of the problem is that very few people are aware of their own rules. So, unless you genuinely understand where things can go wrong, I’d bet they indeed will go wrong at some point.

Let’s think about IT!

When you have at last made the decision to do it, comes the difficult question of where to do it. By where I mean of course what company to use but I also mean where geographically. I’ll put myself in the shoes of a UK company as this is where I am working. So, you are based in UK and you want to use the services of people living in a remote cheaper country. Will you go in India as many have done? Will you go in Russia? Will you prefer to get closer with Eastern Europe? What about China? Then come more elements in the equation: language, time difference, reputation, process certification, etc. These are difficult parameters and indeed having 2h difference with the off-shore team surely needs a different logistic than having 8 or 10. Some argue that a big difference allows a team to work when the other is not and some will say that having a small difference allows better communication. All these questions and answers are valid, of course. But I would like to add one that is rarely taken into account: how will we get on with the local culture?

I was recently delivering a Cross-Cultural Communication Workshop for a customer which has decided to outsource in Romania. This workshop was part of a longer seminar designed to get both British and Romanian team acquire the same understanding of the project along a proper team building. This seminar happened about 20km from Dracula’s castle. By the way, for those who would not know, Dracula has indeed existed. He named was Vlad III, prince of Valachy (today Romania), but although he was incredibly violent and probably sadistic, he was not a vampire. I recommend reading his biography as I did if you are curious. Back to my topic, I have to say that it is the first time that I am working on a project that is started with so much care and energy, a real good start, but that is another story. So I had to prepare a specific workshop related to culture. And by culture, here I do not mean sharing the same movies, music or even type of clothes. Even sharing the same language is not relevant. I mean what is making a people a people; what is giving in individuals this feeling of belonging to a specific group of human beings on this planet.

I cannot really present the whole content of the workshop I delivered but I can still present some elements of it.

First of all, I shall introduce the concept of cultural dimension. There are many schools of thought regarding what elements are really describing a culture. Some like Edward T. Hall in his series of books started with Beyond Culture will emphasise on things such as time and space management. For instance, some cultures will have a more linear way to deal with time like the Germans (one task at a time) and some will have more a multi-task approach like South American countries or even France. For space, you will have also big difference like for instance simple but important things such as open and closed space. Americans will feel better in open spaces and open doors when Germans (T. Hall worked extensively on Americans and Germans) will prefer closed doors.
Some others like Geert and Gert Hofstede in Cultures and Organizations will describe a culture along 5 dimensions:

1/ Power Distance, or the way the society is dealing with power, equality and inequality.

2/ Individualism/Collectivism, or how the society is dealing with individuality inside the group.

3/ Masculinity/Feminity, or how the society is dealing with gender and their roles within the group.

4/ Uncertainty Avoidance, or: is the unknown and unexpected dangerous?

5/ Long/Short Term orientation, or what do you value best: now or tomorrow?

Each of these dimension deserve a whole article if not a book like the Hofstedes did. But if you take my word for a moment that these are indeed valuable ways of describing a culture, then you might be interested in knowing where you stand on these compared to your offshore selected service provider. That’s what I did for my customer and I can present the result and discuss it in here.

The following diagram presents the relative positioning of UK and Romania on 4 of the 5 dimensions (the studies have not included Romania in the Short/Long term Orientation but it is likely to be comparable with UK and the rest of Europe). This is the result of different studies presented in Cultures and Organisations. I have to insist on an important point: these studies have been conducted on 74 countries and the results are relative to each country included in the study. The maximum scores in each dimension is around the 100 mark; sometimes below, sometimes above. You need to check the next diagram to get the full picture.

The following diagram presents the rank within the study of UK and Romania for each dimension. The number of countries included in the study is 74. Therefore, for each dimension there is a number 1 and a number 74 which represent the min and max. Once again, this position is therefore relative and it is perfectly possible to find a country outside of the study which would score far above or even below in a dimension. But 74 countries is not a bad panel considering that the number of countries in the world is about 195 (open to debate as it seems but out of the scope of this article).

I hope that my explanations about the diagrams and dimensions are clear enough. I am here summarising hundreds of pages of studies and books. If you find it confusing, let me know and I’ll try to clarify. If you have only one thing to check in these diagrams, it is the difference between the red and the blue on each dimension. The bigger the difference the bigger …well the difference in culture.

What do we learn from this diagram? Beyond the details of each dimension, we learn that British and Romanian cultures stand quite far from each other on 4 of the 5 dimensions. We learn that misunderstanding is very likely to happen at different levels. In short, we learn that if Romania is closed geographically to UK both people are not so close. Several types of misunderstanding can happen on the project and we’d rather know beforehand then improvise during the course of the project.

I’ll take one dimension to illustrate what it means in real life terms for a project. If you consider the Power Distance Index (PDI) we see that Great Britain scores 35 in 63^rd position, and Romania scores 90 in 7^th position. If we understand that Power index, within a company could be related to the level of power the boss has on the subordinates, then you understand that a British manager will expect his staff to speak their mind. On the other side, the Romanian manager is used to get respect and his authority is not something to consider lightly. Then, one day, you have a member of the UK “basic” staff talking to the Romanian manager as he/she does with the British one: openly. And for some reasons the dialogue from that day has not worked very well and became more formal and cold. Nobody knows exactly why. After a while, the UK team starts to think that “these lot other there” are difficult to work with and quite incapable of proper communication. On their side the Romanian team suffers as well from the poor communication and think that the British are a bunch of difficult people, showing no respect for hard work and valuing the Romanian team work far under its real worth. In a word, both sides start to believe the other one is kind of crazy and at the minimum impossible.
Who’s right? Who’s wrong? I’m afraid nobody is! You are not right or wrong because you behave like you have been taught to. You are not guilty of respecting the rules. The thing is: the rules are different. But worse: the rules are not written, they are invisible and worst of all, we are not even aware of the rules we are applying. They are the rules and that’s it. We apply them without knowing.

Of course, my scenario is not guaranteed to happen. Of course, individuals do not necessarily comply 100% with the “typical” behaviour of their country. Of course, the British in here could have travelled and be more prepared. Yes the Romanians do not have to be typical either. But whole in whole we all know in our guts that what I have described is possible if not likely. We know that this level of misunderstanding is not a crazy scenario and we also know that the consequences on a project can be dramatic.

How do I answer the initial question I used as a title: Where on earth will we outsource offshore? I’ll suggest the following: integrate in the equation the cultural challenges of the situation! Do not overlook the problem and certainly do not consider that sharing American movies on TV will make us all Americans. This is a doomed approach and also a costly one. Prepare your staff. Prepare the offshore staff. Use the services of someone experienced in such matter. Always always keep an open mind when you are in trouble and start thinking the other side is impossible. What about you? Are you impossible to work with?

I could carry on and I probably will in a future article.

Meanwhile, let’s think about IT!

When you study cultures, the one topic that you need to be aware of is stereotypes. Almost every nation is seen with some specific attributes in the eyes of the other countries. To mention just a few, Germans are very organised, French are wine experts, English drink tea all day long, Italians speak a lot, etc. If you are a disorganised German or a very quiet Italian will not do any good as you are not as expected anyway. I remember a situation like that when I was 25. I was travelling the USA for 2 months. I was lucky enough to know a couple of families over there. These friends did something very good for me: they arranged for me to travel the country almost always from friends to friends; these friends sending me to other friends and so on. That was fantastic! But something I was not expecting happened to me at some point. In new-Orleans, I met a lady who had been informed of my arrival. And guess why she was waiting for me? …Because she wanted me to kiss her hand in order to say hello. Man! I had never ever kissed anybody’s hand before in my life! The only thing I knew was that you are not actually suppose to really “kiss” the hand and that to do it properly; you don’t bring the hand to your mouth but your mouth to the hand. Well, in any case, you should never disappoint a lady! I was lucky enough to have been tipped beforehand and could prepare myself for it. So I did kiss her hand. As far as I know she was delighted.

On another occasion during that trip, I had the opportunity to discover another feature of “frenchism” I was not expecting, but this time i was less lucky. In Delaware, I was invited for dinner by some friends and they took me to the local wine shop before the dinner to choose some good wine. The trouble was, at that time, I knew nothing about wine. I did not like wine and never drunk any (I have fixed that since). I told my friends but they did not believe me. So, I thought that, as I did with the new-Orleans lady, I should not disappoint. Then I picked a bottle of wine from a region I knew my family was fond of. We went home, opened the bottle and they asked me to taste it and give my opinion. I did. My opinion was as vague as I could decently be and I asked for theirs. I’ll never forget that one: they found the wine really average to remain polite. I failed and somehow disappointed. What sort of Frenchman was I? Since then, and especially to avoid that shame again, I have decided to study wine and I consequently created a few wine clubs of my own. But that is another story.

In fact, I did not start that text in order to tell you about my wine misery but to tell you about cultural stereotype. As you see it is important to understand what stereotypes you have in mind for other nations and maybe be ready for the fact that everyone from that country is not necessary complying fully with the stereotype.

Now, I think it would be useful, in order to prevent cross-cultural misunderstanding, to not only be aware of stereotypes we have in mind for others but also stereotypes we have in mind for our own nation. Somehow, when you are travelling or dealing with foreigners, you have in the back of your mind something about what you should be as a whatever-country-you-are-from. This stereotype might change your behaviour in ways you would not think too much of otherwise.
I was watching a series on DVD the other day that gave me a great illustration of how you can caricature yourself when you pretend to be a true member of your country. This series is Mission Impossible. Not that I am particularly proud to be watching it but it reminds me of my younger time when I watched it on TV. The episode I am referring to is about a bad guy from the other side of the iron curtain who is specialising in guess what: American culture. Yes, this evil man is training people at behaving just like real Americans. The training camp is already a piece of choice as it represents the most average image of American city you could think of. Amazing! Our Mission Impossible Forces manage to infiltrate the camp and pretend to be candidates for being trainees in the camp. And they are clever at that, believe me! At some point they get clear lessons of what a “true American” would do and not do. I’ll give you two out of the four or 5 the episode contains.

A true American looks into the eyes when shaking a hand! Check that dialogue between Rollin Hand and Mr Bad guy. And see as well how the other candidates know their lesson better than Rollin Hand. Look at their eyes! That’s very amusing!

A true American woman knows how to behave with a man compared to these comrade girls from central Europe! Cinnamon needs to get the attention of Mr. Bad Guy and almost fails because she was not behaving as decently as a true American woman would do. Have a look at that!

I found that very amusing because in this very case, the caricature is coming directly from the nation itself. It is not how the others see the Americans but how the Americans see themselves compared to the rest of the world. I certainly do not pretend to take any lesson from a Mission Impossible episode regarding cross-cultural communication. I certainly do not even wish to judge in any way the content of that episode which is all about the cold war. I wonder what the TV series could have been on the other side. As exaggerated I suppose! Last but not least: this illustration is about Americans, but I am convinced that we could find similar examples for other cultures by searching other movies. Americans are not better or worse than anybody else at that. Do not take me wrong, this is not about Americans, or Germans or French or whatever, this is about culture perception, nothing else!
I think you can always learn and get opportunities for deeper thoughts when attentive to your environment, including while watching such stuff like Mission Impossible TV series.

In the end, I just wanted to say that we should always be aware of what we believe the others are like but also what we believe we personally are before working in a cross-cultural environment. The awareness of both sides should defuse a good load of troubles!

Let’s think about IT!