--- tags: EPITA --- # Intercultural management script - One of the thing we could notice while reading the answers we had from our interviewees is that they did not necessary differentiate cultural issues from the ones that were related to themselves, their environment or even the culture of the company. - The most common issue we could extract from our set of interviews was the language barrier that could exist in a multi-cultural team. - When working on complex multi-field technical problems it can be even worse since the vocabulary that is required may not be the one you use daily. - Internship located in Paris for a company specialized in IoT solutions. His job was to take over the code from an old team who used to work with an Indian team affiliated to his company. Not only the Indian developers he had to interact with could not speak English but their comments in code and documentation were written in Indian. Solutions: Google translate or learn the language beforehand. - Another issue that has been raised is the relation to time: - Deadlines are mostly respected except for teams from latin culture like Spain or Italy. - For example one of the students we interviewed said at the moment during her intership in France, she packed her things to leave work at 5:30PM while she noticed no one was moving and then decided to sit back down and ended up staying until 7PM. (from her Algerian perspective and fixed hours she had from her past experience.) - Another instance that can emphasize this is one of the interviewees who worked in the Netherlands. He said that his team was blamed for taking 1:30 long lunch breaks while his team was blaming the Dutch for leaving at 4PM. The team performance was suboptimal and the results were underwhelming. - Masculinity / Feminity: - Some people said outcomes were affected by people's commitment so we can consider there is a gap between the masculinity indices. - We had one occurrence of what Trompenaar's with Specific vs Diffuse in the interviews we gathered. - It happened in the US for a group project, the interviewee tells us that Americans have a blurred line between private and public spaces and consequently that they were invasive. Because of that he had become much colder and formal and believed that it broke the team dynamic. Solution: In order to focus the work to be done and not be distracted by trivial cultural differences, he sat down with his teammates and set up boundary rules. - Although there were many difficulties that could arise from such an environment, the general feeling for the people who were able to pass this obstacle was one of great accomplishment. Indeed, we can safely say that all nations will be working even closer together as technology brings us together. - Some interviewees confided that having a multicultural work environment also greatly improved on the quality of the final project. The influence of people with multiple cultures resulted in a rich diversity of point of views.