Nicole Sahin, CEO and Founder, Globalization Partners

Understanding the challenges and opportunities of building teams across rich and varied cultures is something every business leader with global ambition should prioritise. While some leaders favour generic corporate values and behaviour over local traditions or business norms, embedding each domestic culture into any organisation ensures a better connection with employees and customers alike. This can have a significant impact on a huge range of success factors, from sales and brand loyalty to staff retention and wellbeing.

Nurturing local culture across international teams starts with an important question: What exactly is culture as it relates to international business? In essence, this is about the shared practices, beliefs, and common expectations around how people behave and conduct their business.

In particular, shared expectations are a vital component if colleagues are to embrace, support and benefit from cultural differences. Their importance is rarely more apparent as when two people come together and don’t have the same expectations for how something is supposed to be done. The result can be friction and disconnect, impeding the ability of teams to collaborate and deliver on shared goals.

A myriad of benefits

For companies of every size, training international management teams on how to truly understand the unique cultural differences of their team, their partners, and their clients will almost always be of benefit. Those who make this commitment to mutual understanding often see a positive effect on unity and dedication, eliminate unconscious bias or preconceptions and allow people of different nationalities to form meaningful, long-term working collaborations and friendships.

Educating a company on international cultures can also be financially smart, and on the flipside can be hugely expensive if ignored. The experiences of Walmart in Germany, whose failure in the country is at least in part attributed to an inability to understand local culture, with an exit from the country and a reported $1 billion loss the eventual result.

Avoid cultural blunders 

Some of the cultural mistakes international brands make can be less serious in the long-term, but still offer a note of caution for others. Pepsi, for instance, opted for a literal translation of their slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi generation” in China, only to subsequently discover that this reads locally as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”.

The list of cultural blunders is extensive, one of the most infamous (and possibly apocryphal) is widely attributed to the Gerber baby food company, whose use of an image of a baby on their labels proved highly embarrassing, given the widespread use of images on packaging in the African region to show what they contain.

Whatever the genesis of cultural failure, the impact can be serious for individuals and organisations alike. In an era where globalisation has become a mainstay of successful commerce, each example serves as a reminder that nurturing cultural diversity is key to long term growth and success.

Digital dehumanisation?

It will come as no surprise that the Covid-19 pandemic has also had an impact on cultural integration. On the one hand, millions more people have become more comfortable with remote communication and collaboration. Many organisations have found themselves released from geographical siloes as people connect with colleagues wherever they are.

But on the other hand, the remote nature of today’s workplace cultures can also mean the opportunity to create meaningful connections with colleagues seems harder. For example, how can people really be expected to be aware of important cultural differences when working from home on virtual platforms like Slack and Zoom?

For employers and their teams, it's important to work hard to retain humanity in their communication, which before last year was a standard feature of face-to-face contact. The format of ‘traditional’ meetings is often bookended by a few minutes at the beginning or end of the conversation to talk about appropriate personal topics, such as family news, sport or to compare life from different perspectives. This is more difficult to achieve remotely, but it remains no less important to have those moments to connect with co-workers, and businesses should remain mindful to facilitate cultural chat and small talk.

Digital tools have proved invaluable in enabling organisations to adapt to pandemic restrictions, but they must not be allowed to dehumanise workplace culture - especially across international borders. Indeed, any organisation that makes a meaningful, long-term commitment to its workforce must work harder than ever to deliver on cultural inclusion across every territory where it operates. For those businesses that have made the investment of time and resources, the returns offer a win-win for everyone involved.