With a title like “A Distressing Virtual Reality: 40 Percent of Dispersed Teams Underperform,” Chief Learning Officer raises awareness of an issue that potentially affects many of us. RW3 CultureWizard’s Virtual Teams Survey Report 2010 is the base of the argument targeting virtual work as something we must learn to be good at, and not something we can easily compare with face-to-face interaction.
Click here to read an article in ASTD’s Training + Development magazine about RW3 CultureWizard’s Virtual Teams Survey Report 2010—The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams.
Learn about the shortcomings of virtual work, and how to support virtual teams with the training they need to succeed despite the lack of context face-to-face interaction provides.
Listen to The American Entrepreneur radio segment “Crossing That Cultural Chasm: ‘The International Capitalist’ Talks With Two Experts” (be sure to click on the second clip), in which David Iwinski interviews RW3 CultureWizard’s CEO, Michael Shell, and EVP, Charlene Solomon. Below is a blurb from the show’s website:
So how do you take your business global? “The International Capitalist” David Iwinski has some answers, as he takes over the hosting reins on American Entrepreneur Radio to discuss that very topic. He’ll talk with the authors of two of the hottest books on the market when it comes to globalization. First, Charlene Solomon and Michael Schell discuss how to effectively manage when your people are scattered around the globe, as covered in their book, “Managing Across Cultures: The Seven Keys to Doing Business With a Global Mindset”.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RW3 Survey Finds 40% of Virtual Teams Underperform
New Survey Identifies Areas that Impair Effectiveness of Virtual Work
NEW YORK, NY – May 24, 2010 – According to a study released today, 80% of corporate managers work virtually at least part of the time and 63% are members of global virtual teams. The key factors that impair productivity are: cultural differences, communication styles, time-zone differences, language and a lack of face-to-face contact, according to the Virtual Teams Survey Report 2010 – The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams, conducted by RW3 CultureWizard, an intercultural training consultancy specializing in online intercultural training for global business managers.
Michael S. Schell, CEO of RW3 CultureWizard, said “We were stunned to learn that only 60% of participants on virtual teams considered them to be as successful as they could be. We can’t imagine that this degree of satisfaction would be acceptable in any business endeavor. Inasmuch as virtual teams are such a fast-growing component of business, and global collaboration is critical to success, the organizations with the most effective teams will be most successful. Making virtual work more effective must be top-of-mind for every business leader.”
The survey identifies three challenging areas: time zone and language difficulties, communication styles and cultural differences.
1. Time Zones and Languages: 81% indicated time zones presented the greatest general hurdle to virtual teams, followed by 64% who found language (accents and dialects) to be a barrier.
2. Communication style: 94% said the inability to read non-verbal cues is very challenging, and 90% stated the absence of face-to-face contact interfered with the ability to build a relationship (which is perceived as a challenge facing virtual teams). In addition, 81% said being virtual made it more difficult to establish trust and rapport.
3. Cultural differences: 80% said that virtual teams slowed down decision making, 77% were hampered by different leadership styles and 76% felt the method of decision-making was a challenge.
“Apparently, collaborative technology has outpaced the ability of global virtual team members to work effectively across cultures,” says Charlene Solomon, executive vice president of RW3 Culture Wizard. “Companies need to be aware of the influence of culture on work styles and to develop procedures to assure intercultural effectiveness. They need to establish specific rules for respectful interaction that are already assumed to exist among members of more conventional, co-located teams where all of the participants are all from the same culture. They also need to pay greater attention to team structure and must carefully monitor and adhere to the work rules they have created,” she added.
“The good news is that there is training available to make virtual teams more effective,” concludes Schell. He explained that the new study was prompted, in part, by the growing number of collaborative software options that facilitate virtual work and make it commonplace for teams of people from around the world to work together – often without ever meeting in person. According to Schell, RW3 CultureWizard is using the findings of the survey report to develop and fine tune the components of its Virtual Team Tool – a training initiative to help organizations improve communication skills among virtual team members.
RW3 CultureWizard has made a copy of The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams available online. Please click on the link above.
About RW3 CultureWizard
RW3 CultureWizard is an intercultural training consultancy that specializes in creating online and e-learning facilities to develop global collaboration within its client organizations. Founded in 2001, with offices in New York, Los Angeles and London, RW3 CultureWizard blends 30 years of experience with technological capabilities into a comprehensive cultural e-university, which provides tailored learning platforms. These include cross-cultural training courses, global and virtual team collaboration, international assignee support, and country-specific information.
NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information, visit RW3′s website.
Read an article by Sean Dubberke of RW3 CultureWizard, titled Culture and Communication 101, which made the front cover of this month’s Mobility magazine. Below is a synopsis from the editors.
“Behavior and communication are interpreted through a cultural filter. As global thinkers with international and multicultural experiences increasingly interact with each other in the business world, opportunities for misunderstanding and communication breakdowns increase. Dubberke offers methods for identifying cultural clues among your colleagues and clients and how to best use them for addressing communication issues.”
Learn more about cultural awareness and receive intercultural business news and other CultureWizard tips on developing your global mindset directly through your news feed on Facebook. Click below to become a fan of our new page.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RW3 CultureWizard Launches State-of-the-Art Online Cultural Learning Platform
Responding to demand by multinational organizations for global business skills development, RW³ CultureWizard, the pioneer in online cultural learning, has created a cultural e-University
NEW YORK, New York—March 15, 2010—For the first time, businesspeople can establish a personalized online learning curriculum that responds to their individual business needs and challenges. CultureWizard 3.0 allows users to customize the learning track for their specific global business needs, learn and practice skills at their own pace and in their preferred learning style.
“Today’s adult learners expect information to be available to them as they need it and when they want it,” explains Michael Schell, RW3 CEO and President. “They look for information to be tactically applicable to real-life business situations. In a contemporary organization, everyone’s work requires sensitivity towards and awareness of culture and diversity. Everyone also needs skills that will enable them to transcend intercultural challenges and achieve their business objectives.”
Cultural dexterity is not intuitive, but it is learnable. CultureWizard 3.0 is an affordable, accessible platform through which everyone can become culturally competent. It contains a variety of training tools and informational components, all designed to provide users with the answers they need to be most productive and effective in their global companies. Users can frequently reference CultureWizard as their business need arises.
Amongst the most popular learning courses are a complete cultural training course, a self-assessment and culture calculator, a global teams tool, a virtual teams course, an assessment tool for international assignees, a global leadership course and culturally-based information on 135 countries.
Contact: Charlene Solomon
Charlene.Solomon@rw-3.com
+1 (212) 691-8900
About RW³ CultureWizard
RW3 spearheaded the cultural e-learning field in 2001 with ReloWizard, an online relocation facility, and reinvented the intercultural training model with CultureWizard. Today, RW3 continues to lead the industry in innovation with CultureWizard 3.0, a powerful resource that cuts the cost of traditional, in person training by supplanting it with a cadre of web-based tools, virtual classrooms and other cultural resources.
NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information visit RW³’s website
The importance of intercultural competency for people who may never work outside their home country is the theme of “Going Global, Stateside,” an article by Tanya Mohn in the New York Times.
The excerpt below describes RW3 CultureWizard and the experience one of it’s clients, Thomson Reuters, had with its CultureWizard site.
Andrew P. Walker, vice president of global mobility for Thomson Reuters, said online training was easier, quicker and cheaper than in-person training. Thomson Reuters uses CultureWizard, a Web-based tool created by the company RW3, for its employees in 93 countries for what he said was ‘a fraction of the cost’ of formal training.
Mr. Walker said he also used it himself. ‘Without the course, I think I would have made a lot of mistakes,’ said Mr. Walker, who moved back to the United States in July after five years in London. He said his low-key, light-hearted manner was fine on business trips, but when he was working there full time, ‘I wouldn’t be able to get away with it forever.’ He said the program helped speed the transition.
Michael S. Schell, chief executive of RW3, recounted how a mining and exploration company in Britain contacted his firm because the mining company was unsuccessful in winning business from an American company. ‘During the training, we pointed out that the proposal turned off the Americans,’ Mr. Schell said, because it began with 10 pages detailing all the risks of the venture and how much failure would cost.
Americans tend to view failure as a learning experience that inspires creativity, Mr. Schell said, so the American company considered the proposal negative and unenthusiastic. The British tend to be risk-averse culturally, he said, and perceived the Americans as unrealistic. When the British company redid the proposal with a positive spin, they got the deal the next day, he said.
‘Differences got overlooked because we speak English,’ Mr. Schell said. ‘They look like us, wear the same jeans and use the same cellphones.’
The assumption is that we’re all the same, but we’re not all the same.
An Investor’s Business Daily article this past weekend poses the following question: Why is it hard for American companies to expand overseas? Simply put, “mastering cultural differences and understanding European, Asian or Latin American customers affect bottom-line results.” So, if nothing is invested in cultural learning, business will not build the momentum it needs to achieve the success it took to expand in the first place.
“Americans think if they are well-intentioned and go overseas or anywhere, they’ll be successful. Being well-intentioned isn’t enough,” said Charlene Solomon, EVP of RW3 Culturewizard who co-authored Managing Across Cultures with CEO Michael Schell. Solomon says that “businesspeople need to understand cultural differences and pinpoint what global customers want from their product.”
Wal-Mart considers local tastes in selling crocodiles at a Sam's Club in Guangzhou, China. AP
One of the most important tips Schell and Solomon offered is to “honor the local culture as exemplified by McDonald’s buying local produce and ingredients rather than having them shipped in.” Knowing the customer in an intimate way, as one would more naturally do in their native country, is absolutely essential. Developing a global mindset is a core competency for all members of an organization, management especially, in the 21st century.
Click here to jump to the article.
Josh
The cover story of this month’s American Executive, titled “Global Mindset,” features Charlene Solomon, Michael Schell and their book Managing Across Cultures. The growing need for executives and their organizations to effectively do business in a very global market is highlighted by the crucial role culture plays worldwide. “The most serious errors made by Americans when dealing with other cultures include ignoring other cultures’ need for relationship building and assuming other cultures share our love for risk-taking, say Schell and Solomon…One reason Americans tend to underestimate the need for relationships, said Solomon, is that time is so important to us. ‘We don’t realize that building relationships and taking time to talk to people are really important. We tend to think these things are gratuitous.’”
A strong sense of relationship and rapport prevails in many cultures outside North America and Western Europe. In East and South Asia and the Middle East, business is built on trusting, personal relationships that extend beyond the workplace.
According to Solomon, this relationship building takes “a few minutes to chat about something on a conference call, taking a little bit of a personal interest in the person on the other end of the phone, and being polite in an opening note in an e-mail.” Cognizance of the cultural need for this kind of behavior is not difficult, and practice makes perfect. “We practice it internally,” she said. “Opening an e-mail with a hello, if appropriate saying you hope they had a good weekend, closing it with your name, just being polite. Also, we take some time before meetings start and see that time of relationship building as part of the business process.”
Owning this knowledge of other cultures empowers you as a global professional, and builds on your global mindset, a must-have for the 21st century.
Click here to jump to the full article online.
Sean
Read about Charlene Solomon and Michael Schell’s book, Managing Across Cultures: The Seven Keys to Doing Business with a Global Mindset, in Re:locate Magazine, a website for HR and Relocation professionals.
Paul
We have recently increased our coverage in the CultureWizard Country Profiles. We have recently added the following countries:
Cote d’Ivoire 
Gambia
Guinea
Laos
Macau
Malawi
Maldives
Mauritius
Mozambique
Senegal
There is now a grand total of 133 Country Profiles on CultureWizard®. Click here to jump to a demonstration of the Country Profiles.
Mike
Charlene Solomon and Michael Schell’s Managing Across Cultures was recently reviewed in Etihad Airway’s Aspire in-flight magazine. See the magazine and read the review below.
“Management speak can be hard enough to understand at the best of times: paradigm shifts? Blue sky thinking? Incentivise? Ehm what? But imagine if boardroom strategy was outlined in Swahili rather than business English. Presentations as dry as a martini can leave cosmopolitan boardrooms at a loss; country-specific humour rarely makes it past the unhappy customs officials. Today, in the ever-expanding global marketplace, cultural sensitivity is at a premium. Step in Solomon and Schell, experts in cross-cultural training, who are promising to change all this. Crucially, their self-help manual features case studies on how Colgate-Palmolive integrates cultural understanding into global marketing, how GE adapts management style to local cultures and how Intels global corporate culture is critical to its ongoing vision. Its not just a catalogue of different customs, gestures and language faux pas. Problematically, however, the book rigidly focuses on western corporates, raising an interesting question. If translated for non-English speaking businesses, would it not get lost in translation too?”
Sean
In the Report on Business section of The Globe and Mail, a Canadian periodical, Harvey Schachter reviews Charlene Solomon and Michael Schell’s recently published book, Managing Across Cultures, The Seven Keys to Doing Business with a Global Mindset (McGraw-Hill, 2009). He compared it to other books in the field and concluded the following:
“…If you could only read one, I’d nominate Managing Across Cultures, which is more comprehensive, particularly in taking readers through the seven key differences they will encounter in other countries, and having you fill out a questionnaire so you know your personal instincts, should they be different from other Canadians.”
Click here to read the full review.
Josh
Read an article by RW3′s Sean Dubberke in this month’s MOBILITY Magazine about the extraordinary educational experiences that are attainable today. As practical experiences, says Dubberke, they best describe the modern, globally-minded professional. In any industry, it is crucial to know that an international education is more valuable than ever before.
Click here to read the article.
