Five Tips To Improve Your Communication With Teams Scattered Across The Globe

Nowadays, it is a common practice for many IT companies to works with the team of specialists from all over the world since such cooperation helps to gain the necessary experience and to get required specialists (check out 7 Benefits of Crowdtesting in our blog). In this article we would like to give your several tips as for the improvement of your communication with the foreign employees and the ways of making it easy, friendly and what is the most important thing, productive. Remember: the quality of work hinges on the quality of your communication and the ability to find the common ground with people from other parts of the world.

See below several ways of making the communication with foreign team members pleasant and productive.

1. Use proper messaging services depending on situation.

Modern messaging tools like Google Hangouts, AIM and so on will help you to make your work easy and productive since they allow quick and easy way to share messages, files and some other project materials with your employees from all over the world.

See below the worldwide instant messenger market share chart (as of March 31, 2013).

However, you should always keep in mind that your respondent may currently be in ‘a sleep mode’, since your time zone can differ a lot. So make sure to use only e-mail messages when you have doubts regarding the local time.

2. Stay positive.

Sometimes, when you are communicating with a person via email it is very easy to hurt person’s feelings since your conversation partner doesn’t see your body language or face expression and doesn’t hear your tone. Besides, there is a huge difference on how different cultures perceive various phrases. In order to avoid these situations try to stay friendly and positive even if your messages will sound less strict and business like.

Remember: Staying positive in business is key to long-term success.

3. Communicate with each team member individually.

Don’t be afraid to ask the question as for the work he/she is currently performing. It will help you to understand and evaluate the progress of each member of your team and analyze possible issues he/she can face. Make it a rule to communicate with one of your team member at least once a day within 15 minutes.

Set goals and recall them frequently together.

Once you feel that you don’t have time to communicate with each of your employees individually – make sure to take care about the person who will do it for you. This could be a project manager, a team lead or dedicated specialist that coordinate your global employees in a specific field. That’s why here in Ubertesters when hiring our global professional testers, our clients also get a personal project manager that communicate with each tester personally to ensure completing a testing process on time, on budget, and with high quality results.

4. Don’t criticize your team members, offer suggestions instead.

Sometimes it is difficult to discuss a current issue with a person whos favourite phrase is ‘I don’t know why but I don’t like it. Try something else.’. It usually leads the conversation to the dead end. Try to move the conversation forward in this situation by offering your suggestions as for the simplest way of fixing the issues when you disagree with your employees.

Remember: When you’re faced with challenges, it’s important to take stock of what’s going well.

5. Schedule team meetings so that each member of your team could take part in it.

For your convenience you can use specialized services such as World Clock Meeting Planner – simply specify the countries of your team members and get the chart with the best business time, depending on each time zone.

It can be really challenging task when you are working with people from different parts of the world, but if you manage to cope with this task, it will give each member of your team the opportunity to feel himself really important and valued.

We hope that this article will help you master the skills of international communication and build strong friendly partnership with your teams from around the world. Make sure to share your experience in comments!