It used to be that when we caught TV shows, we would all watch them at the same time, some prime time soap episode that would become the talk of the week if it was awesome. Then came demand TV and streaming and now we all watch whatever whenever but have nothing in common to chat about anymore as everyone’s watching something different.
In my years of managing multi-country teams, one oddity of remote working is that you don’t always “feel” the local context. For example, when it is raining and we are trying to get into the office we will definitely expect people to be running late. But when you’re working in our remote environment you do not have the same type of weather patterns as the people that you manage and the people that you work with so this leads to us having a disconnect.
You can’t really talk about the weather because it’s different. And someone might be running late and people might wonder why they’re late but it’s just delay due to the weather and they were trying to get to the office or something.
Trying to establish rapport by finding similarities becomes harder as your shared experiences are very limited. The people you manage do not have similar backgrounds and upbringing.
For example, in Singapore, even in the late 90s, there were already a lot of personal computers. I grew up in the 90s and I was learning how to touch-type on a keyboard before I even completed my kindergarten education. Whereas in another country, the experience, even in the same era might be of a lower technological development. Or access to the same tech would be less accessible, and experiences may vary. I used to manage someone from India of a similar age to myself, and yet he only used his first computer when he was in university. This is just but one of the differences in backgrounds and upbringing that you’ll need to contend with when managing across geographies.
Working with others in different timezones also present interesting interactions. You start your work, and greet someone “good evening”, then as your afternoon arrives, you may greet another “good morning”, and before you know it your day is ending and you’re still greeting “good morning”. Just another facet of oddity. Not to mention the difficulties when dealing with more than 2 timezones in planning meetings that stay within working hours but yet not overlap their lunches.
Ultimately, we all crave that human interaction, that empathy for when we are not well, and that familiarity for similar experiences. While there are myriad differences, there are a million similarities that are out there for us to discover. One thing I’ve noticed is, regardless of where we live on this planet, I see similar desires to live a rich life, to care for children, family and friends, and to give back to communities. That is always something that makes me happy to work with blended cross-geographical teams.
