How to successfully work across countries, languages, and cultures
According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, the number of people in the global labor force will reach 3.5 billion by 2030 — and yet there will still be a shortage of skilled workers.
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The result is likely to be intensified global competition for talent. Rather than assuming we’ll work in one location, in our native culture, we will need new skills, attitudes and behaviours that help us work across cultures.
Our ways of thinking about careers, colleagues and collaboration will need to become more flexible and adaptable. My five-year study of the global workforce at Rakuten, the Japan-based e-commerce powerhouse, gave me a close-up look at what will drive success for this new type of global worker.
Prior to 2010, Rakuten had been a multilingual global company. The Japanese employees in the Tokyo headquarters communicated in Japanese, the Americans in the U.S. subsidiary spoke English and the workers in Asia, Europe and South America spoke a mixture of native languages. Translators were employed for cross-border communications. What’s more, the subsidiaries operated more or less autonomously, each with separate organisational cultures and norms. But in 2010, Rakuten mandated an English-only policy for its workforce of over 10,000 employees.
The CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, realised that doing business in multiple languages prevented the organisation from sharing valuable knowledge across the organisation’s existing global operations, as well as those that were being newly established. The company also aspired to raise the overseas portion of its revenue in response to the projected shrinking of the Japanese GDP as a portion of global GDP (from 12% in 2006 to 3% in 2050) and wanted to expand its global talent pool. Above all, the company aspired to become the number one internet services company in the world. The English language, Mikitani predicted, could revolutionise both how Rakuten employees worked and how they interacted with the rest of the world.
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The English language mandate, however, set off all sorts of linguistic and cultural challenges. These challenges differed depending on people’s backgrounds and location. Two groups had the steepest learning curve in particular. The Japanese employees, while already fluent with Japanese concepts such as kaizen (improvement) and omotenashi (hospitality), struggled to become proficient in English. The American employees, who were fluent in English, struggled to become comfortable with new work routines and expectations from Japan.
The employees who had to adjust to both a new language and a new culture — whom I have named dual expats in their own countries — had the easiest transition when it came to working under the new conditions of the company’s English-only mandate. They hailed from countries as diverse as Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand, and all demonstrated the characteristics of what I call global work orientation. This type of orientation can be incredibly valuable to cultivate for anyone working for multinationals or in other global careers and can also be used by managers to develop employees. It consists of five key actions.
1. Embracing positive indifference
Positive indifference is the ability to overlook many cultural differences as being not especially important or worthy of attention, while remaining optimistic about the process of engaging the culture seen as foreign. It’s about adapting to work practices that may at first seem culturally foreign — such as having to wear an identification badge or file frequent key performance indicator reports — without becoming unduly troubled.
2. Seeking commonality between cultures
This enables you and your employees to draw closer to a foreign culture and become receptive to its differences in line with characteristic number one. The commonalities you find may be different from anyone else’s and not initially obvious. For example, a French employee at Rakuten found commonality with his Japanese coworkers by recognising that both cultures are results-oriented and prone to analysing processes for how they could be improved. An Indonesian engineer found commonality with Rakuten’s requirement that employees spend five minutes per week cleaning their desks by comparing it to his practice of washing his feet and hands when entering a mosque. In his mind, both cleaning rituals demonstrated commitment and responsibility to a particular place. Seeking commonality is important to a global work orientation because it draws colleagues from diverse cultures closer which in turn translates to more effective collaboration and teamwork.
3. Identifying with the global organisation rather than your local office.
If you feel a sense of belonging with the larger organisation, you are more likely to share its values and goals. Organisational identification, the term for when an individual feels at one with the organisation, is crucial for fostering job satisfaction, commitment and performance. Here’s how an Indonesian employee at Rakuten voiced this behaviour: “From my perspective, if I’m doing my job, I’m becoming part of the globalisation of the company.” Identifying with the global organisation, in his mind, was synonymous with the collective international company and its further expansion.
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4. Seeking interactions with other geographically distant subsidiaries.
The dual expats, unlike employees from Japan and the United States, welcomed and sought out increased interactions with employees at other Rakuten locations. Brazil reported the largest extent of these self-reported voluntary interactions at nearly 52 per cent. In comparison, the US, which had the lowest voluntary interactions with other subsidiaries, hovered around two per cent.
This behaviour is important to global work orientation because my research finds, in general, when interactions are high, there is a greater ability to develop trust and shared vision among international coworkers. Interactions are also vital for sharing knowledge across sites. As such, tacit knowledge can become more explicit; sharing information or best practices can become advantageous; and learning from one another’s common experiences can accelerate the spread of business efficiencies across the global organisation. As a Thai employee pointed out in discussing the implications of the rapidly expanding internet business in his country: “Learning from other countries, especially other developing countries is very, very key.”