The better colleagues understand the influence of culture on collaboration, the better they can reduce risk in five areas:
Cost
You lead a multinational team. Add just one hour of extra work per week per person due to misunderstanding: additional emails, video calls, possibly even face-to-face meetings.
Let’s run the numbers: 10 people x 1.0 extra hour x 48 workweeks x 100 hourly cost = 48,000. That’s 4,800 for each colleague. Euros or USD. Year in. Year out.
You might want to ask each of your multinational teams to run the numbers. They won’t need much time. Then discuss those numbers. And the reasons for them.
Results
When collaboration in and between multinational teams does not go well it can mean over budget, over schedule, poor quality, or any combination thereof.
Take your most important project. Go over budget by 1%, over schedule by 1%, reduce quality of results by 1%, or any combination thereof. Quantify the impact of that on your bottom-line.
Now ask the colleagues in that project if and how misunderstandings are making their work difficult. Ask them to then do the same calculation: impact on budget, schedule, and quality of results.
Talent
What’s the negative impact on colleagues in multinational teams when collaboration is slow, difficult, frustrating, or failing?
You know your team. You know your top talent. Quantify the impact on the business if just one of the best is frustrated, unmotivated, or even leaves the team.
The negative impact is not only on results, but also on the rest of the team. Ask your people how current collaboration is going, within their team, and interacting with other teams.
Customers
You’re a global organization. With colleagues in different countries. Interacting with customers in those countries, both internal and external to the company.
Quantify the impact on your bottom-line when just one customer is not happy interacting with your organization. Then quantify the impact if you lose that one customer.
Ask the team how interactions are going with your key customers. Is there confusion, irritation, misunderstanding? Even better, ask your key customers how things are going.
Suppliers
Look at your business ecosystem. Your organization consists of multinational teams interacting with multinational teams on the supplier side.
Pick an important supplier. You know your numbers. Quantify the impact on the bottom-line when collaboration between your teams and their teams does not go well.
Then go one step further. Ask those teams interacting with suppliers to do their own quantification. Then compare the numbers. It might be eye-opening.
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