Improving Communication for Global Teams

In the article “Not Lost in Translation,” in The London Times’ Agile Business Report, the author, Sam Haddad makes a case for better communication amidst global teams. He states “As workforces become more globally dispersed, it’s easy for cultural and linguistic misunderstandings to occur, so running a successful agile business relies on good communication.” 

To better understand what “good communication” is and ensure teams can reap the benefits of multicultural perspectives rather than falling short due to linguistic pitfalls, we sat down with Bonsy Yelsangi, a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and an Agile Coach with 17 years of experience, to take a deep dive into real-life scenarios in which cultural differences lead to communication breakdowns. We discussed hands-on solutions to help us all work better together. 

Scrum Alliance: Can you give us an example of a cross-cultural communication blunder you’ve experienced in your professional career? 

Bonsy Yelsangi: “I was coaching a team on how to use the Scrum framework in New York, USA. The Product Owner (PO) was in the NYC office while the Scrum Master and Developers were in India. During the sprint planning event, the developers would say “yes” to everything that the product owner would prioritize, but at the end of the sprint, the forecasted work didn’t get done. This continued for a couple of sprints. The product owner was becoming frustrated with the offshore team.

During one of my one-on-one sessions with the PO, he said “Bonsy, I don't understand how to work with my developers in India, they always say “yes” to the work and it never gets done on time,  though when I check with them throughout the sprint, I always get a “yes”!

I told him “Yes” in India could mean many different things including:

• “Yes - We have understood what you would like us to work on during the sprint.

• “Yes - We can do that BUT it may take more than a sprint to finish it, we can’t tell you that right now, maybe as we progress we can let you know.”

• “Yes - We can’t actually do that but you are the big boss in the USA who we obviously cannot say NO to otherwise we will have to be in endless meetings with our management or moved to a different department where I will never talk to a client again, or worst get fired for saying NO.”

SAI: How did you coach the team to overcome this “yes” problem?  

BY: By reiterating Agile Values, I helped team members on both sides understand that it's about “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools.” I encouraged them to create an environment where an agile transformation is a joint approach rather than a siloed one — instead of teams in India being informed about the decisions, they should be involved in training and decision making.

I also taught them that when on a Scrum team, the team members (all three roles) are peers, there is no hierarchy, we are one unit, trying to achieve the goal cohesively. 

SAI: What are best practices that a person/team can use to make sure they are including everyone in the conversation and not shutting people out based on language and cultural barriers?

BY: In my experience, scrum values (Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect, and Openness) play an important role in breaking down barriers. In addition to that, I encourage: 

• Collaboration: Teams should come up with training plans together, share the overall goal, help teams understand the context around the requirements. Share the intent instead of instructing developers on how to do things.

• Team Building: In the example above, team members traveled to each other’s office and had frequent video calls to remove the us vs. them paradigm. I encouraged the team to learn about each other’s cultures and get to know each other on a personal level, which created team bonding. The goal is to have an environment where team members feel comfortable in approaching one another and talking about issues openly.

• Cultivating environments with psychological safety: You want a safe space for team members to openly share their weaknesses and challenges and ask for help without any fear of consequences. Not only that, this should be a space for them to openly share their victories! It feels great to receive acknowledgement or a pat on the back! Share what’s working for the team and how they should continue that in the future sprint as well.

Related Collection: Learning into Scrum for Remote Teams  

SAI: We often hear about the challenges of cross-cultural teams and not a lot about the benefits. How does having diverse perspectives on a team ultimately lead to better products or greater customer satisfaction?  

Working with team members who think differently, who come from different backgrounds, have different skill sets, and who challenge one another will motivate us to think differently.

BY: A diverse team brings along many perspectives and attitudes, which leads to creativity and experimentation – that in turn results in innovation and valuable products for a larger audience. It helps us have better cultural and customer insights leading us to outperform our competitors.

Working with team members who think differently, who come from different backgrounds, have different skill sets, and who challenge one another will motivate us to think differently; it sharpens the team’s performance. Diversity stretches our team’s level of comfort and redefines their paradigm. Hearing different viewpoints leads to ideas that we may never have come up on our own.

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Bonsy Yelsangi is a Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST) and an agile coach with 17 years of experience. She has helped organizations and individuals attain agility in industries including media, remote managed services, luxury real estate, aviation, automotive and private wealth management. Throughout her career, she has served as a mentor, coach, facilitator, trainer, and change agent during agile transformations.

Bonsy is co-author of the book "Sprint Your way to Scrum". Her speaking engagements focus on bridging the gap between doing agile and being agile. Her goal is to help others embrace change irrespective of their domain expertise.