How to build a positive company culture across borders

Summary

When you talk to founders who lead multinational, multilingual and multicultural teams, one challenge they all mention is creating a common culture across borders. Success lies in nuances: respecting time differences, understanding communication styles, and recognising personal-professional boundaries. Three people who've got it right tell us how to build an impactful cross-border company culture.

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When Indian founders decide to move West, especially to the US, setting up base and finding the right people to propel their business forward is just the beginning. As the business grows and teams expand, founders often find that the time difference is one of the easier things to deal with. The thing that needs a lot of rewiring and fine-tuning is the nebulous idea of company culture.

Ask any founder building a company, and you will often find them modeling their own business culture based on their best past experiences. That is the power of great culture. It stays with the people who work with you long after they move on and that is also what makes it an equal mix of challenge and opportunity for founders.

Defining culture for your startup is a bit like writing a symphony. Like the famous composer Gustav Mahler said, “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.” Similarly, when you build a business across continents, it must contain a bit of everything. Vijay Rayapati, co-founder and CEO at Atomicwork, Krishna Gopal Depura, co-founder at Mindtickle, and Ashish Gupta, VP Engineering at Rubrik, India, have been building businesses spanning India and the US. All three have a deep appreciation of the nuances that require founders to learn and unlearn things in the course of scaling a business.

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Time matters

“Indians are comfortable in jugaad and a chaotic environment. The US, in general, is very systematic by design, and people have greater clarity of thought,” says Krishna. He explains that there is a sense of order and design in the way companies and people in the US work and that’s something that is prized across the country. “Punctuality is a big thing in the US. You have to begin and end meetings at the right time. Over a period of time, I have learnt to proactively communicate to people if I am running late,” he adds. 

Vijay had a similar opinion to Krishna, he went a little deeper into how respecting time was one of the first things he learnt after coming to the US. “It’s something that I have learned, and I encourage a lot of people to learn. A culture or economy which is time sensitive is also probably one where their time is as important as their money,” he adds.

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Communicate effectively

Communication is a muscle that most founders have to learn to develop when they move from India to the US. It's all about learning the nuances. “Our Indian head shake is a big problem, people in the US can’t figure out whether you are saying yes or no,” says Krishna as he smiles. Head shake, for instance, could mean a no or a yes. It’s a cultural difference between India and the US, our communication has to be more verbal, explicit instead of gestures. Over time, Krishna had to relearn how to communicate with people so that he removed any opaqueness in his communication. Be it in a coffee shop or giving feedback to his colleagues. 

“We are used to indirect ways of communication, so it is something I am still learning,” he adds.

“For a company, explicit communication is a great thing to learn from low context cultures. The takeaway from high context cultures is trust and relationship building.” - Vijay

But it’s not just how you communicate that changes as headquarters change from Bangalore to Palo Alto, it’s also what we communicate.

The US is about sharply defined boundaries between personal and professional life. 

“I was used to sharing things from my personal life with people, and it threw them off. I found that I was not able to connect (with people in the US), people were not able to connect with me, until I got this nuance,” remembers Ashish. 

Vijay explains this in terms of high and low context cultures. Low context cultures, such as the US, parts of Europe, and Australia rely more on explicit, direct communication. “For a company, explicit communication is a great thing to learn from low context cultures. Another thing to learn is planning,” says Vijay. India, Korea and Japan are examples of high context cultures, where implicit understanding of situations and collective understanding are the norm. “The takeaway from high context cultures is trust and relationship building.”

The key to make Indian and US teams work together is to blend the attributes of both, he adds. One way to do this in the US is to catch up with your colleagues in a community context, outside of work. A good starting point is going for a game or a trek with them in a non-formal setting. Another thing Vijay supports is having the US teams travel to India, and work from there for a week or more, so they appreciate the cultural nuances better. 

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Transparency and planning ahead

Communication in the workspace, however, is not just about the conversations you have with your colleagues, shareholders and stakeholders, it is also the emails you write. These form the bedrock of how these relationships develop over a period of time. 

“In the US, people value transparency and planning ahead, they get perturbed by last-minute requests or decisions. So, sending a calendar invite a week or more in advance followed by a crisp, intentional email or a one-page document as a pre-read is usually highly appreciated by peers and stakeholders. On the team's side, AMAs create a sense of transparency," says Ashish. 

During the pandemic, when everyone was forced to work remotely, there was a need to build culture within the company culture. At Rubrik, Ashish began holding AMAs with small fora of 20 people or less at a time. He had to use his skill to write differently in these more intimate situations as well. Not only was it good practice for him but he also managed to inculcate a true flat structure with the organisation by answering every question the teams had. “This built a lot of confidence within my colleagues on not just leadership but also the way the company would evolve in the future,” he observes. 

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Think global, implement local

Krishna said that he, too, was mindful of how understanding nuances could help his employee base — in the US and India — connect with each other and find ways of collaborating. Mindtickle organised face-to-face interactions between teams from both India and the US so his Indian colleagues didn’t interpret a crisp reply as terse and his American colleagues didn’t interpret their Indian counterparts as being too superfluous. At the end of the day, communication is about being able to understand each other better and that’s what leads to happy workspaces and productive teams. 

In the fullness of time, everyone ultimately understands the other person but until then how do you help find common ground? Krishna’s mantra: Define tightly, implement loosely. 

“You define what is the premise of your culture, but you have to let people implement it with their own customisations. For example, we want people to take a break from work. Now that can mean going camping with your colleagues or taking time off with your family,” he says. “The two need to be respected and celebrated in equal measure.”

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Understand the social cues, find the commonalities

For Vijay, the way to win in a culture where you don’t have familiarity, is to find commonalities. Breaking the ice with a prospective customer or a hire is important because it leads to a flurry of conversations and relaxes everyone.

“In India, a commonality could be movies or cricket. That's not the case in the US. People in the US love talking about the weather, so that was a starting point,” he laughs. Other social cues that needed some learning were understanding NFL teams, learning fishing, tipping etiquettes, and having barbeque parties. These were just some of the activities that Vijay had to learn (and in some cases unlearn) to make meaningful connections with people. However, no man is an island and Vijay insists that founders travel to the US as much as possible to pick up some of these social cues. 

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Redefining professionalism 

Social cues also help founders understand how to build work environments in the US. “When we build a startup in India, it's more emotional, it's more personal. But in the US, it is driven by professional motivations,” says Krishna. Vijay agrees with Krishna’s hypothesis and he explains that this professionalism filters through when asking hard questions. “In the US, people don’t hesitate to ask hard questions. Indians, on the other hand, are intrinsically conflict-averse and tend to skirt the issue,” says Vijay. 

Ashish explains that he noticed a similar pattern in his AMAs too. “In India, we tend to couch our feedback and try not to be very blunt or raw. In the US, people index higher on being fair or honest,” he says. 

“In India, we tend to couch our feedback and try not to be very blunt or raw. In the US, people index higher on being fair or honest.” - Ashish

For people not used to raw feedback, it can be a challenge to separate the action from the person. “That way, it doesn't devolve into an emotional conversation, and tends to stay rational. You end up focusing on the problem, instead of the person,” he adds. 

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At the end of the day, why company culture matters is because it defines the identity of your business. It is not just about Glassdoor ratings or “Best Place To Work” awards. A great culture will stay with employees long after they've left the organisation, or even gone on to build their own businesses. A strong values-based culture is unique to each company and transcends geo boundaries. It is your most valuable IP to build an enduring business.
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