Sometimes translation is the problem?

When I describe my work to a new set of people I often have to spend some time encouraging them to think beyond language and translation as the problems in international business co-operation. The things that words don't say, about expectations, about different ways of approaching work and different assumption are often the real root of the problem.

However, recently I was introduced to an area where translation issues really are part of the problem. The setting is a small UK company that has been bought by a larger foreign organisation. Local management have mostly remained in place, although there are some ex-pats from the main organisation now present. [Details are obscured to protect confidentiality.]

Senior management from the larger corporation journey out from their home country twice a year or so to ask questions about performance and set new directions for the UK subsidiary.

Analysing a fundamental breakdown in performance it seems to be the case that communication between the foreign leaders and local managers is a particular part of the problem. Certainly, the foreign leaders show signs of misunderstanding the local business context and the local managers do not seem to grasp the strategic import of certain decisions.

As a  simplification, they are not managing to question each other properly and as a result, not obtaining important information from each other.

So why do I say, this time, language might be the problem? After all, we know that different cultures have different reactions to how various levels of the hierarchy should interact. Might that not be the root of this problem?

I won't deny that there were some of those issues in play. However, the key analysis point was that the situation had got noticeably worse with a change in translation services. So, for once translation is the problem!

This being a language I am certainly no expert in, I had to consult with others. They did an assessment and report back that the translator is of technically a very high standard and well suited to the nuances involved. The next step was "live" observation of the interaction between local managers, foreign leaders and the translator. At last, things start to become more clear. The culture of this particular foreign nation has a traditional tendency to place women in a subordinate position, putting less weight on their words, particularly when they disagree with someone of higher status. The previous translator had been male and the new one was female. The technical quality of translation had not changed, but the reception by the audience definitely had. So translation was the problem, but the problem had cultural roots.

 

Technorati Tags: business problems,cultural translation,culture,international managers,translation

Engaging the English?

Four years after publication I've finally found the time to read Kate Fox's "Watching the English." It's a bit embarrassing that it's taken me that long, since it is all about "English culture" but I'm glad I finally did so. If you haven't read it, it is rich with insights into the "English character" and how these manifest in daily life. Kate Fox is a serious anthropologist and doesn't over-generalise too much, but at the same time has managed to write a witty and insightful book that is easy to read.

It's been widely reviewed, so I won't dwell much on the content, except to say that if you ever find yourself watching an English ritual (ordering at the pub, for instance) and wondering "what on earth is going on?" then this is a good book to read. The rules of "pub life" have also been put on the web at the SIRC site. (SIRC is the research centre where Fox works.)

However, the essential characteristics she laid out really got me thinking about the culture clash within a lot of "employee engagement" programs, especially within multinational firms.

A stereotypical example (to avoid identifying anyone!): a large US firm has an engagement program, with pieces implemented by HR and Internal Comms. Within the UK office, this is put in place by local workers.

Picking out three characteristics from Kate Fox's list, moderation/balance, humour, and finally a taboo against earnestness we can begin to see some problems. The program may well be sold locally with a good dose of humour by the local workers, despite the earnestness present in the original descriptions written in Michigan. However, the underlying aims of "employee engagement" as defined at the US HQ might well conflict with local cultural norms about "not being too earnest" or "moderation/balance in work and play."

Now in the case of a small division, this isn't fatal, because culture is a broad assessment and every country contains a range of personalities. You can fill out a single department with people who fit well with the originating culture (in this case the USA) but as your employment requirements grow it will become ever harder to find candidates who aren't typical of the culture.

In time then, we will need to develop different sets of philosophical ideas of employee engagement that can fit with the cultures of different employees. That requires not only an assessment of the culture but also a real sense of "engagement" beyond the stereotypical notion of a hypermotivated, hyperactive, workaholic team.

 

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,cultural translation,culture,engagement,English culture

More Social Networking examples...

Shiv Singh at TheAppGap tell us a bit about his panel talk with representatives from Best Buy, Serena Software and Oracle on their use of Web 2.0 social software.

The BestBuy experience is very interesting as an example of how certain kinds of business knowledge aggregation come out of social networking, but the one I am going to have to research more is Serena Software:

Serena Software is another interesting company and I blogged about them a few years ago (on another blog) when they first rolled out their Facebook Fridays initiative. Rather than trying to build a behind the firewall social networking enabled intranet, Serena chose to build their intranet on the Facebook platform. But not just that, they also built tools to allow the Facebook pages to connect with company data sources in a safe and secure manner. So rather than bringing the employees to the intranet, they went to where their employees were spending most of their time - on Facebook.

This is exactly what most companies are scared of doing on security/productivity grounds, so I think it's a fascinating development.

[N.B. After lunch with Steve Ward today, I realise I've been blogging far too much about various technologies and not enough about culture and communication as it features in my general work. Expect a shift of emphasis over the coming months.]

Technorati Tags: Best Buy,business case,future of internal communications,Oracle,Serena Software,social media,social networking

 

Momentum of Social Networking in the Enterprise.

 

It's growing. I posted recently about IBM, I was at a recent event where Michael Ambjorn described the tools they are putting in place at Motorola and Lee Smith notes that social networking has landed at BT.

I'm not surprised by this, I've argued for a while that the large corporation is exactly the kind of large, geographically disparate body that could benefit from social networking.

Questions that remain:

a) If it's obvious for large corporations, how do we persuade the remaining "big boys" to take it up? Senior management resistance is still a big issue.

b) How big does the organisation have to be for social networking to be a no-brainer? What's the needed "critical mass" of a network to make this kind of software useful?

 

Technorati Tags: BT,business case,future of internal communications,IBM,Motorola,social networking

Is this Facebook's answer to LinkedIn?

So the new app on the Facebook block is the Visa Business Network. It's interesting because it isn't in fact a direct analogue of LinkedIn. Rather than being a tool for presenting our "business personas" it appears more geared to being an organisational persona for smaller businesses.

It's only in Beta, so the networking features are rather rudimentary and until the number of participants increases it's not clear how useful they will be. And personally, I'm not sure that this will be enough for Facebook to take on LinkedIn. I think they are going to have to take on board the fact that we all have more than one persona (the usual example is business vs personal) and if they want to be a site that contains both, they have to give people a way to present both sides. This seems to do so, a little bit, for those of us who own smaller organisations, but I'm not sure quite what it does for those who work, say, for IBM. By contrast, LinkedIn at least has some potential there (along with a growing userbase.)

Of course, this could be an example of one of those "enabling technologies" that helps smaller businesses create "virtual organisations" or "network businesses" to cover market requirements that are normally served by much larger organisations. However, there doesn't seem to be enough interactivity to really be better than a phone directory so far. Also, the address form assumes you are in the USA.

This is a pet peeve of mine, but so many "Web 2.0" sites hobble their functionality by not considering non-US users when they first start up. If you're looking for early adopters, it's best to cast the net wider. Ignoring the world outside the US might save 10 minutes coding up the HTML for location, phone and address handling, but you lose half the advantage (geo-location neutrality) of a Web App in the first place.

 

Technorati Tags: business case,facebook,linkedin,social networking

On new channels

Over at Black Belt Dojo, guest poster Jeffery McMillan posts some musings about podcasts and their place in his new assignment in Russia. He makes some interesting points about how the different medium elicits different responses from interviewees and how it can build a more intimate connection with the audience.

However, what got me thinking was this:

Let's return to the paradox with which I began this blog post. It seems the better I get at producing podcasts the lower the number of listeners tuning in.

...

It could be a cultural thing. Perhaps podcasting is as of yet a western phenomenon. PwC Russia is a solid 93% Russian in its staff composition and, let's face it, maybe you can't blame my Russian colleagues for having an instinctive skepticism toward the media—corporate media included. I wonder what the experiences of my colleagues around the world have been. Do podcasts resonate further in some necks of the woods than in others?

Now I'm no techno-slouch, per se. I have 2 iPods (car and general use) and I'm rarely without my laptop. And yet... I barely listen to podcasts. It's true that I don't work for an organisation that puts out vital information in this format, but plenty of high quality blogs in the IC space and others produce a podcast. But the only podcast I generally make an effort to listen to each year is the Guardian's Tour de France daily report. And I usually end up listening to that in the evening on my laptop.

Now there are a variety of reasons for this, from the fact that I don't drive on a regular basis, to the miserable quality of bandwidth on the train and in various hotels for streaming.

I must also admit that once I get the new iPhone, I might be more likely to find it easy to organise such that podcasts are with me all the time.

I think that these sort of infrastructure issues are a big part of Jeffrey's situation. It's often not that convenient/appropriate to sit in an open plan office listening to a podcast. But elsewhere, bandwidth can be a bit scanty. And (guessing) perhaps the Russia office has a lower iPod ownership.

And this is a problem which a lot of new media channels face. The main reason every "social networking" conversation eventually turns to Facebook (and occasionally LinkedIn) is that they are the main ones with any kind of serious user density.

For myself, I can see lots of interesting possibilities for mixing my virtual life with my physical one. Examples include things as diverse as Facebook's status update, Twitter and Dopplr. The problem is, candidly, very few of the people in my physical world are on any of these services.

Interestingly, email was easy, because everyone got it with internet access. I wonder which other channels will turn out to be "basic" in the same way.

 

Technorati Tags: podcasting,social networking

How much knowledge work do you actually do?

Or perhaps, more importantly, how much knowledge work does your organisation actually do? There's a whole host of recent posts that touch on the collision of innovation, knowledge work and systematisation in business. (e.g. Victoria Axelrod, Dave Snowden.)

One thing I am still struggling to understand and (roughly) quantify is how much "knowledge work" is actually going on. Over the years, many commentators have taken the "Gold Collar Worker" as a starting point and believed that the future of work for many (if not most) will be more flexible, more satisfying and more knowledge-based than before. This leads of course both to a view of education as a tool for income improvement (not to mention as the source of increased value-added for businesses.)

However, my own observation of various "knowledge industries" is that many firms may be large, but many of the people inside are doing rather routine work (which might be termed "mental labour") which is not particularly creative or flexible, but for various reasons is not cheap to automate at this time. So, I'll put the question to knowledge workers reading this, how much of what you do is really "creative knowledge work" and how much will be outsourced to lower-skilled subordinates using a computerised system in the next few years?

 

Technorati Tags: knowledge economy