Outsource Magazine

The recent report by Softtek and Horses for Sources, 'How Latin America Powers Global IT Delivery', is a painful example of how the community of outsourcing talks about culture. The report implies that business culture is equivalent to seeing Western products, using a credit card, or viewing shows on television. In speaking with Beni Lopez about the report, it is clear the intention was to talk about experiences rather than business-culture differences, but does the reader understand that?

Proximity experiences help when explaining product requirements to an outsource team, but these have little to do with how employees work, what they feel is important and how they get things done. This is where the real problems lie in these relationships.

It’s difficult for Americans to think about cultural differences because we subsist on the idea that everyone is the same. This idea powers American culture. Without it, Americans would find themselves in the same situation as Norway: confronting radical groups focused on identifying people that hold differing beliefs.

Americans are not constantly bombarded by differences nor are we expert ninjas in mastering them. The opposite is true: we are raised to be blind to them.

Outsourcers find themselves in a complicated quandary because of these rose-coloured glasses. Softtek is one of the few outsourcers that take active and effective measures to train staff to work across cultures. I have shone a light on Softtek before.

But these efforts are rarely discussed. Instead, outsourcers have in many ways taken on the challenge of erasing these differences so their clients don’t see them. Outsourcers assure clients that there are NO differences between the client’s staff and theirs, attempting to comfort the client in their struggle to tell the organisation who will replace the newly departed local team.

What the leadership of the outsourcer fails to realise is how great the impact will be when their “foreign” staff lands inside the client. These employees act and react very differently than the locals. Often outsourcers assume clients know the challenges so they don’t mention them, or the outsourcer assumes their quick 30-minute video on how things are different in the US is effective and eliminating any problem.

From working with clients in these agreements I can tell you that culture is the last thing most Americans even consider as a potential problem because of our belief system. As an outsourcer, trying to get business from these clients, this is a big problem for you: this is the road to your replacement.

When a US client sees problems and gets frustrated, they don’t consider culture: instead they turn to process. Once the process has been defined and rolled out the client assume that everyone – and more importantly anyone – can follow it.

The result leaves the outsource team following a highly defined rigid process, similar to a robot. Clients start asking: “Can’t we pay someone else less?” Because the thinking goes, if everyone can follow it, then anyone can.

This is an important point to understand: when outsourcers don’t talk about culture, and then correspondingly fail to train workers to engage effectively, clients assume the outsourcer’s staff’s capabilities are at the root of problems.

Cultural differences present as capability deficiencies to Americans.

Using a specific example, clients don’t understand why an outsource team member doesn’t speak up because of power distance issues across the team. Instead, the Americans jump to: “These guys are idiots! They saw the problem and didn’t tell us!”

This is one finite example; there are hundreds. But, under this entire conversation is a pure ignorance that business cultural preferences affect everything we do in outsource relationships.

If you are an outsourcer reading this, and you are not Softtek, you likely have this problem.

I spoke with a group last week preparing to cancel a 70-million-dollar contract. This is the kind of contract on an outsourcer’s balance sheet that really matters. This client’s top problems are directly related to how the outsourcer’s staff is acting when onsite at the client - which of course would be ok at home, but not ok in the US. The outsourcer believes they have trained their team to work across cultures.

Both sides of this agreement need to learn more about culture. But the outsourcer has not offered a way for the client to talk to them about the problem. Instead they assume it's time to get a new team.  

Cultural differences are at the core of most outsource problems. Talking about them is the solution.