Key Takeaways

• Effective asynchronous communication is crucial for global teams.
• Cultural diversity should be celebrated rather than homogenised.
• Annual meetups play a vital role in maintaining team cohesion.

Topics

• Remote Work
• Company Culture
• Team Management

Transcript

With difficulty, to be honest, I mean, I think we've always been in multiple countries. So we were in Thailand and the UK from the very beginning. So in that regard, you know, that wasn't difficult because we had existing teams. We always had really good ways of working. And when we were smaller, it was easier because even with time difference, like you can pick up pretty good ways of doing asynchronous communication and you get into workflows quite fast. Like you can use the time zones to your advantage or there can be a massive disadvantage, but quickly you figure out how to use it to your advantage. And it just means you need to be more clear in your communication because you might be communicating to someone who's only going to see that communication when they wake up. So you need to be thorough, right? You need to be very clear, especially when people don't have English as a first language, such as in Thailand. That's just something you just learn to do. But obviously culture, I actually would even argue you don't have a single culture. Like you have this overarching culture of like, what is the culture of what we do and don't accept at ScreenCloud? But a Thai interpretation of that is going to be very different to like a West Coast LA interpretation of that. And I think if you try and make everyone homogenized, then you're going to fail because like the very cultures that those people are from are so radically different themselves. But what you can have is this common thread, right? This common humanity, which I think is something you've got to hire against. You've got to really like maintain and be disciplined about maintaining that runs across all of that. But then I think you've got to also celebrate a bit of local diversity as well. But it's difficult and it gets much harder at scale. And it got even harder during COVID where we couldn't do these annual meetups. We do this thing called ScreenCloud Together where everyone gets together in one location once