INSEAD professor Erin Meyer recently offered a few ideas on INSEAD Knowledge, suggesting that while conflict is a natural part of collaboration, when it occurs across cultures it can be a source of discomfort, offence and more practically, less efficient working.

Meyer cites a recent survey by CultureWizard, an intercultural training consultancy, that found that 63 percent of respondents working for multinational companies said that nearly half of their teams were located outside their country to illustrate the urgency of the issue. She then goes on to explain that, based on interviews she’s conducted for her research, different cultures often have very different views on conflict and confrontation.  She gives this quote from an Indonesian professional as an example:

Even asking another’s point of view can feel confrontational in our culture. We had a meeting with a group of French managers from headquarters, where they went around the table asking each of us: ‘What do you think about this? What do you think about this? What do you think about this?’ At first we were just shocked that we would be put on the spot in a meeting with a lot of people. That is just an insult!

The French managers, for their part, explained that their schooling emphasized open debate and they felt that, “with confrontation you reach excellence, you have more creativity, and you eliminate risk.” How do you bridge such wide gaps? Meyer offers three tips:

Do your preparation. In many Asian cultures, the default purpose of a meeting is to put a formal stamp on a decision that has already been made in previous informal meetings. In Japanese this is called Nemawashi. The tendency rings true to various degrees in China, Malaysia, Korea, and Thailand. If you lead a team with members from one of these countries, try making one-on-one phone calls before the formal meeting to hear the real deal.

Depersonalize the confrontation. Instead of asking people to express their opinions and challenge one another’s ideas in a meeting, ask team members to send all their ideas to a nominated third party before the meeting and have that person create a list of ideas without stating who had the suggestions. This way, participants can confront each idea during the meeting — without confronting the person associated with it.

Change your language. You might try following the advice of Sean Gilbride, an American manager based in Mexico. “I soon learned that if I wanted to encourage team debate it was important to use phrases like ‘I do not quite understand your point’ and ‘please explain more why you think that’, he says, “and to refrain from saying ‘I disagree with that’ which would shut down the conversation completely.”

Language is also at the heart of the suggestions of Ethan Becker, the author of Mastering Communication at Work and president of The Speech Improvement Company. He argues that even between team members with a solid grasp of their common language, terms are often understood in subtly (or not so subtly) different ways. “Product research” may mean $50,000 dollars worth of professional polling to an executive from one culture and simply asking acquaintances for feedback to one from another. Yet they can meet, discuss “research” and never reveal this chasm between their understandings. The miscue may only be revealed some time later when its caused aggravation and probably a good deal of time and money. Becker offered three suggestions to help head off such simple but profound cross-cultural communication challenges in an email:

Paraphrase. Repeat what others say in your own words to confirm your understanding.

Define terms. When it’s your turn to speak, invest time in creating common definitions of terms. It’s okay to stop the flow of the meeting to do so. Taking time now to define your terms – even if it’s only by asking a simple question such as “what do we mean by take-away,” and then answering it – can save time and energy later on. Be patient, and plan for extra time for this.

Never assume. Don’t take it for granted that everyone is using terms in the same way.  Tone of voice may suggest understanding, but that doesn’t prove that you’re on the same page, so always double-check.

Have you run into cross-cultural communication trouble and, if so, did you manage to resolve it?

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And anyone who has ever worked with a colleague half-a-world away knows of the occasional necessity of late night calls to bridge time differences, but besides knowing how to brew yourself a strong cup of coffee and operate your alarm clock, is there anything you can do to make working across many time zones less painful and more productive?

Erran Carmel, a management professor at the American University Kogod School of Business, has actually written a whole book on the issue entitled I’m Working While They’re Sleeping: Time Zone Separation Challenges and Solutions. He also recently authored a guest post on blog Workshifting boiling down his advice for those he calls “timeshifters.” These folks are “globalized workers who are comfortable timeshifting and traveling across time zones,” according to Carmel who has a few suggestions for those looking to join their ranks, including:

Breaking the email chain. The email chain begins when, in asynchronous communication, the sender initiates a message, and the receiver on the other side of the globe asks for clarification. The original sender attempts to explain, but the receiver, still confused, sends another request for clarification. Meanwhile, an entire week has passed. Zoners stop this chain early by picking up the phone to clarify the message and move the task along.

Carmel also points those confused about syncing up their schedules with distant coworkers to a handful of useful apps. Timeanddate.com, for example, offers everything from clocks giving you the current time just about anywhere to a time zone map and a list of world holidays – it’s cluttered but useful. World Time Buddy creates a dashboard that shows the time in multiple locations to help you plan meetings, while Every Time Zone does basically the same thing with a prettier but slightly harder to read slider mechanism.

Another new, simple app along these lines is SameTimeAs, a dead simple solution dreamed up by Will Rodenbusch, one half of a globe trotting couple of location independents. As you might guess from the name, the gizmo simply tells you what time it is in location X when it is a given time in location Y.

Amidst all this talk of the hassles of timeshifting though, it’s important to note that many professionals who work across time zones report benefits as well as drawbacks. Jason Johnson, who co-founded BlueSprig with a technical team in China, has said that the massive time zone difference provides a great mix of collaborative overlap and uninterrupted periods of concentration.

“I wake up about 6:00am. It’s around 10:00pm in China and generally they’re still working. I have a couple of hours overlap with them and then they go offline for eight hours. But then they come back online just about the time that my two-and-a-half-year old goes to bed and we can review things together. The really neat thing is, I will go to bed, say, 10 or 11:00pm. I will have shot over some requests or some feedback and they then have seven hours to work on those deliverables, so that when I get up at 6:00am I have an inbox full of messages,” he told GigaOM earlier this year.

“The beauty of this is we operate 24 hours a day, and we have periods of being online at the same time to collaborate but we also have the benefit of these blocks of time where they can do what they do best without any interruption. During my workday I’m not getting all these emails. I can focus. Likewise, when they’re cranking away, I’m asleep and not bugging them. It works really well,” he said, putting a positive spin on timeshifting.

Have you found ways to make timeshifting work for you or is it pretty much a nightmare in your experience?

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While there is no single accepted way to kick off a group in a collaborative process, my experience and the available research says you should start small with a specific, achievable goal, rather than trying to implement a full technology platform at the same time as you’re organizing the project.  Stewart Mader, author of the book Wikipatterns, says that you should focus on the work; help people see the value from the work and the rest will follow.

Organizational scholar Karl Weick wrote in 1984:

A small win is a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance. By itself, one small win may seem unimportant. A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals. Small wins are controllable opportunities that produce visible results.

This still holds true today. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer followed 238 professionals in 26 creative teams across seven companies and three industries, gathering over 12,000 person/days of data. They report their results in the forthcoming book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. In a recent talk I attended, Prof. Amabile described how progress in meaningful work is the most important factor in people’s engagement. This progress doesn’t have to include a breakthrough — just maintain forward momentum.

Keep these ideas in mind when you start your next collaboration project. Go for the small wins, rather than the stretch goal, and focus on the work rather than the tools. Follow Georgina‘s advice and take a “tools last” approach to collaboration. She says, “tools are not the process, nor are they the work. Tools are there to make complex tasks easier or more efficient for your team.” Get the team’s work started, then see what tools will be most helpful.

What is your experience?  Do you agree that small wins beat out stretch goals for kicking off a new collaborative project?

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What does remote work mean for creative collaboration?

The Old Model

While technology may have made many aspects of business easier and simpler, the traditional model of creative collaboration has a lot going for it.

Two minds (or three, or more) are better than one. To come up with ideas — or solutions — is difficult, which is why creative collaboration in teams is so valuable. This model allows us to gain the advantages of different viewpoints, skill sets, and values in concocting solutions that exceed the requirements of the project brief.

The creative process is a particularly human endeavor. When they’re working in teams, creatives rely on mood, inflection, body language, gestures, and eye contact to gauge responses to ideas, and clarify their understanding of what’s been communicated verbally. Often, it’s the use of these non-verbal cues that separates the great creative teams from the less-than-great.

If a creative collaboration endeavor will continue for some time, keeping those creatives in the same physical space can also be helpful. The walls become populated with idea drafts, notecards and images. The team reorganizes the space to reflect their working relationships, and make themselves as comfortable as possible.

The physical space speaks loudly to each team member about what they’re doing, what they’re part of, and where it’s at. Those spatial reminders may help them recall a conversation they had with a team member, an idea they’d forgotten, or a thought they’d had that they want to take back to the team tomorrow.

New Challenges

The use of dispersed creative teams presents some challenges, especially for those who previously worked with the “agency” model of creativity: a bunch of people in a room with a whiteboard.

In a distributed creative effort, team members may be more likely to work on the creative task independently. First of all, they’re not physically surrounded by their colleagues, so if they want even to do so much as run an idea past someone, it takes effort — and may therefore be avoided.

Also, more effort may be needed to integrate the independent inputs or ideas that your dispersed team members have come up with. Three creatives working independently will come up with different angles and ideas than three creatives working together. That doesn’t mean the ideas aren’t as good, but it often means that more work is required to integrate them into a coherent whole.

In some ways, the challenges inherent in working from different locations, under the burdens of technology and time, preclude some aspects of the very concept of “working together.” It’s much harder to work together when you’re not together. And this is especially true for creative work.

The Distributed Creative Process

The creative process differs for each individual, but in an on-site creative team effort, it can be molded to suit the requirements of the team members, tasks and workplace situations fairly easily.

Throw distance into the equation, and the creative process can be more difficult to get — and keep — a handle on. Also, the naturally disjointed nature of remote collaboration can mean that the already-slippery creative process is more easily derailed: it’s more difficult to keep everyone on the same page, in the same frame of mind, and working at the same level of momentum when they’re in different locations.

There are ways to minimize the negative potential of the distance separating your creatives. Making it easy for each person to record, store and share their ideas in whatever format suits them is critical. Don’t delete evidence of old ideas, though: keep them on file in a logical, searchable order so that, if needed, they can be accessed by the team — as idea-triggers for future projects, or the enrichment of the current one.

Keeping the output or product separate from creatives’ work in progress and from their raw ideas is also a good idea. Wherever possible, keep a clear delineation between idea that have been developed and discarded, and what has been developed and produced.

Contact is, of course, crucial. Consider its regularity, depth and frequency, and make sure that your team members can embrace the approach you choose. Don’t be afraid to try new ideas — video chats every couple of hours during intense collaboration phases, for example — or to change your approach if it doesn’t seem to be working as you’d hoped. Alleviating blockages and ensuring smooth, clear communication is often the most important thing a manager can do to support a creative team.

Transparency during the assembly of the creative product is also a necessity. To get the greatest value from your creatives, you’ll want to give them the ability to adjust or amend the product as it’s created. Do this in a way that ensures their accountability to the rest of the team, and so that each team member is aware of the impacts the others are having, and you should avoid nasty surprises.

How do you manage the creative process in your dispersed team? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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These days, everything is distributed: our teams and co-workers, our customers and clients, and even our networking efforts. You can live in San Francisco, have an assistant in New York, and serve clients in London. It’s also possible to have many followers on Twitter and Facebook, and tons of posts and comments written about you or your company on a daily basis around the web. Somehow, you have to find a way to manage all that interactivity, and keep your team, your customers and your followers in the loop as well. It’s a lot to handle, and it can easily become overwhelming.

Postling enables you to post to your blog, schedule tweets and respond to comments using virtually any social media outlet. You can write a post once and publish to all your social media accounts at the same time, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Flickr.

Organize and Schedule

You can group your social media accounts by brand so that you can stay organized and work efficiently, which comes in handy if you own more than one business, have multiple locations, or want to manage your business and personal accounts from the same place.

On top of that, you can also connect multiple users to your accounts so that assistants and team members can post to your social networking and media outlets, too, and with granular permissions for every person, you can easily protect your privacy by only allowing access to certain accounts.

Another helpful feature of Postling is its ability to schedule posts, which means you can write posts ahead of time, then schedule when you want them to be published.

Monitor Comments

Postling also gathers all the comments your readers leave on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms and organizes them in a single place, making it easy to respond across all social networks without having to access multiple sites.

The Postling dashboard provides an overview of your recent posts and the comments they receive, and each comment gives you the option to reply directly to the correct account. Comments are threaded, so it’s easy to understand the flow of a given conversation and chime in at any point.

You can monitor what people are saying about you and your business by tracking your streams, RSS feeds and reviews from around the web, such as Yelp and CitySearch, and with email alerts of comments, you won’t miss anything.

The Postling analytics dashboard allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your social media and networking efforts by showing which days your posts are most effective, as well as your post-to-comment ratio.

Postling currently supports integration with most social networking and media platforms — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — most major blogging platforms, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Bit.ly, Yelp and CitySearch.

The starter plan is free and includes one account per social network; if you need more users and accounts, Postling’s has plus ($9/month) and premium ($49/month) plans.

Of course, Postling’s not the only app that enables you to work with multiple social media accounts. Alternatives include tools like TweetDeck, CoTweet, HootSuite, and Engage121, but Postling’s ease of use, along with the number of platforms it supports, makes it my preferred choice.

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The new iPad offers enterprise users a number of improvements over the previous version, although the cameras might not be appreciated by some in workplaces where privacy is strictly monitored and controlled. Like the original iPad, the new version is still a tool that allows remote salespeople to all stay on the same page, with current sales and marketing material and an interactive presentation tool they can easily take directly to their customers. And it still allows distributed team members to stay in touch via email, IM, VoIP and online collaboration tools. But now it also offers the power to potentially operate in a greatly expanded creative capacity, the means for advanced video telecommunications, and the ability to act as a plug-and-play mobile workstation.

iMovie is a truly powerful creative app that could pave the way for professional-calibre video editing applications on the platform. The new A5 chip and 9x better graphics performance mean that we’ll see developers rush to tax the limits of what’s possible on the iPad 2, and I think we’ll be surprised at how far they take things. Allowing team members to tweak complicated rich-media projects quickly on the go will be revolutionary for the iPad as a professional tool.

People who think that adding a camera to the iPad 2 is just a minor improvement aren’t people who work with remote team members and clients. Videoconferencing is increasingly popular; you need only look as far as the success of Skype and the rise of competitors to that service to find proof of that. The value of face-to-face communication actually increases as in-person dealings become more of a rarity, and it won’t be long before third parties join Apple’s FaceTime in the video chat game, and multi-person group video chat is right around the corner (I suspect this may be a feature of FaceTime in iOS 5, in fact).

I’ve mentioned this before in my piece on HD mirroring being the killer feature of iPad 2, but it bears repeating here. The mirroring feature of the iPad 2 (which allows the entire OS and all apps to be output to a display via an adapter and HDMI cable) will allow users to treat it as a total mobile workstation. Just plug the iPad into a screen, pull out a full-size Bluetooth keyboard, and work away. Obviously, iOS still has isn’t as capable at some tasks as OS X or Windows, but developers have been doing a good job of filling those gaps, and will no doubt continue to do so. And for some tasks, I find it actually works better as a productivity tool, because of its one-at-a-time.

Finally, I have to point out that for those who have yet to hold the iPad 2, the thinner and lighter design just makes it feel much more like a portable device. My first-gen iPad feels positively clunky by comparison. This is no small consideration when it comes to the mobile worker. To paraphrase my colleague Kevin Tofel, the best tools are the ones that you have with you, and I can definitely see the iPad 2 coming along where its predecessor may have been left behind. For the flexible, distributed workforce of tomorrow made up of autonomous, mobile individuals acting in concert across great distances, the iPad is the tool to beat, and this revision only underscores that.

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Tablet > Smartphone

Tablets, be they Android or iOS-powered  (I’ll reserve judgement on RIM’s offering until it actually hits the market) make tasks that are a chore on a smartphone — like tackling and actually responding in full to email, document reading, making edits to presentations, annotating PDFs and keeping a creative notebook — a breeze. In fact, the only thing a smartphone really has going for it over a tablet is portability, since in most cases, so long as you have a data connection you can use a tablet to make voice or video calls one way or another.

For many employers, issuing a smartphone also won’t be necessary as much as it has been in the past, because of increasing smartphone adoption in the consumer mobile market. While the tablet market saw explosive growth in 2010 thanks to the iPad, and promises to top even that performance in 2011 with the introduction of Android 3.0-powered devices, they still won’t be nearly as prevalent as smartphones, and so attention would be better-focused on getting tablets into worker hands.

The In-Between Gadget

Tablet computing exists somewhere between smartphone and traditional computing. Making sure that distributed workers have the entire spectrum covered will ensure there are fewer potential gaps in their daily workflow. The tablet can operate as a “just right” middle ground solution, perfect fro tackling tasks that were too demanding to complete on a smartphone, yet not worth the effort of taking out a laptop and getting it booted up.

My iPad does this especially well when it comes to communication. Where my iPhone lets me provide the most basic answer required to communication requests via email, IM or social media, the iPad lets me provide a complete response without a substantial time investment, with quicker turnaround and in situations where I’d normally not prioritize immediate action. Because I feel able to do more, in other words, I will. Tablets, like smartphones before them, decrease the number of excuses for inaction and stimulate greater productivity.

Inward and Outward-Facing

Tablet computers are unlike smartphones and notebooks in that they are not only useful among team members and employees, but also as client-facing sales, marketing and reporting devices. They lend themselves to sharing and presentation.

If you or your employees meet with clients or customers on a regular basis, a tablet is a device that pays dividends in terms of the impression it gives off. An attractive wrapper makes a hard sell easier, and a bitter pill less difficult to swallow. Not only that, but it represents your company as cutting-edge and able to adapt to the rapid pace of technological change. And combined with proprietary apps, tablets can keep your branding and message cohesive, even if your sales or service force operates strictly on a distributed basis from a decentralized office.

Technological fads can seem to come and go, but the tablet isn’t just a fad. It’s a true game-changer for business that’s here to stay, and it’s tailor-made for the continuing rise of the distributed workforce. But to say that the two go hand-in-hand would be to understate the need for business and distributed workers to act; obvious benefits aside, tablet adoption needs to be driven by key enterprise stakeholders from the ground up. The earliest voices evangelizing this change will be the ones longest remembered.

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