Known Challenges and Best Practices

UNIT 1 X-Culture General Guidelines

Starting Up

Before reading, discuss the following questions in pairs.

1. What comes to your mind when you hear the word “project”?

2. Have you ever taken part in international projects?

3. What challenges are you likely to experience while collaborating in cross-cultural virtual teams?

4. Do you think it is easy to communicate on-line?

Below there is a list of some expressions you will come across in the following texts. Check if you understand them.

Key Vocabulary

1. Lack of commitment	a) Необязательность
2. To experience  challenges	b) Испытыватьтрудности
3. Real-life international business challenges.	c) Проблемы из реальной практики международного бизнеса
4. To complete weekly progress surveys.	d)Выполнить обзор хода работ за неделю
5.To be due	e) Должен быть представлен
6.The course grade/mark	f) Оценка за курс
7.To track performance	g) Отслеживать выполнение работы
8.To meet deadlines	h) Выполнять работу в срок
9.To submit team’s works	i) Сдавать работы команды
10.Peer evaluations	j) Внешний анализ
11.To be full of redundancies	k) Много избыточной информации
12.To dismiss the ideas	l) Отвергнуть идею
13.Social loafing/free-riding	m) Социальная лень
14.To foster close social ties	n) Поддерживать социальные связи
15.To meet expectations	o) Оправдать ожидания
16. Participation rate	p) Уровень активности

Reading 1

Read and translate the following text, remember the words and expressions in bold.

WHAT IS X-CULTURE AND HOW IT WORKS

(Pre-project training module, part 1:http://x-culture.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/X-Culture_Training_2017-1a.pdf)  

 X-Culture is a project designed to offer trainees an opportunity to complete a projectin a global virtual team and in theprocess experience the challenges and learn the best-practices of global virtual collaboration and business consulting. The challenges you will experience in X-Culture are exactly the same challenges you will experience when you have towork in a team as part of your future job. X-Culture is like a time machine that shows you what will happen to you whenyou work with people from around the world as part of your job. It will not be any different and the better you learn nowhow to deal with those challenges now, the more effective you will be on a similar project in the future.
The Task
You will be working in an international team of 5-6 people for about eight weeks. Every semester, we select severalcompanies that present their real-life international business challenges. Your team will have to select one of thosechallenges and suggest your solution.

Weekly Progress Surveys
All X-Culture competition participants will have to complete weekly progress surveys. The surveys will ask you to submityour team’s works completed in the past week, as per the Challenge Instructions, as well as answer a few questionsabout your progress, team dynamics, and peer evaluations. Each participant will receive a personal email around Tuesday or Wednesday of each week. The email will contain yourweekly performance review and a personalized link to the next progress survey. The surveys are normally due everySunday.
Evaluation (Grading/Marking)
The X-Culture competition is open to anyone. Most participants are MBA and business students who participate in X-Culture as part of their international business or related courses. For most students, the project usually constitutes 20-50percent of the course grade/mark. There are also a few non-student professional teams who are completing the project fortraining purposes and are not receiving academic grades/marks for their work.Regardless of your participation status, we track performance of every individual and team. The following information is collected and used to (1) identify problems and provide help and support where needed, (2) select the best teams, students, and instructors and the end of the project, and (3) provide the instructors with the necessary information to give their students project grades/marks: performance on the Readiness Test; a bility to meet weekly deadlines as per completion of weekly progress reports; weekly peer evaluations (if participating in a team);effort; intellectual contribution; leadership and help with team coordination; friendliness and collegiality; help with writing the report; quality of the report; quality of each report part; creativity and novelty of the teams; depth of analysis, strength of the arguments; formatting and presentation.
For most students, the quality of the report accounts for 40-60% of the project grade/mark, peer evaluations for 20-50%,and weekly progress reports for 10-20%.

4. Read the text again and answer the following questions:

1. What is X-culture?

2. How many people will be collaborating in a global virtual team?

3. How long is the project

4. What is the project’s task?

5. How often will you have to complete a progress survey?

6. Who can participate in X-Culture?

7. How will your project’s performance be graded?

Reading 2

Read and translate the following text, remember the words and expressions in bold.

Known Challenges and Best Practices

(Pre-project training module, part 2:http://x-culture.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/X-Culture_Training_2017-1a.pdf)
Time-zonedifferences make communication in global virtual teams very slow. If you are in the U.S. and you send an email to your team member in Japan, the person is likely sleeping and will not see your message until your tomorrow. It works best if teams have occasional real-time conversations via Skype, Facebook, or Google+. Even if not all teammembers can join the teleconference, such an approach speeds things up.
Email overload: Often, when teams rely on email-only communication, they end up with dozens of emails that are difficult to follow and are full of redundancies and conflicting information. It works best if the team creates a Facebook, Skype, or Google+ group or a Google Docs discussion board. This way,all correspondence is permanently saved and it’s easy to review the entire conversation.
Cultural and other differences: Your team members will differ in many other ways. You all will be coming from differentcultural backgrounds, and your values, attitudes, traditions, working and communication styles will be different. It works best if you try to turn those differences into opportunities. So, rather than assigning different report sections to different members and letting them work independently, communicate frequently, use brainstorming and discussions whenever possible. Don’t dismiss the ideas of others just because they are differentfrom yours.

Lack of commitment from some team members, “Free-Riders”:
In any team, at least some team members have a busy work schedule, family obligations, or get sick. As a result, some team members don’t actively participate in the project. This is called “ social loafing ” or “free-riding.” Studies report that up to 30% of the members in corporate global virtual teams tend to be free-riders, that is, they do some work but do not meetexpectations of their team. Our data shows that in X-Culture, on average, there is 1 team member per team whose participation rate is below expectations and about 3% of all trainees don't participate at all and have to be excluded from the project.
It works best if you do the following:
- First of all, try to foster close social ties among your team members. Studies show that spending only a few minuteson asking team members about their interests, hobbies, studies, work experience, and interesting facts from theirlives helps a lot and leads to noticeable improvement in team commitment.
- Also, right at the start of the project, discuss what each team member is expected to do and what happens if theydon’t.

- Keep sending emails to the “missing” team members every few days even if you never hear from them.
- Don’t wait too long. If after several days you don’t hear from a trainee or two, start working on the project with thetrainees who replied to your emails.
- If, despite your best efforts to get in touch with the student, you never hear from him or her or his or her inputremains very limited, give low peer evaluations to the “missing” student, and his or her poor performance will be
reflected in his or her course grade.

6. Read the text againand answer the following questions:

1. What is the time difference between Tyumen and Greensborough?

2. What project’s participants are called free-riders?

3. What should you do if some of your team-members never answer your e-mail messages?

4. What cross-cultural differences can you experience during the project?

5. What advice can you give to overcome the project’s challenges?