Week 15-5 Front Line Employee

Charlemagne's web poster was about Front Line Employee. The poster was very informative and useful. I work in a support organization and management repeatedly stresses the importance of this and the importance of people who interact with customers how the process and understand their concerns.

Last week I personally experienced how Front line employees can impact the company. I was having trouble with my home VoIP phone and contacted the phone company, their wait times are outrageous but I was OK with waiting as they provide a cheap service with good quality and might not have any resources. When finally I got hold of them they asked me to do all the normal things in spite of me repeatedly telling them that i did them all and I know what is bad. After this process they said they will send a replacement router and there was no response for a week and when I called back they started asking me to do the same things again even when i was telling them i had a open case. Finally, i had enough of it and canceled the service. If still believe they have good product but the people helping them in providing the service are stopping them from being good.

Week 15-4 An Analysis of Global Virtual Teams: Conflict & Leadership

Pink Lady's Web Poster was about "An Analysis of Global Virtual Teams: Conflict & Leadership".
The poster very well organized and the illustrations made it easier to understand. Lot us work with Virtual teams and we all have to deal with the time differences, understanding the cultural differences. The summary of her research was very helpful.
I completely agree with her points about the communication issues and the information overload with emails etc.,

The sources of conflict are very important to remember and make sure we don't fall into them . Also, the Organizational Dispersion sometimes creates as us versus them attitude even we all are working for the same organization and on the same project.

Communication Barriers

Cultural Diversity

Organizational Dispersion

Technology

Temporal and Spatial Dispersion

Week 15-3 Creating Transparency

Zamoradesign's Web Poster explained about Creating Transparency and its importance in Businesses and Corporations. This is a very important topic. Most Organizations today try to be or pretend to be trying to be transparent. I think Transparency will help Organizations that follow the correct practices. if organizations are transparent more people will know about things they are doing and this also helps them find out things that they might be doing wrong unintentionally as other might notice them which we might not have from with in the Organization. But for companies who want to do things which something that is not completely correct or not the standard practice for them is difficult to be transparent as this might lead to more scrutiny.

In my opinion if we are ethical in all the things we do, it will be easy to be transparent

Week 15-2 Communicating Change Effectively

Cathy's web poster was on "Communicating Change Effectively". We hear about this a lot and is a very important topic. Any change comes with some resistance. To implement any change successfully it should be communicated effectively. One way to do this is to involve all the parties involved from the early stages so that they feel part of it is possible. Change should come with a positive message and reasons for it. Also, it has to be communicated well in advance of when the actual change will happen. There are certain changes where communicating early will not be possible like layoffs where communication becomes even more important as the people affected by change were not ready for it.

At work, we follow a FAQ approach for communicating any change, where we come up with a list of questions and through them communicate the necessary information. This approach was very useful and was successful in multiple projects.

Week 15-1 Cross-cultural Communication Issues in USA and India Organizations

Kartik's web poster was on the subject of "Cross-cultural Communication Issues in USA and India Organizations". He did a very good job on summarizing the articles and presenting the important things to consider. I am from India and I had to go thorough similar experiences when I came to this country initially. Kartik makes a very good point about expatriate employees working for US organizations in India and this might help organizations deal with the cultures better and be a good interface between the headquarters an the offices in India. After reading the this web poster and points about how people in India might expect more feedback from their managers, I went to my companies website and looked for the Organizational Chart of some of the Business Groups and their teams in India, I could clearly see the number of people reporting to a manager were much less than in US and also there were team leads assigned that were responsible for sub-groups under a manager.

Week 11-5 Commuications & Gender Appropriate Behavior

The views of gender appropriate differ from culture to culture and are a very important consideration in communicating global work/project teams. In US men greeting women by shaking hands is considered normal and is a common occurrence. But some women in India and Middle Eastern countries due to religious customs and culture do not make physical contact with males. It is important to be aware of these customs and should women to come forward approach to shake hand before other proceed to do so. Comments which are acceptable in one culture may not be acceptable in others and when conversing with people from other cultures we can try to restrain from making personal comments and is better to keep conversations restricted to business needs until we understand the cultures and customs.

Week 11-4 Importance of Clarity in Communication

Clarity is very important when communicating with people from multiple cultures.We should try not to combine words and sentences together (shoulda instead of should have), avoid slang, acronyms and words with multiple meanings. We should use short and simple sentences and summarize key points.

I read about this example and it is very a nice real life example of understanding the local culture and clarity in communication. The vacuum cleaner maker Electrolux had a add some time back saying "Nothing Sucks Like Electrolux" and did not recognize the word “sucks”, in its marketing slogan is a slang disparagement in United States of America. This worked fine in some other countries. Hence, the reliability of their marketing communication was compromised because, at least at first sight, this slogan has a different meaning to different recipients. There are multiple examples of similar situations.