By Janina
Watch out, politically incorrect opinion piece coming along 😝 I recently reposted someone’s take on offshoring teams. Now I went back to reading some of the comments there: “But what about ethics?”, “What about quality?”, yada yada.
To me, this reflects a familiar pattern - a tendency to view anything outside the West as inferior or ethically questionable, even paying great money for great work to people outside of the West is judged as ethically wrong 😑 And yes - it is great work.
When I first started my business based on a collab with an Asian team, I was insecure myself because of everyone’s warnings - my insecurity stopped when I briefly stepped back into employment and saw how onshore teams struggle. The most frustrating experiences I’d had in my offshore team were still more satisfying than the best experiences I could imagine with any onshore team.
True, there are huge challenges when it comes to communication, structure, processes - and it is “the Westerners’” responsibility (who might be the product managers or project managers) to solve if they don’t like the way things are done by the locals.
I find that offshore teams bring an exceptional deal of flexibility and openness, they’re not stuck in “that’s how we’ve always done things” inertia. Use that to your advantage.
Be clear, be direct (don’t think Asians cannot handle directness 🤭), expect to see that many people on the team would probably be our boss if they had been born in another country 😅 - and mostly be open for compromise and have trust that things will work out in the end - like with any business partner, colleague, or friend.
There will be an awesome collab resulting from the mix of your drive for sticking to deadlines & data protection regulations and your offshore team’s unstoppable hunger for more.
If your offshore collab sucks, first take a hard look at yourself. It might be because you yourself need to do much better 🫠
(Or maybe I just got lucky with the particular offshore team I work with. Haha.)