Overcoming Cross-Cultural Challenges in Virtual Teams

Since 2013, we’ve partnered with a multinational bank, continuously supporting their teams. Recently, we were tasked with coaching over 90 European employees from their Operations Middle Office team, who work closely with counterparts in India to manage complex payment processes.

Babel Group Overcoming Cross-Cultural Challenges in Virtual Teams
Babel Group Overcoming Cross-Cultural Challenges in Virtual Teams

The Challenge: While the teams had built strong working relationships, there were still ongoing challenges on both sides. These included language barriers, difficulties with accountability and speaking up, unclear communication in English, delays in responses, and a need for more structured guidelines.

Our mission? To equip these employees with practical tools and strategies to collaborate more effectively across cultures and time zones.

Our Solution: To address these challenges, we delivered six interactive, half-day online courses led by Babel’s lead facilitator based in Chennai. The focus was on understanding Indian identities, bridging cultural gaps, and developing shared team “norms” through the exploration of real-life work scenarios. Participants gained a deeper awareness of Indian cultural preferences and how these influence workplace behaviour, enabling them to connect more effectively with their colleagues.

The Result: After the training, all the participants reported that they were far more aware of their own management preferences and how they could now delegate more effectively using the best practices outlined by Babel for trust-building and managing team exchanges. The key sponsor also shared their appreciation: “Thank you for rolling out this training, we’ve received lots of really positive feedback.”

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