They Paint the Office Walls in China
April 14th, 2008by Jeremy Thomas
Five of the people on my team work out of our China office in X’ian. Last week they informed me they were taking Monday off for a team building exercise. Each team was given a wall in the office to paint. And they didn’t paint murals. Nope, just a fresh coat of white paint.
On Tuesday they were instructed to work from home to avoid the overwhelming smell of drying paint. So we had our weekly standup meeting on instant messenger (I actually found this to be a rather effective way to communicate with my team there) instead of on the phone.
I love these little cultural differences.
I must say, though, that I’ve never had a team of more enthusiastic, dedicated people than my team in China. They own their work and take personal pride in getting it done the right way. Now if I could only figure out how to do Agile with them…
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April 15th, 2008 at 6:30 am
@Jeremy,
interesting observation on the subtle differences in culture.
Do you communicate with your offshore team in China in English or there is a ‘translation engine’ onsite
August 4th, 2008 at 5:20 am
We long ago decided that IM was the best method for daily standups. Thick accents and crappy speaker phones make for bad communication. Also, you have the log for review or posting to your trusted system.
August 5th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Yeah, IM works well. I’ve found that Skype (with webcams) works really well too. We have weekly standup meetings over Skype now. Body language helps a lot with the language barrier.