Professional service firms seeking to help companies navigate the demands of globalization face a tough challenge because advisers with the specialized expertise needed to address sophisticated issues are most often distributed throughout the firm and around the globe. This makes collaboration difficult.

Global collaboration creates significant coordination costs: incompatible schedules can lead to project delays, cross-cultural or linguistic misunderstandings can create non-billable rework, and technology failures can cause missed deadlines. No cross-border matter is truly routine because each involves coordinating professionals with different assumptions and ways of working.

Working at a distance is so complicated because it affects both the way we feel and think. For one, it can promote us and them thinking — that is, it can lead us to group our colleagues into categories rather than see them as individuals. This critical cognitive short-cut helps us to simplify our ever more complex environment. But it also has bad consequences because we tend to view those in our in group more positively, and those in our outgroup more negatively. That’s why the otherness of our distant colleagues is reinforced daily and on many dimensions. Speaking via video conference with a colleague in a different country, who speaks with an accent, exhibits different cultural values, and is only available for two hours of your normal workday makes that person seem a world apart.

If that weren’t bad enough, working at a distance also limits the amount of information we hold about our colleagues. When we work in the same office as our co-workers, we can notice, interpret, incorporate, and leverage a vast amount of information as we try to make sense of our daily experiences. If we know someone’s position in the office power hierarchy, the other projects competing for their time and attention, or their underlying motivations, we are better able to understand their actions. Much as we might want to deny it, even information we might not think of as relevant – personal lives, moods, or even the weather – play a role. We all know that having a commute tripled due to bad weather or being sleep-deprived due to a sick child affects our day. Unfortunately, barriers in the form of distance, time, culture, language, and technology all stand in the way of communicating such information, creating what Catherine Cramton coined the mutual knowledge problem. When interacting with distant colleagues we lack a large percentage of the information we rely on to collaborate effectively.

Just to make matters worse, these two problems reinforce each other. We don’t share as much information with our outgroup, but the less information we have about them, the more we see them as them.

These outcomes are the exact opposite of what we aim for. But they happen so naturally that we don’t usually identify them in the moment, especially when our teams are focused exclusively on results without regard for interpersonal dynamics.

Despite the difficulties of global collaboration, however, there are a couple ways to avoid the common pitfalls while delivering exceptional cross-border service.

Focus on commonalities: The problem with us and them thinking is that we focus on our differences over our similarities, but it’s just as easy to reverse our focus. Highlighting the things we have in common with our distant colleagues is the best way to reduce the problem.

Foremost among commonalities should be your shared objective.

• Remind your team of its shared and distributed goal. Have an open discussion around the question: Why are we working across geographies? Remind the team why you have chosen to collaborate with colleagues at another location – whether it is to better serve global clients, to provide a more complete solution, to leverage dispersed knowledge, or a combination of the above – and make sure everyone holds the same goals.

•  Recognize your interdependence in reaching your objectives. Couple the discussion above with: Why does my success depend on my distant colleagues? Reinforce this day-to-day by looking for opportunities to remind your team of their reliance on other locations.

If you don’t have a ready answer to either question, you should rethink whether the benefits of a global team outweigh the costs. But if you do have an answer, that discussion will focus team members on common objective and interdependence, turning us and them into we.

Symmetrize Information: Focusing on commonalities, however, will only get you so far because every day the information asymmetries between locations serve as a constant reminder of the differences between offices. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. The only way to combat these asymmetries is to work hard to counter them. Effective global collaborations have processes and procedures designed into them that force information sharing across sites.

• Schedule regular meetings and touchpoints to share task-related information. It is important that these be regular, rather than on an as-needed basis, because we often don’t recognize when the knowledge we hold is needed by our distant colleagues.

• Take time to share the personal updates as well. Although it’s tempting to dismiss such activities as irrelevant or a waste of time – especially when we’re under pressure – they are vital. Remember that global work runs counter to millions of years of evolution as social animals who leverage our knowledge of others to effectively collaborate. To tackle the mutual knowledge problem requires activities that often feel forced or artificial like scheduling time for spontaneous interaction or investing in technologies to create a virtual water cooler. These activities also create shared experiences that increase the feeling of a shared we.
  

• Equip the team with the right resources. Our natural tendency is to ask for help from the people we know well, even if they’re not ideal for the job. This inclination is even stronger when performance pressure increases the psychological risks for a piece of work. But spending the effort to get the real experts on the team, rather than defaulting to those who are familiar but less adept, will ultimately pay out. Ideally, think broader than just the pure content expertise: the perfect contributor for a cross-border matter is one who also has sufficient cultural intelligence to operate in a global team.

• Give (and take) a virtual tour to provide context. The more you and your distant teammates know about each other’s environment, the better you will be able to make sense of one another’s behavior. At the start of a project, give each person just a few minutes to share a bit of their context. Not name, rank, and serial number, but elements of their environment that are most likely to affect their ability to collaborate effectively.

Kai, a partner in the office of an international law firm shared a helpful approach:

I started to work on a matter with a partner in New York and knew he and I would be having a number of late night – or early morning – video conferences. So I took five minutes to give him a rundown of my workspaces. It didn’t take long, but I focused on things that were most likely to interrupt future calls: my co-counsel on a major tax litigation, my occasionally over-eager assistant, and – when working from my home office – my dog. The interruptions were much easier to deal with when they came up because he was expecting them.

Whether a quick pan of a webcam or a verbal walk through, the objective is to help your distant colleagues understand the environment in which you are working.

Effective global collaboration, as we all know, is very difficult. But if you invest the time and effort to artificially foster the things that come for free when we work face-to-face, then it’s much easier to accomplish.

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 07/01/2015.

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