The Rise of Multicultural Virtual Teams
Effectively managing cross-border remote teams can help companies meet growing market needs. It improves the flexibility, productivity, and agility of companies. It also exposes them to a vast pool of highly skilled professionals, which better positions companies for growth. With the COVID-19 pandemic, cross-border, virtual teams are increasingly becoming an accepted way of working.
While running multicultural virtual teams has its challenges, its benefits far outweigh its cost. The growing popularity is proof of this. To help you better understand how running a multicultural workforce works, we cover the essential concepts of multiculturalism within a virtual workforce and the reasons why cross-border remote teams continue to emerge.
What Is Multiculturalism in the Workforce?
A multicultural workforce is a functioning team with members in various geographic locations around the world. The team uses technology to work together instead of in person. These teams are typically characterized by cultural diversity since members come from various parts of the globe, hence multicultural virtual teams. Within a company, multiculturalism means that people with diverse backgrounds work across departments and have equal opportunities for input and advancement. A multicultural company practices and promotes nondiscrimination toward people based on ethnicity, religion, race, language, age, gender, physical limitation, or sexual orientation. Multiculturalism in the workforce allows companies to leverage the talents of individuals across borders.
Why Cross-Border Remote Teams Are Emerging
Working with a multicultural virtual team is one of the best strategies for your company to keep up with a global market. Whilst this might involve numerous video calls, sometimes at strange times of the day or night, and telling people they are on mute, there are many benefits to working this way:
Improved Productivity
Virtual team members have more control of their time, which can increase their satisfaction, enhancing their performance. The lack of office distractions and the elimination of time and effort required for travel allow better work hour flexibility. This can contribute to the significant improvement of the productivity of your remote workers.
Access to a Wider Talent Pool and Extended Business Hours
A virtual workforce opens your company up to talented and highly skilled individuals from across the globe. While the language is one of the main worries of having a multicultural team, it doesn’t have to be a barrier because of Welocalize. Our solution allows cross-border remote teams to work together smoothly. Welocalize streamlines your global business journey through multilingual content transformation services. This includes localization, translation, and adaptation of over 250 languages and over 77,000 in-country linguistic resource networks. We translate, localize, and adapt anything from marketing and copywriting materials, international patents, and financial content to pharmacovigilance (PV) literature.
With a multicultural virtual team and multilingual content transformation services, your company gains access to a wider talent pool and market without concern about language barriers. Additionally, a remote cross-border team allows you to extend your business hours and even offer 24/7 customer service.
Reduced Costs
A remote team means your employees can work from anywhere globally and perform their respective functions effectively. You can reduce the expenses on flying people in and out or relocating team members. This allows you to refocus your resources on other more strategic, revenue-generating initiatives. You can also hire staff in multiple locations without the costs that come with opening an office. This gives you the ability to access new markets without incurring enormous expenses.
Increased Workforce Flexibility
A multicultural virtual team gives you the flexibility to scale your team up or down more easily than when operating your company at a fixed location. Remote team members also have more control over their time, giving them the flexibility to better balance work and personal life tasks. This leads to happy workers. Happy employees translate to improved productivity.
What’s Next?
Cross-cultural virtual teams provide many benefits, from giving your company access to a broader talent pool to reducing the resources required to travel and arrange face-to-face meetings. A multicultural remote team lets you establish a melting pot of cultural diversity and widespread distribution of members with varying perspectives. Plus, it can also make working life fun – interacting everyday with people all over the world from many different cultures. From Beijing and Barcelona to Washington and Warsaw, your global team mates can enrich your life and give great insights and perspective.
