Top tips for doing business abroad

11 August 2014 by Catherine Holdsworth in Business and finance

There has been a rise in passenger numbers at Heathrow and Gatwick this summer. Although many of those extra passengers will be eager to start their summer holidays, evidence has suggested that more and more of us are doing business by travelling abroad. Even those of us who stay at home will have to start learning to communicate effectively across cultures as innovations like VOIP make it easier for any business to become global.

Dr Deborah Swallow and Eilidh Milnes’ book, The diversity dashboard has helpful tips to communicate effectively when visiting other cultures, offering examples of how to improve communication and get the most out of your business trip.

Here are just a couple of examples showing how insight into a culture can improve the way you do business in that culture.

Culture crash
One manager talking about his time in the Middle East explained, ‘Abdullah said to me, “Brian, I can make this happen for you. I have connections; I can pull strings and know who to ask…”’

Culture tip
As a functional Brit, Brian immediately thought, ‘I don’t like this. It is underhand, nepotism. I feel uncomfortable.’ However, he was to learn that it is the life-blood of business in the Middle East, where relationships matter above everything else.

Doing business with a culture more relationship-oriented than our own can feel time consuming. In such cultures, everything is connected to everything. Your prospective business partner may want to know about your family, your connections, the kinds of food you enjoy and even what you read. Business is done socially and at a much slower pace. People prefer plenty of time to build trust before getting down to business.

Obligations of mutual debt are very strong in such societies and are necessary to make things happen. Such obligations have no boundaries. The English phrase ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ describes this exactly. Mutual-debt societies exist in different forms all over the world. The Japanese nemawashi system and the Chinese guanxi relationships are forms of the mutual-debt society. However, in the Philippines, the debt or obligation is never absolved; it lasts a lifetime. Their term utang na loob means ‘sense of being indebted’.

Culture crash
Towards the end of a very pleasant lunch in Paris, Jean Gautier draws his British colleague, Peter Smith, aside and mentions that his teenage son is about to attend a summer school in Surrey in a few months’ time. Peter asks a few polite questions and leaves it at that. Two months later, Jean telephones to say his son is on his way and that he would appreciate it if Peter would see that his son is settling in. Peter is annoyed, thinking ‘What’s this got to do with me?’ However, one Saturday afternoon he takes his own teenage son to visit the young French lad. The boys find they have a passion for rugby in common and agree to keep in touch through Facebook.

Months later, Peter finds that his new reward and recognition initiative for Europe has been completely snubbed by the French. Françoise, the head of HR, has become implacable and won’t even return Peter’s calls. One day, to his utter amazement, he receives a call from Françoise asking if they could discuss his plans to see how they could adjust them to suit French working practices. When he remarks to a colleague how astounded he was that Françoise had eventually ‘seen sense’, he learns that Jean Gautier had had ‘a quiet word with her’. The time spent with the two teenagers had paid off.

Culture tip
Some societies, like the French, assume there are no boundaries in the business context. That ‘little request’ may well be for a personal or social favour to a business colleague, thus making business and social spheres overlap or mingle. France is a unique culture where people will only share things with you if you are part of the group. In France there is a network system; they call it les réseaux – réseaux meaning networks.