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About This Week’s Guest

Hugo Messer

Hugo Messer has been building and managing teams around the world for over 10 years.

His passion is to enable people that are spread across cultures, geography and time zones to cooperate.

Whether it’s offshoring or nearshoring, he knows what it takes to make a global collaboration work.

His 6 tips to become more culturally competent are:

1. Focus on creating one team or one partnership. Invest time in this and try to get away from an “us versus them feeling“.
2. Take time to think about how you will work remotely. Do this before you actually start executing and working.
3. When you’re developing software, use an iterative framework like Scrum. Make the process incremental.
4. You need people with empathy on location in order to find was to get across the cultural hurdles.
5. Use daily “standup” meetings. Get together (virtually) every day for 5 to 10 minutes in order to re-align where everyone is. This way you can truly build a remote virtual team.
6. It is crucial that everyone in the team is on the same page. They should all be aligned with each other.

Interview Links

Links that are mentioned in this episode:

• To get all the ebooks that Hugo wrote: http://ekipa.co/ebooks
• Email: [email protected]
• An earlier podcast with Lisette Sutherland on how to work with virtual teams

Build Your Cultural Competence

In the Culture Matters podcast, we interview real people with real stories.

Every other week there is a guest with broad international experience and lots of cultural insights. I interview real people with real stories.

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• Via this website: Just use the “Ask Your Question” tab on the right of the screen and leave a voicemail
• Email me at [email protected]
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Finally

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this far, and to listen to my Podcast.

I hope you will be back for the next episode of the Culture Matters Podcast!

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Chris Smit

Chris is passionate about Cultural Differences. He has been helping organizations save time and money when they work Internationally for the last 20+ years. While doing this he had the fortunate opportunity to hold lectures, workshops, and consulting projects on this subject World Wide. It has made him understand his own culture much better and appreciate the differences around the world.
His education is in Organisational Psychology and he has lived in the USA, the Netherlands, and currently lives in Belgium.

Chris Smit

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