Outsourcing can boost efficiency and reduce costs, but success requires clear guidelines and communication. Establishing rules early ensures projects meet quality standards and align with your goals.
When dealing with western people, you want to avoid having screen captures showing foreign characters.
Let us look at some examples:
Communication can be difficult (even if English is your first language!). When using Microsoft Teams/Zoom, it might be tempting to only chat via text in IM, but this will not improve your skills or build a relationship as well as communicating verbally.
Timezones can make communication and collaboration difficult, but there is a silver lining! If there is a time-sensitive task you can asynchronously collaborate and get it done faster. Imagine a relay race, where you pass the baton to the next runner. This is how you should think about collaborating across timezones.
To do this effectively, you need to do a project handover every day. This takes a lot of thorough documentation and communication.
When working remotely, you should be sharing your screen whenever discussing changes to a document or software. This allows your colleague or client to see changes that are happening on the screen, making the remote collaboration experience much nicer.
When a company has many different office locations, often people in one office aren't familiar with people in other offices due to a lack of interaction. This problem is particularly pronounced where you have offices that span multiple time zones or countries.
Many companies use overseas developers to do some of their work, but the language barrier can sometimes extend past simply communications. Sometimes you can end up with foreign language snippets in your code too.
When you edit an aspx page in TFS, follow the below steps to avoid having Chinese characters appear.
Make sure your Visual Studio encoding is consistent with Sydney to avoid encoding problems in the future.
Say your language is Chinese, of course, local Chinese customers would feel more comfortable communicating in Chinese. The disconnect happens when head office needs to get involved. They can't review emails, read the history of email threads etc.
Improper spelling, grammar, and punctuation gives a bad impression of your company and can result in your message not being conveyed correctly.
When discussing client work in an email, it is not always clear which client you are referring to. By using the ClientID as your email subject prefix, those involved in the email conversation will immediately know which client you are talking about.