Sharing a language doesn't guarantee understanding, especially when your team is spread across several countries and time zones. In this episode of Jugando en Serio (in Spanish), Almudena Santos, HR Director for Iberia and Latin America at CWT, explains how to manage multicultural, remote teams without losing trust or closeness.
Managing multicultural teams: same language, different codes
Santos, a lawyer by training, started out managing only Spain at CWT, a corporate travel and events management company, and took on Latin America during the pandemic. She expected Brazil to be the challenge because of the language, but instead found subcultures: accent, tone, speaking speed and, above all, how a conversation is opened and closed.
She learned this from a Chilean colleague who, before asking for anything on chat, would ask how she was and wait for a reply; in Spain, she says, we are much more direct. The line between personal and professional also shifts: in a women's leadership initiative, Latin American participants introduced themselves with photos of their pets or children, not corporate headshots. And there are subcultures within the region: in Mexico, greeting colleagues with a kiss at the office matters so much that someone complained she hadn't received one.
Diagnose cultural diversity before acting
With reporting lines crossing countries and no tools to manage them, CWT joined a project run by an NGO specializing in cultural diversity. The first step was a diagnosis, which helped them pinpoint their main pain point, such as communication, and build a strategy that included unconscious bias training. We all have biases, Santos notes: within two seconds you've formed an idea of someone from their accent or the way they speak.
For her, cultural diversity is one of the most neglected dimensions: companies focus on gender, disability or LGBTI inclusion, often for compliance reasons, and leave a source of richness unexplored.
We often wrongly assume that, because we're in so many countries, we have cultural diversity. What you have is geographic dispersion, or lots of people of different nationalities, but you may not know how to manage that cultural diversity.
Standardize or adapt: honoring difference
Santos began managing Latin America in May 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, with rules changing in every country: some had schemes similar to Spain's ERTE furlough, while in others, such as Colombia, they had to invent a voluntary program to reduce salary or working hours. That uncertainty ended up bonding the team.
When global policies arrive, often from the United States, she tends to accommodate differences and adapt, just as in Spain some things have to be negotiated with unions. When a Colombian colleague with more than 30 years at the company passed away, the office set up a small altar with candles and flowers. That would be unthinkable in Spain, she admits, but what authority did she have to stop it?
And good intentions aren't enough: an extra week off at Christmas, decided in the United States, created inequity because not every business unit could absorb it.
Leading remotely: overlap hours and disconnecting
When she introduced the right-to-disconnect policy, Santos insisted on working during overlap hours and respecting other people's rest. If a leader writes at ten at night, she creates the expectation that her team should be available too. Today email itself suggests delaying a message when the recipient is in another time zone, and WhatsApp is kept for truly urgent matters. She sets shared events at 4 p.m. Spanish time so that people in Costa Rica don't have to start at 6 a.m.
Another mini tip: always say whether something is urgent and by when, because urgent doesn't mean the same thing everywhere, and when everything is urgent, nothing is.
Cameras, rituals and humor to build a team
Her levers for closing the distance are simple: cameras on, an unwritten rule from day one, and keeping the Wednesday team meeting even when there's no agenda, so that nobody in Brazil, Peru or Costa Rica feels isolated. She also tailors follow-up to each person: the challenge is to be present without being intrusive or micromanaging.
And she adds humor. The local words that came up in meetings became a team dictionary, which eventually turned into a glossary within the cultural diversity strategy.
That small ritual of keeping our team meeting, whether or not there was an agenda, has helped create a lot of closeness and a real sense of team.
