Nourishing cultural diversity in Agile teams

In our days, working on a team with people from different countries is a regular thing. While it's always good to have diversity and distinct ways of thinking within a group, it definitely creates some challenges in communication. Specifically, due to varying cultural backgrounds, people may be used to different ways of receiving feedback or expressing their disagreements. Also, quite often, English is not the first language for many people, which adds some difficulties as well.

Below, I would like to describe how a Scrum Master can help a team better handle possible communication nuances due to cultural diversity within a group.

Managing cultural differences 
As a Scrum Master, you should research cultural differences between nationalities that are present on your team. After you summarize your findings, the next step would be to discuss the results with your team. Check if people find any similarities or have something to add. Depending on your team challenges, you can try asking specific questions such as what 'show respect' or 'handle a conflict' means in each culture; or what kind of approach they are used to when receiving feedback.

There is a lot of information available online on the above topic. Among such resources, I would like to highlight a book called 'The culture map" by Erin Meyer, where she talks about low vs. high context mentality.

Let's review a specific example of how a well-known "sandwich" approach to giving feedback can cause communication issues. What seems to suit American culture quite well is not always understood by people across the world, including myself, who comes from Ukraine. Once I completely misunderstood the feedback my manager gave me. In my mind, he told me that I was doing a good job, and there were just a few things to improve, while he was just trying to be polite and not to make it sound so negative. As it turned out - my supervisor was not happy with my performance at all.

Your team may face similar miscommunications, so people need to discuss this topic and share their stories. It's naive to expect that people from across the globe have the same values and respond to certain situations in the same way. Team members need to talk it through so that they can better understand each other's behavior and, as a result, improve their communication, cooperation, and performance overall.

Language barrier
The language barrier can also make a significant impact on the team's communication. There are lots of talented developers who avoid talking because they are ashamed of their English pronunciation. On the other hand, quite often, native speakers admit not feeling comfortable to say that they didn't completely understand a message due to someone's heavy accent.

The lack of English vocabulary can be a challenge, as well. It's not rare for a non-native speaker to describe different situations with the same words simply because their lexicon is limited. As a result, people's perception of what's being said can be inaccurate. For example, let's look at two phrases, such as "it doesn't matter" vs. "I don't care." Non-English speakers often use these expressions interchangeably even though they carry distinct meanings. Therefore, if used in response to someone presenting their ideas or sharing something personal, using one phrase instead of another can affect people's feelings and create unnecessary tension. As a non-native speaker, I've experienced many similar situations and felt somewhat helpless when I saw confused faces in reaction to what I said. Thankfully, as a Scrum Master, you can help in that area as well.

The first thing you can do is create an environment in which a team can freely talk about the language barrier. As soon as people relax, it won't be an issue anymore. For example, I, as an immigrant, told my team members about funny situations I faced due to language diversity and what I learned from them. I felt that my stories positively impacted how the team felt about it. I encouraged them to share new words learned every day and let the team play games around guessing what exactly different idioms mean in English.

The main idea is to convey to people that not knowing every word in English is totally normal and expected. Also, I've heard that many native speakers like listening to different accents as original pronunciation sound boring to them. I just find it interesting how many people are so ashamed of their accent, while native speakers see them as unique and smart individuals who can speak more than one language.