Lost in translation: How to avoid cross-cultural miscommunication in chat and email

Distributed teams bring a stunning cultural diversity to your organization, which is a massive strength. Having these different perspectives can lead to increased creativity, innovation, and local market insights that give you a competitive advantage, but these differences create different expectations in communication styles, which are exacerbated in written channels like chat and email.

Here’s why these issues happen and what leaders can do about them.

Why does cross-cultural miscommunication happen?

To put it simply, different cultural backgrounds lead to different expectations around communication. If these expectations aren’t communicated or accounted for, misunderstandings follow.

Two concepts can help you understand why these miscommunications happen: the importance of context in communication and cultural dimensions theory.

High-context vs. low-context communication

High-context communication refers to a communication style in which the context around a message carries as much weight as the actual content of that message. This context can include factors like the relationship between the sender and the receiver, group norms, hierarchy, and indirectness as a deliberate signal.

Low-context communication is a communication style in which the content of a message is prioritized over the context around it. Messages are expected to be direct and explicit, with a focus on achieving a specific goal over building relationships.

The contrast between expectations in each communication style can lead to misunderstandings. Low-context communication can come across as offensive or overly blunt to people from a high-context culture. Conversely, low-context culture collaborators may find high-context communication vague and frustrating.

Cultural dimensions theory

The cultural dimensions theory was first developed by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede in the late 1960s and further refined by social scientists thereafter. The basic premise is that different cultures can be ranked across six universal dimensions:

• Power distance index: How clear and accepted hierarchy is in society, and how it manifests in day-to-day life.
• Individualism vs. collectivism: How much members of a specific culture prioritize the collective good over individual interests.
• Uncertainty avoidance: The level at which members of a culture are comfortable with the unexpected, compared to strict codes of conduct and expectations.
• Motivation towards achievement and success: How much a specific culture values achievement and assertiveness, compared to cooperation and modesty.
• Long-term vs. short-term orientation: A spectrum covering how much a culture values tradition and steadfastness compared to short-term pragmatism and problem-solving.
• Indulgence vs. restraint: How much a culture allows freedom in gratification of human desires compared to strictly regulated social norms.

Cultural dimensions can lead to unconscious bias that carries over into communication, and a lack of awareness of these dimensions can lead to miscommunications.

How chat and email amplify cultural gaps

Cultural differences can cause miscommunications and misunderstandings, but written communication, as found in chat and email, can significantly amplify this. Here’s why.

Missing nonverbal cues

A significant portion of communication is non-verbal. That includes everything from your tone of voice to facial cues and body language. These elements can help bridge the gap between two communicators, especially from different backgrounds. But they’re completely absent in written communication.

Low-context is the default

Written messages default to low-context communication, since they rarely have space for the factors high-context communication depends on. All you have to go on is what’s written down, which tends to favor low-context communication styles. For collaborators from high-context cultures, this can feel like fighting an uphill battle to be understood with every message.

Asynchronous miscommunication

When you’re having a face-to-face communication with someone, you can tell when they’ve misunderstood something you said—or, worst-case scenario, they’ll tell you. That gives you the chance to correct any misunderstandings right away. When you’re communicating in writing, you rarely have that chance until a significant amount of time has passed, turning small misunderstandings into larger conflicts.

The costs of cross-cultural miscommunication

Cross-cultural miscommunication doesn’t just impact individuals; it also hits your bottom line. Here are some of the ways these miscommunications can affect your organization.

Operational and productivity costs

Communication is essential to staying productive and keeping operations running smoothly. Miscommunications can impact operations and productivity with:

• Slower decision cycles as team members struggle to communicate.
• Wasted time on rework when miscommunication leads to deliverables not meeting requirements.
• Missed deadlines and extended timelines as teams fall out of alignment.
   

Trust and relationship costs

People need to feel like they trust their coworkers to do their best work. Here’s where cross-cultural miscommunication can impact trust and relationships:

• Recurring miscommunications and misunderstandings can erode trust between distributed teams.
• Unexplained miscommunications may lead to inaccurately attributing laziness, evasiveness, or unresponsiveness to coworkers of a different background.
• Reduced psychological safety because employees don’t feel like they can bring their full, authentic selves to work.

Financial impacts

Every miscommunication at the individual level can radiate out to multiple business functions, hitting your bottom line. Here’s how:

• According to Grammarly’s Productivity Shift report, miscommunication costs companies over $9,000 per employee, per year.
• Public miscommunications and misunderstandings can erode your brand’s credibility, leading to frustrated clients and lost business.
• Unaddressed, recurring cultural miscommunications can lead to decreased productivity across global teams, making projects and initiatives more costly.

Talent and retention impacts

Keeping a global workforce full of world-class talent means managing relationships and potential conflict. Miscommunications can affect that with:

• Increased turnover as stress increases for employees who frequently feel misunderstood by their colleagues.
• Higher replacement costs as everything from job listings to reach-outs from recruiters lead to misunderstandings.
• Stifled career advancement for collaborators who struggle to be understood by their peers and managers.
   

How to minimize cross-cultural miscommunication

Cross-cultural miscommunication can be complex and expensive, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing leaders can do. A few simple fixes can allow you to build a foundation for asynchronous communication that ensures everyone feels heard, understood, and respected.

Build actionable, adoptable norms

Leaders need to lead in matters of communication. Discussing cultural differences can feel taboo, but not doing so just hides problems rather than solving them. Build clear, actionable guidelines for communication in your organization, covering when certain channels should be used and how people should communicate across your hierarchy.

Favor over-explicit phrasing

Asynchronous communication like chat and email is low-context by default, meaning communicators have to go out of their way to add context to their messages. By adding more context than you think your message needs, you can nip miscommunication in the bud.

Separate urgent signals from routine requests

When everything is urgent, nothing is. Miscommunicated urgency can lead to significant misunderstandings. Try having dedicated channels for urgent signals, or a labeling system so everyone can distinguish between urgent and routine requests.

Build clarification loops

When someone doesn’t understand a message, their first instinct should be to ask rather than assume anything. Build this expectation into how teams, managers, and leaders communicate.

Calibrate feedback delivery

Feedback needs to be calibrated to its recipient, rather than “one-size-fits-all.” Train managers and leaders to acknowledge, understand, and accommodate cultural context before delivering feedback. This can prevent misunderstandings and ensure feedback is heard.

Communicate clearly across time zones

Communication is essential to productive collaboration. When working with distributed teams, you need to account for cultural differences between collaborators.

Miscommunications can occur when expectations and communication styles clash, but this can be resolved with clear guidelines, understanding, and a little extra effort from everyone involved.

Get the benefits of a distributed team without the misunderstandings.

FAQ

Why does cross-cultural miscommunication happen more often in chat and email than in video calls?

Communication requires both verbal (or written) messages and non-verbal cues. In a video call, you can get a sense of the meaning behind a message based on facial expressions, the tone of someone’s voice, and other signals. Even a simple statement like “Nothing to add” comes across differently in a chipper voice with a broad smile compared to a monotone voice and a frown. With chat and email, there are no nonverbal cues. All you have to go on is the actual words someone has written, and few people know how to compensate for this to be correctly understood.

What is high-context vs. low-context communication?

The concept of high-context and low-context communication comes from anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s 1959 book The Silent Language. High-context communication is the norm in cultures where collectivism is prioritized over individualism and subtle, non-verbal cues play a larger role in understanding what someone is communicating. Conversely, low-context communication is the norm in cultures that prioritize individualism, and communication is more about the words being spoken or written than other cues.

How can leaders reduce cross-cultural miscommunication on distributed teams?

Leaders can reduce cross-cultural miscommunication with clear norms and a “trust but verify” culture. Communication norms that encourage everyone to write clearer, more detailed messages can help prevent misunderstandings. “Trust but verify” means people should trust that communication isn’t meant to offend or confuse them, but they should still verify a sender’s intent when something isn’t clear.

Does cross-cultural miscommunication actually affect business outcomes?

Ineffective communication can absolutely affect business outcomes, from decreased productivity to increased costs, lost business, and eroded brand reputation, according to studies. Cross-cultural miscommunication can contribute to organization-wide communication issues.