We were dancin’, and singin’, and movin’ to the groovin’ 🎶

Well helloooo there!

Did you miss us, did you miss us, did you miss us…?

We were out of your inbox last week because we were out of office on our agency summer break!

Sharing our plans for what we were gonna do over break (crochet! read! dance! oh my!), and setting our OOO limericks (if you missed it, there will be another, i promise!),

Had me remembering a guest blog post i wrote several months ago for the teambuilding tool Braid on cross-cultural company culture (say that 5 times fast!).

Ignore No More will turn 5 in November (awww look at her go!) and while our team has grown and shrunk as client needs have, we’ve intermittently spanned 5 time zones, 12 languages, and at one point, 4 continents.

I’ve learned “oh-wow-should-I-be-embarrassed-or-proud-of-this-growth?!” levels about what it takes to manage a cross-cultural team.

We have all learned with a whole lot of cringe and awkward laughter at my own assumptions and cultural foix pas. 😅 

So in today’s issue of Marketing is Not My Job, Aelia (who is based in Karachi, Pakistan 🇵🇰) and I are going to share a teensy-tiny bit of the goo-gobs of what we’ve learned managing and working in a cross-cultural team.

Our success, and our client success stories are not 100% because we are great at marketing (although we are!) as much as it is about how great we are at being a team and problem solving together.

First off, we’ll get right to it - What were your expectations vs reality of working with a remote US-based company?

Especially compared to previous experiences or assumptions

i had the same expectations that i had learned from the usual corporate culture that i’d experienced: slave away and justify your work. rinse and repeat. honestly it felt like being on trial. so it was shocker to have smooth salary negotiations that didn’t feel like pulling teeth, and to have a work culture where hours aren’t prioritized over actual work done! i was also expecting some level of racism, because, well, the holy trinity of brown, muslim, woman 😅 but the reality is hilarious (there’s a reason we kick out AI note takers on our informal calls 🤣). we’re all crazy with different skin here. 😀

Oh noooooo, that sounds very not fun. We are. We are just a taddd bit crazy. Speaking of the unexpected…

What’s been the most surprising part of working at Ignore No More?

Getting a front-row virtual seat to all the wonderful cultural practices, and bonding over things that are absolutely universal (family things and irritating siblings etc 😄)

How would you define INM’s culture?

Chaotic, creative, and very genuinely, unapologetically human.

Oh, you mean us being neurospicy and regularly devoting meeting screentime to our fat stacks of books? Or our ability to see a marketing opp where no one else would and whipping it together in days with coffee and content duct tape? Tell me more…

Yesssss! I love how we can be chaotic little gremlins who love finding something shiny in the marketing world and jump in to test it out and identify use cases so we have a stock of possible answers for different marketing problems! I also love being in a space where the flaws that come with having a hyperactive, creative mind, i.e., brain-uncooperative days aren’t vilified, and I can just be human.

Aww Aelia! Hehehe me too!! It takes so much of the stress out of work to not be working on being perfect too. With that in mind…

For everyone reading today, what advice you would give to a company that wants to foster great cross-cultural culture?

Remember that you probably have more in common with people around the world than you’ve been led to believe. and the differences are just experiences that will broaden yours.

Try to not always be the standard (have flexibility with call timings and national/religious holidays and other events) and work with your employees to set up something that works for everyone. regular communication does work wonders!

mmhmm. yeah. * snaps fingers like it’s a poetry slam *. oh that’s good. that’s real good.

And finally, what’s been your weirdest working experience (here or anywhere else)?

Okay, this was NOT at Ignore No More! Honestly the most surreal experience was for a colleague to blatantly take credit for other people’s and team’s work, serving no accountability, and instead getting more opportunities in the workplace.

But i learned that the only place such behavior can thrive is if the company culture itself is toxic top-down. 🤷🏽‍♀️

Oh.., i.., really i have no words. Have mercy!

Aelia, you know we could talk for hours (and we have) and this newsletter would never see the light of day (and we almost did). Thank you so much for being here!

As i know you know - there is NO WAY IN HELL (or heaven or a hot spring) that i could do this job without you - and i certainly wouldn’t want to.

We’ll be seein’ ya real soon!

Three of the Many (!) things i’ve learned managing a cross-cultural team!

This is an excerpt (i’ve always wanted to say that!) of the blog post i wrote for Braid.

Read the whole thing here and check out Braid for fun games in Slack that help bring your team closer together (no matter what continent they’re on!).

1. Stuff goes down while I’m asleep 😴

I’ll never forget messaging one of my copywriters furtively 9 hours after she missed an internal deadline only to open up the news and find out her city had just been hit by a tsunami warning and they didn’t have power.

Yikes.

She was safe, thankfully, but i learned that “staying up to date” has a lot higher stakes than keeping up with the latest meme.

Now i have alerts set for each of my teammates cities and countries and i check them frequently - especially if their Slack status is off when it’s usually on.

2. Know the big sporting events 🏉

Because lets be honest - was anyone doing much work during last year’s Summer Olympics? I for one was sitting in a coffeeshop that had a lifestream of the events pretending to type.

Also great to have a Slack channel for sports (if you’re a larger company) or post about it in the #casual-convo channel.

That way you’re not asking people to work during the Rugby World Cup when years of rivalries get to play out on the pitch.

5. Choose teambuilding activities that the whole team already does 📚

Virtual happy hours are no fun when half the company doesn’t drink for religious reasons.

Movie nights are a bust when the jokes are at another characters expense - and that character is from a teammates country.

Trivia is rough when “90’s kid” is very culture-specific.

So as the team grew, i waited to see if hobbies would naturally overlap was so team events could feel fun and not forced.

I limit in-person (aka not async!) activities to 1-2 a year.

it’s just too hard across timezones and somebody’s going to be up early or late, and i make sure i rotate into that early/late range too!

And finally, a short list of my school of hard knocks 🤦🏽‍♀️

Just a few of the high and (Usher-level) low lights

• cash is the best gift and shipping gifts is a losing battle. a little bonus with a personalized note “to round out your fantasy book collection!” is a lot less rigamarole than trying to ship Christmas presents to 14 countries in time

• off-sites are a great mental break. visas are a mental nightmare. Use Passport Index to coordinate a place everyone can go to! And be sure to have fun hybrid moments for the teammates who probably can’t make it

• make meetings silly. this one isn’t cross-cultural so much as it’s company-cultural. but we start out at least 1 meeting a week with silly convos that often involved the latest tiktok reel and in-country shenanigans. it helps make everyone real instead of 2-D virtual avatars.

• check twice message once. Is it 2am their time? check before you hit send, or better yet, schedule send it!

• Slack is awesome and our best get-to-know-you tool. Custom emoji, instagram reel links, and games like Braid make it easy and natural to keep the camaraderie going and the inside jokes flowing. our custom emoji library is 300+ gifs and memes long 😆

That’s all for now folks!

Neither Aelia nor i had and idea work could be this much fun!

We’ll see you and your inbox next week with more marketing goodness.

Cheers!

Sophia ⚡👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia 🪄🧕🏽

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