Transatlantic Teamwork

Among many things we learned by living through the COVID-19 pandemics, the particularly valuable ones would be how to cooperate online without having to travel a lot, be physically present during the meetings and how to communicate effectively without facing each other. And since many of us appreciated the benefits of home office and work flexibility, the idea of working online is here to stay, which brings some interesting challenges for transatlantic teamwork.

By transatlantic teamwork we understand, quite literally, the cooperation between European and East Coast of the United States teams that work towards one goal. If the cooperation goes well, the external client might even stay fully unaware that people developing his product never meet each other physically, yet are more than capable of providing great results.

How does transatlantic teamwork work?

The idea behind the term is to provide European firms with resources available in the States – might it be technologies, innovations, whole groups of clients or workforce. Although transatlantic teamwork is a phrase originally used to describe military cooperation it’s a pretty good name for a business partnership idea.

It works because it increases the area of influence for any business. It’s basically a “standard” teamwork just on a bigger scale, which makes the benefits bigger as well.

Let’s assume you want a specific application for a purpose you figured out by yourself. There’s a high possibility that you will find a team of developers locally, but if the company of your choosing has a team of developers from different countries, that provides you: bigger variety in ideas, specialists in more than a few technologies with different experience, also, because of the time zone issues, you might get the process being developed 24/7.

If for whatever reason you are however afraid that an international team will not be working effectively, here are some key points to change your mind.

1. International team members, in order to stay on the same page, are really good in online conferences and effective meetings. To maximize the effectiveness of the team, the meetings are specifically designed to discuss potential doubts. Also – since there is nobody at the nearby desk to ask for help, international team members are fluent in being in contact with more experienced employees that might help them with their issues.

2. The project manager of your project will probably be an experienced professional, since leading a cross-cultural team is not a walk in the park. Being a person responsible for being a link between you and the developers team is difficult enough, but this time the developers team members are working in different styles, time zones and possibly speak English on different levels, which means navigating many things simultaneously. This on the other hand provides you a great experience of cooperating with the best of the best.

3. Top talents are not exclusively to be found in your country of origin. If your project is being developed by a transatlantic team it means a few very important things – first, the organization itself is attractive enough to bring people from different continents and second, a bigger market means more candidates for work, which brings us back to top talents who were possibly designated for the implementation of your product. Hope this sounds convincing.

For you as a customer, having a transatlantic team of specialists means a great productivity and flexible support structure, where someone somewhere is probably working on how to grow your business. The quality of training and experience has greatly improved in places such as East Europe, so the demand for employees from that region is and will be increasing. And together with those employees you can gain their knowledge of their local market which adds value to your business plans.

So hopefully the good mix of the things that multinational teams are capable to deliver speaks to you as much as we believe it should.

Author: Andrzej Wodnicki, Managing Director at ITSG Global