Findings regarding what communication channels that worked best

Almost all informants stated that face-to-face communication works best. At least early in a project it is important to get to know the people you work with. The only way to do this is to meet the other person physical. It was difficult to get any uniform answers regarding what messages that was most suited for face-to-face communication. Some informants mentioned that the need for face-to-face communication varied according to the setting. In a client-vendor situation there seemed to be a higher need for this than in a setting where everyone work for the same company. One Indian informant stressed the fact that this highly depends on organization culture and politics. When everyone have the same KPI’s the need for

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to-face meetings is not as large as it is when people work in different companies. By having the same KPI’s there is less risk that the people who communicates will have any hidden agendas. They all share the same target, which should ease the communication between them.

Some mentions the negative sides with face-to-face meetings. One is that unless proper minutes of meetings are taken it might be difficult to know exactly what have been agreed.

Language barriers might prevent the flow in the meetings. A Norwegian informant made some comments about this. She said that in meetings with Indians and Norwegians they thought they had agreed on something. After the meeting, the Norwegians often have informal conversations (Greenberg & Baron, 2008, pp. 354-356). This always happened in Norwegian. If they were lucky, someone would inform the Indians about this later. If not, they miss this important information. Distinguish between formal and informal

communication is an illimitable separate theme. Due to the limits of this thesis, I decide not to focus more on this.

A Filipino informant mentioned the same issue. She said that she always made sure that she always sent her understanding of what they agree in the meeting with the rest of the team on e-mail. That way everybody could come with their comments and sort out any

misunderstandings before they become too serious. An Indian informant who had been in Denmark for a long duration said that in some cases the Indians were suggested not even to participate in some meetings. The reason was that the language in the meeting would be Danish. In these situations, someone explain the outcome of the meeting to the on-site Indian consultants only after the meeting.

Quite often face-to-face meetings are not possible. In that case, most of the informants preferred to use the phone rather than e-mail. A phone gives the opportunity to get an answer immediately. A few informants said that they would prefer e-mail rather than phone. Their reasoning for this was that on e-mail you could easily track back and check what was agreed.

If the communication is only by phone, then this information is not available.

One informant, (Consultant 13) mentioned that the message is understood different dependently depending on communication channel. When he received an e-mail from his Norwegian counterpart it quite often sounds like the Norwegian was unhappy with the execution of a task. The language in the mail felt quite shroud. When he picked up the phone and called the Norwegian the opposite was actually the case. The Norwegian was quite happy

61 with execution of the job. It was just that he had not managed to write the right words. The same experience is applicable also for myself. While writing mails in India, at least initially, I used stronger words than what I probably should have done. This happened mostly because of my lack of vocabulary. Without knowing the proper word, it became tempting to use stricter words, just to make sure my message was clear. In oral communication, this is easier as it is possible to explain in more details.

4.4 Summary

This chapter shows that most of the findings related to what communication challenges that exists are related to the communication process. Challenges with information overload and/or opportunistic behavior is not that frequent mentioned.

All informants mentioned a huge number of different techniques they use to mitigate the communication challenges. This varied from simply rephrasing a statement, via changing the communication channel to changes that are more significant like using a middleman or creating a communication plan.

In the next chapter, I discuss what mitigation techniques that might work best for each of the challenges.

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5 Discussion

In the theory chapter, I described three different communication challenges (challenges in the communication process, information overload and opportunistic behaviour). I discuss these findings according to these three categories of challenges. Almost all informants mention challenges due to cultural differences, but not necessarily related to one or more of the challenge areas described above. Hence, it could be an idea to discuss this in a separate section. At the other hand, the cultural differences is an underlying factor, which affects all communication. If I take this approach, cultural differences might be an embedded into all the different categories of communication challenges. I have taken this second approach and included challenges due to different cultures in the discussion of the general categories stated in the theory.

In section 5.1, mitigation of problems in the communication process is discussed. Discussion on how to mitigate problems with information overload is in section 5.2, and finally how to overcome opportunistic behaviour is discussed in section 5.3.