Cultural Connections Shape Payroll, Business Relationships

Understanding nuances of different cultures can greatly aid payroll practitioners working in global payroll or collaborating with teams in different countries, two global payroll professionals said May 13.

Kira Rubiano, a partner at Payrollminds USA, said she once had to give feedback to a vendor in the Netherlands that was performing poorly and, after not being direct during the meeting, was surprised when nothing changed and the vendor thought the relationship was going well. “It wasn’t until I had this one interaction that I truly realized the invisible boundaries that exist,” she said.

Robert Gerbin, CPP, PayrollOrg’s senior director of global strategic initiatives, said that in his first payroll job he was to make a three-day visit to get to know a payroll team in Germany, only to end up meeting with them once for an hour and leaving unsure what was to happen next. He later found out the team expected to be fired, he said. “I didn’t really know how to prepare, I didn’t call ahead and say ‘this is the agenda, this is what’s happening, I want to know just about the operations,’ and it was my very first lesson learned,” he said.

Rubiano and Gerbin, speaking at PayrollOrg’s 44th Payroll Congress in Nashville, Tennessee, used these stories to illustrate some of the cultural differences that can affect communication.

“You can think about a business in China operating differently than a business in France, which operates differently than a business in the US,” Gerbin said, adding that he began talking to business leaders instead of HR departments to understand the businesses with which he was working and also learned to listen and ask questions of businesses and vendors. He learned to ask payroll professionals in other countries what to do or bring when visiting. “Why guess? Ask these other people what they like,” he said.

The idea of cultural relativity states that cultures are comparative, not absolute, Rubiano said, using as an example that when to speak and when to be quiet can vary dramatically. “When something might seem direct or abrasive to you, it’s completely normal or acceptable in another culture,” she said.

In a global team, some employees may be willing to speak up and give feedback directly, while others may wait until prompted to speak, Rubiano said.

Rubiano and Gerbin applied the eight scales from Erin Meyer’s book The Culture Map, measuring how cultures communicate, give feedback, persuade, lead, make decisions, trust, disagree, and schedule, to behaviors in the workplace.

Persuasion varies from whether an individual learns a fact first and adds a concept to justify it or vice versa, Rubiano said. “I would say this is the hardest concept for people to grasp,” she said. “It’s basically how people like to be convinced or persuaded when something is being presented to them.” In practice, presentations or reports can be organized such that a decision is presented first and the steps taken to get to it come next, or conversely that all the steps come first followed by the decision that was made, Rubiano said.

Rubiano said her current employer is Dutch and begins meetings two minutes before the listed time, while in other countries it may be okay to start late or not get through the entire agenda. She said she once had to tell a Latin American team she worked with that they could only show up for meetings two minutes late, against their cultural norms, and now goes over scheduling with every global team she works with.

Disagreement can be confrontational or nonconfrontational, Rubiano said. It is entirely normal to publicly disagree in some cultures, while people from nonconfrontational cultures can find being singled out even for praise to be uncomfortable, she said. “You have to be patient if you’re dealing with nonconfrontational cultures,” she said.

To give some practical advice, Rubiano and Gerbin demonstrated to attendees how to give and receive business cards when meeting a new contact in some Asian cultures: Gerbin presented the card with two hands to Rubiano, who received it with two hands, adding that the recipient says thank you and puts the card down on the table, not in their pocket. Not bringing business cards in this situation shows a disrespectful lack of preparedness, Gerbin said.

During online meetings, Rubiano said she likes to have attendees have their cameras on so she is not talking to “a black hole,” while Gerbin said that not having the camera on can indicate a lack of respect for the other person in some cultures.

The presenters encouraged attendees to be open-minded. “Be humble, be aware, be champions, help others,” Rubiano said. “Don’t expect people to know these things.”

Cultural experience “helped me grow my global payroll career,” Gerbin said.