In its yearly report, freelancing platform Upwork revealed that up to 63% of companies today employ remote assistants. This means remote teams are becoming increasingly diverse, enabling organisations to innovate and tap into larger talent pools.

But with all its benefits, diversity comes with a few pitfalls.

Consider this: it’s tricky enough to chat with people online without seeing their body language or hearing their tone. Imagine how much harder it would be to communicate with someone having different cultural norms, but without the convenience of seeing them face-to-face.

How do you ensure that you:

1. Don’t offend them?
2. Establish rapport?
3. Promote a productive and friendly work environment?

Here are some cross-cultural tips to help you avoid these issues.

Get to know each member of your team

When you work in the same office, it’s normal to get acquainted with co-workers through situations like water cooler conversations and lunch outs. When you work from home, you don’t enjoy such benefits.

The solution? You have to make a conscious effort to get better acquainted with each member of your virtual assistant team. You can:

• Participate in off-topic (i.e. non-work related) chats.
• Engage in small talk and ask them about themselves (without being nosy).
• Organise occasional meetups with colleagues nearby.

Learn more about how they communicate

To better collaborate with colleagues from other cultures, familiarise yourself with how they communicate. You can do a quick online search and read about the basics, which may include:

• Cultural expressions and norms.
• Do’s and don’ts when it comes to humor.

Better yet, ask individual virtual assistant team members about their own culture; they’d probably be eager to talk about it. Doing this comes with two advantages:

• It’ll help you develop rapport.
• You’ll learn how to better understand others.

Avoid jargon and slang

Jargon and slang can cause blunders, even among your own in-group. So it’s reasonable to expect miscommunication if you use it when exchanging information with a team whose members are located across the globe.

To avoid this, communicate using plain, generally understandable language. See to it that you state your message clearly and in detail, leaving no room for confusion or doubt.

Be more deliberate when talking

Speaking too quickly may make listeners struggle comprehending you, especially team members from different cultures who may speak the same language, but probably understand it differently.

Here’s a tip: be more conscious when you enunciate your words. Try to be just a little more deliberate in your speech. Beware, however, that speaking too slowly will make you come off as condescending. The aim is to make yourself easier to understand.

Get to know their language

Taking the time to learn a friendly greeting or a few useful phrases in each of your team members’ native tongue should be beneficial. At the very least, this will improve your engagement with your virtual team, and help you understand them better.

But don’t pressure yourself to become conversationally fluent. Learning how to say “thank you” or “hello” and “goodbye” in their language should help in developing your relationships with them.

Make sure you understand

Whenever you’ve finished communicating with one of the members of your remote team, confirm that you fully understand what was discussed. This should be an effective habit regardless of who you’re dealing with.

But don’t merely repeat what you heard; to avoid miscommunication, paraphrase the gist, then ask if you got it right. Doing this will save everyone’s time.

A caveat: following these tips won’t ensure that everything is smooth sailing all the time. The secret is that when conflict occurs, and it will (in multicultural teams or otherwise), address it right away. Fixing a problem early keeps it from escalating into something you might not be able to handle.

As your offshore virtual assistant services team’s leader, you should be able to look at a problem via multiple cultural viewpoints and serve as a cultural link between conflicting members. Be ready to have an honest discussion when the circumstances call for it.