Introducing “Cultural Palate Cleansers” as a Tool to Bring Global Teams Closer Together

One morning in early March, I was on a video call with more than 80 faces looking back from my computer screen. Some were with me in New York City, but most were scattered around the world—Shanghai, Sydney, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, London, São Paulo, Dallas, Singapore; the list goes on. (I would say they were all bright and shiny faces but given the time differences, we weren’t catching everyone at their brightest and shiniest hour.) It was WeWork Labs’ monthly all-hands call, and it perfectly illustrates the aspect of Labs that is simultaneously our greatest strength and our biggest challenge: the truly global makeup of our team and our business.

To describe WeWork as a global company is an understatement. We operate in 27 countries, with team members based in each and every one. As WeWork’s global platform for startups and innovation, WeWork Labs is part of that worldwide workforce, with team members in 28 cities spread across five continents.

That creates many strengths. We have local startup ecosystem experts running the Labs program in each of our cities, and we’re able to leverage a global pool of expertise, information, and talent to drive us forward. But it creates friction, too. Different countries have different cultures, values, and historical contexts that influence how they do business, which affects how we operate and communicate as a team. (They even have different soda preferences, as WeWork's Adrian Zamora shows in the photo below, enjoying a Thums Up, the Indian equivalent of Coca Cola.) We’re not alone in this challenge—today, most teams are global in some way, shape, or form.

The “cultural palette cleanser”

When companies have global employees who may lack shared experiences but need to come together to get big things done, how can they create understanding and appreciation of their cultural differences? At Labs, we came up with the concept of “cultural palette cleansers”, and we wanted to share it in hopes that it benefits your team, too. Allow me to explain.

We started with a lofty goal: help our global team members better understand their colleagues. We thought that opening our larger all-hands meetings with short presentations from team members where they’d share interesting cultural stories, anecdotes, and glimpses into their country’s past were an excellent starting point. The name “cultural palette cleansers” is a nod to the kind of psychological level-setting we wanted to achieve. We all bring our baggage into these meetings, so what can we do in five minutes that will freshen everyone up and teach them something new, specifically in a way that will lead them to better understand and appreciate their team members from other cultures? We began using those to kick off our monthly calls, with each presenter nominating the country that would go next.

The structure goes something like this: One team member (or the whole team in a given country) puts together a few slides outlining historical facts, key industries, or did-you-know bits of information about their country. There are no constraints on what they share, other than the time limit: five minutes. We encourage them to share whatever information they think will help their colleagues better understand their country and culture.

Of course, you can’t possibly learn all there is to know about China, for example, in a five minute-presentation (it would take a lifetime to get anywhere close), but you can provide a foundation upon which to build and an emotional connection between teammates working half a world away from one another.

What we’ve learned as a team

I could go on and on about the information our team members have shared, but here’s just a taste of those cultural and historical insights.

When Seoul Labs Manager Jooch Nam gave a cultural palette cleanser about Korea, he painted a picture of a country that prizes new technology and modern conveniences but is still rooted in the traditions of its past. For example, you can get just about any food, including McDonalds, delivered, and the average wireless download speed in Korea is a lightning-fast 33.5 megabits per second. But superstitions still exist in Korean culture, including never writing a living person’s name in red—it means that person is about to die or is already dead.

Tom Lowden, our Labs Manager in Toronto, recently gave us an introduction to Canada, a country that’s working to make inclusivity and multiculturalism a hallmark of its culture. Half of the Prime Minister’s cabinet is female, and it includes the country’s first Muslim minister and first Inuit fisheries minister, among other firsts. Toronto is a particularly diverse city—half of its population is foreign-born. Canada is also ranked as the world’s sixth safest country and has one of the highest numbers of educated workers in the world. And Tom confirmed that at least one preconceived notion you may have about Canada is true: The country holds the largest maple syrup reserve in the world.

Cultural palette cleansers are also a chance to learn about the home countries of team members where we don’t (yet!) have a Labs presence. Earlier this fall, Narcisa Codreanu, a software engineer on our team at HQ in New York who comes from Romania, presented the vast history of the country (it was once part of the Roman Empire, hence its name) and a culture that values family and respect. Extended-family gatherings are a staple of life there, and Romanians are known for their hospitality. If you’re invited to a Romanian’s home, expect to be offered a lot of food and always bring a gift! There’s also a shared reverence for age and position—you should use someone’s title and surname when you speak with them until they invite you to use their first name.

And I cannot finish without a personal favorite: in the India palate cleanser we showed the movie scene of the song Yeh Dosti Hum Nahi Todenge from one of the best movies ever made: Sholay. 

How we’ve grown

Through these short presentations, we’ve started to develop deeper understandings of our global colleagues and the markets in which we operate. Those who knew nothing about Canada now know that it’s a country that values diversity; team members with little understanding of Korea have learned that it’s citizens live on the cutting-edge of technology. (Check out Labs managers Michal Ner-David, Kim vanHaalen, and Will Akins, from Haifa, Israel, London, England, and Dallas, Texas, respectively, bonding on the Santa Monica Pier during the 2019 Global Summit this past January, below). These pieces of information, as small as they may seem, help us work together towards our goals with respect and appreciation for where we all come from.

If you work on a global team, as I’m sure many of you reading this do, I encourage you to take a step back and think about how you’re fostering cultural and historical understanding within your team. It doesn’t take an operational overhaul to begin the process, just a desire to know a little bit more about where the people you interact with every day are truly coming from.

Roee