International cooperation in IT teams

Have you ever experienced difficulties communicating with foreign team members even though you do speak the language? Or quite the opposite, do you find it easier to talk about some things in a foreign language?

If so, this talk is for you.

There are many international projects in the IT industry today. The pandemic has intensified the globalisation process. We are only a few clicks away from our colleagues living at the other end of the world which is an incentive to build international teams. As far as it might seem an easy task from the technical point of view, it poses many challenges – starting from language barrier, through time zone differences, to end with differences in communication patterns and cultural values across the world.

The talk aims to present and discuss some of the above-mentioned challenges and psychological mechanisms, such as:

in-group and out-group social categorisation;

cultural differences in collectivism/individualism;

communication patterns differing between languages and countries.

Apart from relying on psychological concepts and study results, the panel relates to real-life experience in international projects from IT industry, including speaker's current hands-on experience in one of the biggest IT projects in Europe. The goal of the talk is to inspire participants to improve international interactions and to show how fascinating the world of international projects might be.