The traditional view of working with people that’s not in your time-zone, or that don’t fit in in your countries culture is that it’s not people. Rather FTE’s where you can send your bulk-work. Or not all work… because ”they don’t do anything if it’s not in the specification. And god forbid that you forget anything in that specification. Even if it’s chrystal clear that it should be done, it won’t if it’s not written down.”
We don’t look at it from that perspective. The big difference is that we work together with all our developers regardless of location.One of our core values is that ”we build everything in teams”. That puts some pressure on us solving our geographical distance, different time-zones and technical behavior.
It’s also of essence that we can manage to involve every one that is a part of a team so that the feeling is that it is borderless. We never ever communicate with Italy or Philippines just through specifications or managers, we communicate face-to-face (even if it’s digital) and developers to developers.
If we’re adding team-members to a team, the interviewer can be either here in Sweden or in the Philippines. When we contact customers, it can be from here in Sweden or from Italy. It really doesn’t matter. For us, people together with our joint technical expertise comes first. If we can build successful teams where not all members happens to live in Sweden. So be it.
What matters to us, is that we deliver the expected outcome and that we keep having people in the teams that are nice, support each other and help each other grow their technical and soft-skills knowledge. Now you might wonder how we solve it in our every-day life. Well, stay tuned and the answer will come.
To give you a short summery of TIQQEs cultural compote. At TIQQE we are 27 people employed in Sweden from three nationalities. Swedish, Italian and Chinese. We have part of our sales office in Florence – Italy and we have 21 developers working with us from Cebu – Philippines. We are roughly 33% women aiming for 50%.
