X-Culture: Figuring it All Out

Guest Blogger: Jessica Hook, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

My name is Jessica Hook and I am from Wilmington, NC. I am enjoying working with my X-Culture teammates on this project. We chose the company “Eletrobras” and are looking forward to doing further research on the organization. My teammates all seem very productive and have been answering their emails or other forms of communication, although my one teammate, from Thailand, has not gotten back to us at this point.

When the team emails back and forth, all teammates are always included in the messages. This way, we are all always on the same page. At the very beginning of the project, our teammate from Barbados had dropped the course and did not take the initial survey/test, but was still put into our group. She responded back to our emails and let the team know promptly. The one issue that my team has come across is a couple of teammates were not able to access Google docs for some reason or another. When this problem came up, one of my teammates opened up a dropbox account and we were all able to access it from this point on. Although it is not as productive as Google docs, it still was able to get that job done well.

All of my teammates seem very excited and motivated to work on this project together. The main challenge that I think that my team will have to deal with during the duration of this project, are time zone differences. As of this point it does not seem to pose too much of a problem because we have been giving ourselves plenty of time to talk about choices of organizations, among other things. We have decided as a team to do things earlier rather than later. This is good because when things are put off until the last minute the issue of time zone differences will then become a bigger problem than expected.

One issue that I was worried about, before the project began and before we made initial contact with our teammates, was language barriers. This has actually not posed any problems for us, or at least not for me, so far for this project. As I stated before, there is still one teammate left to make contact with the team, but for the most part I still do not think this will pose a problem between us.

We as a team have been quite productive so far and I have hopes that we will continue to be as motivated in the future of the next couple months as we are and have been in the past couple weeks.