How to Manage Multicultural Teams: Communication Rules That Reduce Friction

HR Business Partner Maria Pronkina explains why multicultural teams often struggle over small communication habits rather than dramatic cultural conflicts. The conversation turns ambiguous words such as "ASAP," time-zone pressure, language exclusion and indirect feedback into practical management tools: self-awareness, leadership learning, How to Work With Me exercises, written team agreements and region-sensitive processes.

Maria Pronkina · HR Business Partner at AI Digital
Hosted by Ksenia Izotova and Timur Novopashin

Maria Pronkina is an HR Business Partner at AI Digital, where she works with international teams and cross-cultural people initiatives. Her route into HR began outside the profession: she worked in cinematography as a screenwriter and casting director before moving into recruitment and then HR business partnering. Her experience includes roles at Multilogin and Tabby, where she built and supported people practices across growing technology organisations. Maria is based in Barcelona and writes about recruiting, corporate culture, engagement and the human side of work.

Connect with Maria on LinkedIn

To manage a multicultural team, replace assumptions with explicit working agreements. Define what words such as "ASAP" mean, set response and handover expectations across time zones, agree when meetings can happen, and make communication preferences visible. Train leaders to notice how their own style is perceived instead of memorising national stereotypes. Then adapt onboarding, feedback, scheduling and task allocation to the people and regions involved, and review the rules when friction shows that the current process is not working.

Teams rarely begin by asking to become multicultural. Existing members may prefer the language, humour and habits they already share, while new colleagues struggle to enter conversations that carry hidden context.

Friction then appears in small operational details. "ASAP" may mean drop everything now to one person and fit it into the schedule as soon as possible to another. A late-night message may feel harmless to the sender but urgent to a colleague who assumes a tag requires an immediate response.

The solution is not to label one interpretation correct. Leaders need to identify the ambiguous moment, agree what the team means and build a process that works across languages, locations and time zones.

Frameworks such as The Culture Map can provide useful concepts, but they become risky when managers use them to predict every individual. Maria recommends starting with self-awareness: how direct, contextual, fast or informal is your own communication, and how might it be perceived?

Team conversations should test assumptions against real cases. One useful approach is to discuss hiring or collaboration failures and separate cultural or language issues from ordinary performance, attention or personality mismatches.

This turns culture from a fixed explanation into a question. Managers can ask what happened, what the other person understood, which part of the process contributed and what evidence would change the conclusion.

A How to Work With Me exercise helps team members explain the habits colleagues would otherwise have to guess. Each person shares communication preferences, working hours, feedback needs, reactions to urgency, use of emojis and other signals that affect daily collaboration.

The goal is not to create a permanent personality label. Teams compare their answers, discuss contradictions and agree how to respond when preferences conflict. A manager may clarify that a tag does not require an evening reply, or that silence after a proposal should not be read as disapproval.

The exercise becomes most useful when the output is visible, revisited and shared with new joiners. It turns invisible expectations into a practical starting point for conversation.

Written rules translate a good conversation into repeatable behaviour. A team can define reporting deadlines, common collaboration hours, meeting-free periods, expected response times and how to mark a genuinely urgent request.

These agreements are especially important across time zones. They protect people from unnecessary after-hours pressure and reduce the chance that a meeting excludes colleagues whose working day has not started.

Rules should be short, visible and updated through experience. They are not a substitute for judgment, but they reduce the amount of cultural interpretation required in routine work and give new hires a clearer way to join the team.

A global policy cannot assume that every region shares the same communication norms, working day, religious practices or expectations of managers. HR should review onboarding, scheduling, feedback, task allocation and deadlines with local employees and leaders.

Adaptation does not mean lowering standards or treating every person as a cultural stereotype. It means preserving the business outcome while changing the process where the default creates avoidable barriers.

Maria’s core point is that long-established ways of working cannot be rewritten in a month by a manual. Sustainable change requires empathy, repeated learning, practical agreements and enough feedback to see whether people can actually use the process.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while preserving the speakers' meaning.

Ksenia Izotova: Hi everyone. My name is Ksenia and I'm from UnifyHub. We teach English and other languages to corporate clients. If you are looking for a language learning provider, we are here for you. This podcast was created in collaboration between UnifyHub and International HR Club, and I would like to hand over the mic to my co-host Timur.

Timur Novopashin: Hi everyone. I'm Timur. Talent acquisition professional and the founder of a peer-to-peer global talent community for HR professionals. If you work in the field of HR, talent, people experience, International HR Hub is a place where you can find nurturing sessions, benchmark reports, and peers to talk to about your problems and issues that you're facing as an HR professional.

So before you continue to watch this podcast, make sure that you follow our LinkedIn page. You may find the link in the description to this video. Today, together with Ksenia, I'm going to be hosting the very first episode of our podcast, HR Circle. HR Circle is a podcast created for HR experts by HR experts – real conversations with industry and professional field leaders about what actually happens at work and behind the curtain — the complex stuff that doesn't always make it into the official handbooks.

And without further ado, it's my enormous pleasure to welcome our guest, Maria Pronkina. Maria is an HR Business Partner at Global Company AI Digital, where she leads cross-cultural initiatives for international teams. She knows what it looks like when cross-cultural initiatives work and when they do not. So let's get started.

Timur Novopashin: What we noticed is kind of a perception or stereotype on the market that when a company is rapidly growing and going international — let's say expanding to five or ten more markets — the company is already global and international, but the teams within the company tend to struggle with that. They tend to hold onto this notion that they're not international, so they want to use their native language. It's hard to switch to English, etс. Does that reflect your experience working with international teams?

Maria Pronkina: I see two big problems here. Number one: the team never wants to become international. They're very comfortable speaking their own native language, sharing the same memes, having the same cultural background and having that personal vibe between each other. Problem number two is once they agree, "Okay, we are now all switching to English," they're like, "We told you we don't want that, and you still do it. And now look, we are all very much unhappy." At least at the beginning.

Timur Novopashin: It sounds kind of like reflecting the stereotype, but can you give us a couple of particular examples of such cultural differences that you faced as an HR professional?

Maria Pronkina: These cultural differences are not that big. It is often perceived that when we say that leaders are not open to explore different cultures or we have cultural conflicts or something, people think about something big like, "Oh my God, they have different cultural backgrounds, they cannot talk to each other." It's not like that. It turned out that the problems appear in very different areas. It's around processes, it's around communication, and it's around very small, tiny details that seem easy to fix, but they're not.

For example, we have different definitions of "ASAP" in different cultures. If you say "Please do this ASAP" to a Russian-speaking person, they will be like, "Okay, I have to do it right now. I don't have anything else to focus on right now. I should be doing this only." But if you say the same to an English-speaking person, they might treat it differently: "As soon as I can. As soon as possible. I will do this. I will prioritize this, but according to my main schedule." And that's when the friction turns out.

Another part is time zones. We are all in different time zones. We have some common hours, but some of them are very different, especially when we talk about employees from Europe and from Latin America. It's completely different working hours. And it is hard because if you are a new joiner, or even if you are an experienced worker, and you have a question, you want to type it immediately and schedule a message for tomorrow. But it just takes additional time and effort. Traditional thinking is that it's much faster to just type, "Hey guys, what about this?" and tag a person. And everyone is like, "Okay, you tagged me." With my cultural background, I feel like it doesn't matter that it's 2:00 AM right now — I have to answer immediately. For other cultures, it's like, "Well, I'll answer later." That's the type of differences that start to occur and that's where we see the most friction.

Timur Novopashin: I bet that everyone will be interested in your professional journey and story. So now you are leading these cross-cultural projects for international teams as a part of AI Digital as an HR Business Partner. Tell us how it happened. How did you get this job? What's the story?

Maria Pronkina: I love this part because I am not an educated HR. I don't have a master's degree in this field or something like that. I used to work in cinematography as a screenwriter and then as an acting casting director. But I was so tired of this. I mean, working in the art industry requires a specific mindset and enormous love for cinema. I don't have that. I love it, but I enjoy it, but not that much to spend my entire life doing this. That's just crazy. I have tons of respect for people who are open to this career.

So I had to find something that would suit me, that would be interesting and that I could really do well. I started with recruitment because I thought that castings and hiring are pretty much the same. I was so wrong. Oh my God. And that was the biggest mistake I ever made. But also recruitment didn't turn out to be a perfect fit for me. It has a lot of frameworks that are very repeatable. So you do pretty much the same. And yes, you face different situations and different challenges, but you basically have different frameworks for all of them. So I got bored and I wanted to do something more, and I wanted to have a deeper connection with people.

I'm a little bit of an introvert, to be honest. So as a recruiter, you have to meet a lot of new people every day. As an HR partner, you have to meet the same people. You have stronger bonds with them. It's just different. So I started to move into this direction.

Multilogin was a huge help here. Tabby, of course, was something that shifted my career. I could actually have a lot of opportunities to do some processes from scratch, to explore different things because Tabby was a young startup when I joined. So I was doing everything — events, coaching, cross-cultural programs, performance reviews — everything a little bit.

Now in AI Digital, we are slowly becoming more mature HR. We start to have people coordinators, HR roles, we have a Chief Empowerment Officer. So the team is growing really fast and I can focus on what is really interesting for me right now.

Timur Novopashin: You know, the part about working in the film industry and filmmaking — I think it's amazing. It's a super unusual career path, let's say. I tend to think of it more as not changing careers, but more like you're developing, you're unwrapping your potential.

And in regard to your current position — the situation on the market right now is ambivalent. Someone is saying that AI is kind of destroying everything. Other experts are pointing out that no, we are creating more jobs with AI than we are destroying or losing. Everyone is interested in practical tips and advice. So in your opinion as an HR Business Partner — you also at some point were a job seeker — what did the trick for you?

Maria Pronkina: Wow. Well, first of all, a very deep focus. I used to know that the market was messed up. And I quit Tabby before I started to look for another job. That was a bold move, I would say. It didn't turn out as fast as I expected it to be, but I was prepared. Thank God. My partner was very supportive and he was even pushing like, "Hey, don't you want to take a little bit of a break before jumping to job search?" I wanted to, but I am an anxious person, so I couldn't afford that to myself.

What worked? Applying a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. The more you apply, the more interviews you get. I didn't have a lot of problems with the interview process. I guess it's about finding the right fit for you. But my biggest struggle was that you apply and you get rejected like in five minutes or in one minute sometimes.

I also was deeply hurt. In one position that I really loved, I applied and had no response as usual for a month. So I found their VP of People. I reached out to her, she read my message, and in the next three minutes I received a rejection letter. That was so sad.

At the same time, some companies did provide very good feedback on the CV itself, or they invited me to the interview. So I ended up with two offers in two months.

Timur Novopashin: That sounds perfect. Especially for the current market situation. So you were in a position to choose. That's great.

Maria Pronkina: Yeah, I did have two options to choose between. But both of them offered something like interesting tasks, interesting jobs, but lower salary or no stock options — the type of benefits that are not so cool. So it is about being flexible and being open to compromise, because if you are not open to that, it's better to stick to what you have before you find something suitable and competitive.

Ksenia Izotova: Maria, this "ASAP" example really stayed with me because it's such a small word and such a big misunderstanding really. And I think every HR listening or watching us can relate to that — a deadline, a manager frustrated just because nobody agreed on what ASAP actually means. So what do you do about it practically? What books, exercises, or initiatives have already helped your teams get on the same page? Tell us about it.

Maria Pronkina: That's a never-ending process, I'm afraid. We have a learning base. Of course, there is "The Culture Map." What I still love about this book is the scientific research and some facts that we cannot deny about different contexts that different cultures have. This is useful material that we recommend to our managers and not only to our managers.

But that would not be enough because when you read that in a book, you're like, "Okay, we are a low-context culture, they are a high-context culture. Good to know."

The number one thing is self-awareness. What I want our managers to understand from that book is not how other cultures work — it's a very complicated topic to understand from only one piece of information — but how you talk, how you are being perceived. Because it is a very often friction.

We have a front office based in the US and we have operational teams based in Europe, and that is something that causes a lot of friction. I received feedback from the US team like, "Hey, your directors are often push-backs on our positions or on our questions," while our teams are just trying to get more information to make a more informed and data-based decision. This comes across like that.

It is important for them to understand that when they ask very direct questions with no context — it may be weird for them. It may look like we are patronizing them in a way. At least that's how they describe it to us. So I want them to understand how they work and what they can change in the future. That won't be possible in one day, but when you start thinking about it, this is an important part.

We have our management foundation course, which is mandatory for every leader in the company — newly promoted, newly hired, already existing — and optional but available for everyone in the company upon request. In this course, we are defining our leadership principles: how we work, what we appreciate, what we value, how we provide feedback, what are our practices. And we have one specific model for cross-cultural communication because that's something where we are struggling altogether.

But what I love about this is that the storytelling of the e-learning material is very case-based. So you are playing the role of a new manager who joins a team and you have AI team companions who are talking to you. And yes, you have a theoretical base, but then you have these videos when an employee comes to you saying, "Hey, I feel left out. No one is talking to me. I saw this joke. I don't get it. It's fine. But then we have common calls and you're still talking about this joke and I cannot join. Please help me." And you have options on what to answer. Then we have a self-reflection tab where we highlight different questions. There are no right or wrong answers. You can self-reflect, you can put them in the system, you can come back and change them later. That is something that we bring in during our one-on-ones with our managers. That is helpful.

The most helpful, I would say, are two exercises. Number one is knowledge sharing. We have Leadership Monthly — once per month, we have our leadership team all together for one hour and we discuss different topics. It can be feedback sharing, it can be letting people go, it can be cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural differences.

And it is a little bit hard to navigate those conversations right now because we have a multicultural leadership team. I was very worried like, "Okay, how can we address that when we have one team lead from Latin America, one from Serbia, one from Bosnia? It turns out it was very helpful because when you are a new joiner, you obviously see that, "Okay, I see a lot of similar endings of surnames. I see a lot of similar accents. I see a lot of chats in Russian. What is going on?" And it was helpful for them as well to understand the context and to understand how teams welcome them.

What I want to highlight specifically — it was my assumption that if we highlight wins and achievements of our international hires, people will get motivated to hire more of them. Turns out if you name 50 new employees who are doing amazing, some managers may think like, "Wow, we have 50 exceptional cases, but these are exceptions. We will have to spend one year finding these people."

But what worked is when you discuss failures. When you ask people, "Okay, who hired people from this region? Five people. Okay. Who hired from this region? Ten people. Share your experience. Who had to let go of these people because of something, something?" And they start to describe it, and we all come up with the one simple conclusion: "Well, that's not cultural. That's not a language barrier. That's actually a personality mismatch. It's attention to detail. It's not willingness to improve. We had the same with Russian-speaking people. We had the same with other cultures. That's a common human thing."

From that point, it's easier for them to make a decision: "Okay, I'm open to hiring more international people because it looks like they're not bringing in any horrible things or any horrible ideas to the team, but they can add something new."

The last exercise that I find extremely useful is "How to Work With Me." It is kind of famous. I saw it in the Atlassian playbook — they have different mini-plays for management teams. It has a lot of manager playbooks that I see in the open space across the internet. We modified it for ourselves.

What I encourage our team leaders to do is to have an honest conversation, create a mirror board that would be comfortable for their specific team, and discuss. I use "ASAP" when I mean this is something extremely urgent. I use dots when I am getting angry. I use emojis always, and when I don't get emojis on my messages, I feel like you don't like me. Things like that. The most simple ones.

Working habits — like "In the morning, don't touch me. Don't even try to have a call with me." "In the evening, when you tag me, I will respond no matter what, even if it's my wedding, I will open my phone and respond if you tag me." These little habits — we can discuss them and say, "Okay, we understand. You don't have to do this. Sometimes you may be accidentally tagged. Please, that's up to you. We cannot control you here, but we know this detail about you, so we will try to reschedule the message or to write 'Feel free to ignore this until you're online.'" Something like that. At least when you bring awareness, that is helpful.

This was a recent invention from our legendary team lead. I love her so much. I want to say that her name is Nika and she lives in Poland and she is amazing. She came up with written rules. After she had this exercise, she figured out that it would be very helpful to define some internal SLAs.

For example, "By 5 PM Central European Time, we should have all reporting done. No matter what. By this time, we want this. After these hours, we do not have calls at all. Before these hours, we also don't have calls because part of our team might be sleeping and we don't want to have a call without them."

So she has these rules in a written format. She shares them with all new hires and they see them as little reminders. That is something very, very common for them. They know it as a rule, and that helps a lot. That really reduces the friction time.

Ksenia Izotova: Maria, we just talked about "How to Work With Me" exercise. So what's in yours? How do you work?

Maria Pronkina: I don't know. I feel like I tell from the very beginning to people I work with what I expect. This is also not cultural, but personal things. I am obsessed with recognition. When I do not receive feedback at all, I start to doubt myself a lot. So if you don't say to me, "Wow, thank you, this is a good idea," I will be like, "Okay, just thank you? Are you sure? Is that all?" I make sure that every stakeholder I work with knows about that thing. And they tell me good things unless it's a bad thing. And if it's a bad thing, I immediately know about it so we can discuss it.

Right now I also work with the US team, so it's kind of easier for me. But with the US team, I have a "How to Work With Me" manual that I share. Sometimes my US colleagues — and I don't mean to be rude — but they tend to say "yes" to a lot of things without meaning "yes." And my life hack is very simple: if they say "yes, let's do it," then it's yes. If they say "yes, I was thinking once upon a time, blah, blah, blah" and then they have a long story, that means it's probably no, and I have to dig into that.

When you work with the MENA region, with India, they also require process changes because they have their own experience. We are not hiring someone who is in kindergarten, right? We have people who are at least 18 years old, so they have been taught ways of living and ways of working for 18 years. We cannot change it in a month. We cannot change it with any manual. We have to create and we have to adapt our processes for working with different regions who have their own working culture.

I have to admit that if you do not adjust your processes — onboarding, working schedule, how you allocate tasks, how you set deadlines — it will not work with many regions. It will not work with India. So that requires huge process changes.

Personally, you have to adapt to their communication style. It was a huge surprise for me when I first traveled to Egypt where we have a call center in Taba. I wanted to say "Hey" and give a handshake or even a hug to some people because that's how we used to do it. It's not allowed there. You are not allowed to touch other people. Even if you have their consent, that's not appropriate. Things that I had to learn. They have time to pray. They have time to eat. They're very sensitive about that. That is something that I had to learn.

Ksenia Izotova: Thanks for sharing. Thank you.

Timur Novopashin: I think we do have an extra team member that everyone would love to meet.

Maria Pronkina: Chief Happiness Officer.

Timur Novopashin: And what is the Chief Happiness Officer's name?

Maria Pronkina: His name is Casper. Actually this Saturday we received a certification — he is now officially a certified emotional support dog, so he can volunteer in schools or in hospitals. We're not doing this yet, but yeah, we have gone through this journey. He is the best dog ever.

AI Digital is a very dog-friendly company. We recently had an offsite in Barcelona and since both me and my partner work at AI Digital and everything happened in Barcelona where we live, Casper had to attend the event with us. He gained popularity across all teams.

Ksenia Izotova: Can you just tell us a little bit what type of breed that is?

Maria Pronkina: That's a Cavapoo. It's a mix of Poodle and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

Ksenia Izotova: What made you choose this particular breed?

Maria Pronkina: It was accidentally. I used to grow up with dogs. I was born in a small village. We always had a lot of dogs. But then I joined the university. I had to live in a dormitory, and then the war happened, and relocation, relocation, relocation. All these years I wanted to have a dog. Once we stopped in Spain and rented an apartment, a long-term apartment, not an Airbnb, I immediately started to look for dogs.

My boyfriend didn't want to have a dog at the beginning. He was like, "No, why? Why do we need that? It's too much effort. It's too much time. We cannot travel." And I was like, "If the dog is small, we can travel." So we decided to get a small dog. We started to explore different breeders here in Spain.

The first breeder was just Cavalier Spaniels because as a kid I had an English Cocker Spaniel and I love spaniels. They're the best. It turned out that this breeder sold one pup for 4,000 euros plus 21% of that. I was like, "Okay, I am not prepared for that." Especially right after relocation — we had to buy all the furniture from scratch. It's crazy.

And one day I just received a notification that there is a breeder somewhere in Poland who is delivering their puppies across Europe. They have one puppy who is now in Europe and he wasn't bought, but he is around Spain. So they offered him with a huge discount. I was like, "Okay, taken." So that's how he turned out in our house. Next dog will be a Golden Retriever. He will arrive in two weeks.

Ksenia Izotova: Wow. Golden Retriever is a different choice from Cavapoo, right?

Maria Pronkina: Yes.

Ksenia Izotova: It's a boy as well?

Maria Pronkina: Yes. I could push for the second one and say, "But I want a big dog." Why would we have two little dogs and then get a third one? That would be three dogs. It's not so convenient. Why not just take a big one? She's like, "Okay, do whatever you want."

Ksenia Izotova: I also have a dog who wants to say hi — he's been waiting for that all morning.

Maria Pronkina: Oh my God.

Ksenia Izotova: He's also curious. He's been waiting. We are also looking to get a bigger dog because it'll be a great company. He's also sleepy.

Dogs are absolutely incredible. Every time there is someone coming to visit me, people say, "Oh, I need to get the same dog."

Maria Pronkina: As an HR professional, I have this part of the job that is not the most pleasant — it's terminating employees. Sometimes it is very challenging. It's never a pleasure, I can say. Sometimes I am extremely worried. Sometimes I know those people very well and I'm sad. If we had a long journey with performance improvement plans and everything, and we've been collaborating together, I will be rooting for them. I get incredibly stressed.

Imagine that you are on a termination call with HR and I am with all serious face explaining the reasons and saying goodbye. And Casper can sense stress hormones. He's like, "Oh my God, she is stressed. I have to do something. I have to do something." So he jumps on my knees and starts licking my face while I'm like, "Okay, your access will be revoked immediately after the call." But I can't stop smiling because Casper is so cute and it's so funny how he feels the stress and immediately drops everything and comes to my knees and does this stuff. It's so uncomfortable sometimes.

Ksenia Izotova: This is what I heard about these types of breed — that they are very empathetic. Unlike the others, like toy poodles — Zeus doesn't care a lot about that. But Cavapoos, that's something that makes them really special. That's an amazing fact.

Timur Novopashin: I would just ask one last question about your takeaway. What does every HR person need to know to be successful?

Maria Pronkina: Empathy is the only skill that really helps you to boost your career. You can learn a lot. You can know a lot. You can understand all the frameworks in the world. But if you have empathy and a very good common sense, you can be a very good HR professional because it all comes from these things. All policies — I hate them — all processes, all coaching, all L&D comes from empathy. So yeah, that's my point of view at least.

Timur Novopashin: Beautiful. So we have to exercise our human muscles, let's say.

Maria Pronkina: That's true.

Ksenia Izotova: Thank you, Maria, for being here. That was such a real and very honest conversation. And to everyone listening, thank you for staying with us till the end. Let's stay in touch. See you in the circle. Goodbye.