IT staff augmentation has many benefits, but it can be a concern if the augmented teams are not culturally aligned. Here, we’ll discuss the challenges of poor cultural fit and how to eliminate them in your enterprise when using IT staffing services.
In today’s world, most businesses have employees, stakeholders, investors, and customers from different cultures, regions, and demographics. Your employees come from diverse backgrounds and work together for a common cause. Based on your workplace culture, they would have adopted, adjusted, and adapted accordingly. What happens when you expand the internal team with IT staffing services? Should you take the same care to ensure a proper cultural fit, or can you hire anyone by focusing only on their talents?
The answer is clear. Poor cultural fit can result in miscommunication, arguments, conflicts, etc., which can eventually affect the project and your business. Whether you want to hire an employee on a permanent payroll or augment a team with external talent for a limited duration, an organization cannot ignore the importance of cultural fit.
Even though IT staff augmentation is gaining traction and is considered a more effective choice than full-scale recruitment, you have to make sure the new candidates can adapt to the existing work culture and deliver the expected performance. Statistics show that the global IT staff augmentation market will reach $857.2 billion by 2031 at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 13.2%. In such instances, it is crucial to understand how to eliminate poor cultural fit in IT staffing and how to create a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming work culture in your organization.
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Building a diverse team comes with its share of challenges and risks, even more so, if you hire staff augmentation services where your in-house employees have to work with external professionals for a limited period. Since they are unlikely to know each other in advance, certain issues may arise and lead to different conflicting situations.
As humans, we tend to flock together and gravitate towards like-minded people. In a workplace, this can create mini-groups within the same team. Some employees may feel isolated or ignored. Employees who don’t ‘belong’ anywhere might lose interest in the project or end up with low self-confidence.
People communicate differently, based on their culture, upbringing, societal influence, etc. What is considered assertive in some cultures could be rude in others. What’s polite in some cultures can come across as cold or uncaring to others. Lack of knowledge about each other’s cultural aspects and communication styles leads to poor cultural fit and creates conflicts among team members.
Just like in society, businesses too tend to follow the majority rule. This puts pressure on team members from other cultures, especially underrepresented and marginalized ones, to adapt to the major culture and change themselves. This pressure could lead to stress, anxiety, and a decline in efficiency.
Some organizations began to counter the major rule by over-implementing diversity and inclusivity. It can also be termed as tokenism. By forcing employees to be something they are not, you run the risk of creating more rifts, resentments, and conflicts within the team. Diversity works when there is a genuine commitment from everyone.
You can eliminate poor cultural fit in IT staffing with proper planning and continuous effort. It is not a one-time solution but an ongoing process.
Before you hire IT staff augmentation services and ask for candidates who will suit your work culture, you should first be clear about the company culture and create detailed documentation for it. This has to be shared with the employees. Provide information about business values, ethics, communication styles, decision-making hierarchy, etc.
When you create a job description to share with the staff augmentation company, make sure to include the cultural aspects. Let the service providers know exactly what kind of professionals you want to include in your teams. Talk about soft skills, ethics, mindset, personalities, and more.
Choose an offshore staff augmentation company that understands your workplace culture and has access to candidates who can fit into it without too much pressure. Explain your priorities and go with a service provider that shortlists candidates who align with your business and job requirements in every way.
Poor cultural fit is also due to resistance to change and unwillingness to embrace something different or be flexible enough to accept different opinions, views, etc. Adaptability is vital when augmenting a team with external talent. The newcomers and the existing team members have to make some adjustments to work together on the project.
Most IT staffing augmentation companies give businesses control in choosing the best candidates for their projects. You can conduct interviews to directly interact with them and select the right ones. Include behavioral interviews in this process and ask questions based on real-life scenarios. This will tell you whether the candidate aligns with the company culture or not. Similarly, you should also conduct cultural fit assessments.
One reason for poor cultural fit is due to a short onboarding process, where the new candidates are not given enough information or time to understand the existing company culture. Make onboarding a priority and assign a mentor to the external employees to help them integrate into your organization and understand your values.
Ultimately, it’s employees who have to collaborate and work together. Keeping their identities a secret from one another will make it hard for them to connect. Create space for the existing team members and newcomers to interact with each other before they officially start working on the project. For example, if you hire analytics staff augmentation services, let the analysts talk to each other and share their experiences. They will find common ground and bond quickly once the work begins.
People invariably display early warning signs and red flags, which could become bigger problems if ignored. If a candidate is unwilling to communicate properly or address an issue, hiring them because of their skills can affect the team dynamics and lead to a poor cultural fit.
Remember that company culture is not static. It is dynamic and has to be flexible and adaptable to align with the changing times, business growth, etc. Regularly document the cultural details, get feedback and input from employees, conduct surveys, and see how you can support cultural evolution while ensuring employees’ individualities remain unaffected.
Here, you may ask an important question: How can I adapt these strategies to my organization?
There is no simple answer to this question. Eliminating poor cultural fit to strengthen the diversity of your teams requires continuous effort across all departments and levels of the organization. Clarity, understanding, flexibility, and awareness are essential to adopt these strategies in your organization.
While poor cultural fit can lead to many issues, choosing the right candidates who are a perfect fit for your company culture results in many advantages. The best way to enhance the advantages is to make an effort to choose culturally fit candidates through IT staffing.
When the new candidates and employees are culturally aligned and feel comfortable collaborating with each other, they will feel satisfied with the business. Greater employee satisfaction makes them more productive.
When the employees and external professionals are a cultural fit, they don’t feel the need to look for other work opportunities. They will be loyal to the organization, thus reducing the attrition rate and increasing the employee retention rate.
A business that makes consistent efforts to build culturally fit diverse teams develops a strong company culture over time. It boosts employee morale and keeps them motivated to do better and deliver greater results. Together, the employees and augmented teams help achieve the business goals.
Typically, experts who work with diverse clients tend to be flexible and adaptable in their approach. They will be used to different cultures and collaborate with ease. That’s why staff augmentation services are preferred over full-scale hiring for specialized projects. Organizations have fewer concerns and can increase the chances of proactively grabbing market opportunities to boost business value. Find an IT staffing company that can align its services with your requirements and is the best cultural fit to form a strong, long-term partnership.
IT staff augmentation is a cost-effective and time-saving method to expand internal teams by hiring specialized professionals for fixed durations. A business can augment its team for the short-term or long-term and for a project of any size and complexity. When the augmented team is the right fit in all aspects, it gives the organization a strategic advantage over competitors and helps increase returns while enhancing overall quality, efficiency, and performance.
Read the following links to learn more about IT staff augmentation services.
A few examples of successful cultural fit assessments are as follows:
You can customize the strategies for your team by creating a cultural fit profile (or what an ideal team member and employee would be like). Then, create a set of questions that will help you assess if the candidate meets the requirements. Feedback from the HR, team members, and employees is also useful.
Cultural audits can be highly beneficial when opting for offshore staff augmentation to expand your in-house team with external employees. It ensures that new employees are not only talented but also compatible with your work culture and can easily collaborate with the in-house team. It reduces the risk of friction and conflicts that may arise due to different cultural values, biases, etc.
Luckily, technology can streamline cultural audits and simplify the process in many ways. AI and NLP tools can create surveys, questionnaires, etc., to analyze the behavioral, personality, and cultural aspects of the candidates. Business intelligence and data visualization dashboards, such as Power BI, can present analytical insights about employees in user-friendly formats, enabling quicker and more informed decisions.
Fact checked by –
Akansha Rani ~ Content Creator & Copy Writer
