Case Study 3: The Bottleneck

An American company outsourced a team to China:After training 15 Chinese workers how to do their tasks, the American team had most of its members transferred to other groups or fired, leaving only 3 original members to continue handling the American side of the work. The remaining 3 members were then required to have daily 10:00 PM phone conferences with the Chinese team.

During the phone conferences, there was frequent uncomfortable silence. On the Chinese side, there was only 1 team member who had enough confidence, or English skill to try to talk to the Americans. The Americans complained that they could only barely understand the one engineer who would speak, and did not have confidence that he was relaying appropriately complete information to the rest of his team. The Americans would talk for 5 minutes, and then the one Chinese engineer would speak in Chinese for 10 – 15 seconds to the rest of his team. The result of this communication bottleneck, (and other technical issues) was that the 3 American team members had to pick up most of the work themselves, and got minimal work output from the Chinese team.

Analysis: This communication problem needed more English speakers on the Chinese side, or a fluent Chinese speaker on the American side. Given the small size of the team, however, this kind of HR resource was out-of-budget. Ultimately, executive management is responsible for providing the resources necessary for the team to be successful.