How Do We Develop a Culture Guide?

One of the questions that we get asked all the time is, “How do you develop a new Culture Guide for GlobeSmart?” 

It’s an excellent question to ask! Here, we’ll take you through the process of how we add a new entry to our Culture Guide database – from start to finish. Hopefully, this post can shine some light on all the extensive work we do to illuminate the different working styles of cultures around the world.

Here’s how we develop a new Culture Guide, step-by-step:

1. We determine which culture we’re going to add. This equation gets measured on a number of different things: our priorities, our clients’ priorities, worldwide economic trends, and other factors. Our most recent entry was Serbia (our 99th entry); entry #100, Croatia, will come out later in 2021.
2. We begin our literature survey. Our editorial team first conducts a literature review of recent publications for each culture that will be developed as a Culture Guide. The reviewers search for books, articles, and online materials that have been written in the last three years that contain useful information on the specific business topics that are covered in the Culture Guides.
3. We start recruiting interviewees. In order to get the insight we need, we interview people with extensive experience living and working in the culture from a variety of industries and job levels. The ideal interviewees have worked and lived in multiple cultures; that way, they can give perspective on how cultures compare (especially important if the culture in question is their native one).
4. We recruit or assign an interviewer. Our interviewers have an intercultural background and, preferably, can conduct interviews in the local language.
5. The interviews take place. As soon as we find an interviewer, the interviews take place over either a number of months (if remote) or days/weeks (if in-person). Each person gets interviewed for 1-2 hours and can choose from a long list of business-related topics to discuss. The interviewer seeks out key themes, commonalities, and core diversity factors that will impact business. In the interviews, the critical information we’re seeking is “What do foreign businesspeople need to know before they come to work in this culture?”
6. After the interviews, our content team creates a summary report based upon the notes. This report gets shared with the writer (in an ideal case, the writer and interviewer are the same person), who crafts the interview content into our topic structure.
7. The writer and the content team edit the draft to meet our strict requirements and include all relevant information. After it is final, the draft gets reviewed by several interviewees for accuracy.
8. For the finishing touches, the content team adds the culture to our Content Management System’s taxonomy and builds the infrastructure of the new Culture Guide. As soon as the content gets finalized, it gets entered into the CMS—along with images, quiz questions, links, maps, and other elements. Voila—a brand-new culture is set for exploration!
9. After the Guide is published, we continuously update from ongoing user input. 
   In the footer of every page is a link to Provide Feedback to Aperian Global. The GlobeSmart editorial team, with the help of our GlobeSmart Cultural Experts around the world, determines whether or not the comment or feedback should be added to the existing content. Aperian Global welcomes any and all feedback from users, and generally responds within one business day, letting the users know how their feedback will be used.

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