Clinical trials are often conducted globally across several countries, taking place across different continents, and even in different hemispheres, bringing together multiple colleagues and project teams.
This collaboration can ultimately lead to the success of a clinical trial, with project teams playing a crucial role in ensuring successful outcomes. Project teams are often formed by members from different cultures, languages, and different parts of the world, which is hugely beneficial, but can lead to challenges. One key factor to making a clinical trial successful is the project team’s ability to work together efficiently.
A Working Culture for Success
At Linical, our working culture is defined by our core values: integrity and honesty, unending enthusiasm, and continuing spirit of inquiry. Our culture is underpinned by our principles, SOPs, and guidelines, all while bearing in mind the mission defined by our President and CEO, Hatano-san: “to contribute to our clients’ new drug development and to patient wellbeing around the world.”
This mission of improving the patient’s life around the world is shared by drug developers, regulatory authorities, study sites, service providers, and everyone participating in drug development. But the way of achieving the final goal can be very different depending on the local culture of each stakeholder. It is important to consider and understand these different approaches, but most importantly, the clinical trial team must be aligned. This becomes even more important if located in different parts of the globe to successfully meet the client’s expectations and deliver the highest quality results from day one.
How to Manage Multicultural Teams in a Clinical Trial
- The language used in communication should be adapted to the cultural background of the participants, not only the spoken language, but also written such as in emails and Microsoft Teams messages. Using language consciously and having the writing format adapted to the cultural context of the individual stakeholders can prevent many misunderstandings and improve the daily interactions and delivery.
- Technology offers collaboration tools that improve clinical trial management. The multi-country project team members collaborating on a clinical trial may not actually meet face to face very often, since the inception of remote working. This is important to keep in mind, especially in studies that have a short duration or involve several countries. Tools that improve communication should be used, such as connecting the camera during remote meetings allowing the use/visibility of body language. Another example is the use of instant messaging that provides a shortcut to resolve urgent issues or a personal conversation rather than sending a message where tone/context can get misconstrued.
- Managing a project team across different time zones offers unique opportunities. Using tools as meeting planners for selecting the most convenient start hour at the global level or scheduling email delivery so team members receive them when their workday starts can help to balance family life and work. Leveraging different time zones can allow teams to finalize tasks that would not be possible working in a single time zone.
- Local public holidays or absences from work should be reported in advance by local team members to all stakeholders so that managers are aware when resources will not be available. This can be done easily by everyone adding a clearly visible short message in the email signature reporting the date of the upcoming local public holiday.
- Study Managers should be aware of the local season when stakeholders have vacation in a country or at a local/regional level, so that alternative strategies can be considered in advance of study milestones, e.g. national holidays are not a good period for performing a submission.
- Identifying clear timelines early on and making sure action plans are reviewed and agreed by all, with stringent follow-up, must be established and consequently followed through. Following up can be required to achieve clinical trial timelines, but a fine balance is needed to make sure no delays are caused. The advice coming from local teams, as they are experts in their country, should be followed, since the local project team members know the best way to achieve the result. The client should always be informed about the reasons behind following a different approach locally.
- Ensuring that the entire project team is regularly kept informed of the project progress, upcoming milestones, challenges, and achievements is paramount to success.
Celebrating Diversity
Finally, we should celebrate diversity. We learn from each other, improving our daily work. We can chat respectfully about our local traditions and experiences, and we should always share the progress/successes we are achieving together. As a multicultural and collaborative team in our clinical trial journey, our contributions are important to improve the lives of patients around the world.
Author:
Santiago Zas
Project Director, Linical