Before I arrived in Sweden I read how they were very low context individuals, meaning communication is explicit and direct. People say what you mean and do not add a lot of filler. On paper that put Sweden and the US in roughly the same place, and I assumed it would be easier to adjust. That turned out to be about half right. Swedes are direct in the sense that when something is said, its said plainly. If a piece of work is not good, you will hear that it isn’y good, without any cushioning around it. Coming from a context where criticism usually arrives with a couple compliments, it definitely took some adjusting. However, I have come to enjoy it more because there is no decoding of what you are being told and everything is so straightforward.
Where I was wrong is in assuming that directness meant everything would be spoken. What I have found is that Swedish communication is explicit when it happens. A lot of meaning sits in what nobody bothers to say. Silence is seen as a message and usually that means it is fine. If something were wrong, you would be told. My clearest miscommunication came out of exactly that. Early on I was given a competitor research project with almost no direction. I was told what to find out and essentially nothing about how. No template or guidance on how to go deep. I interpreted that as instructions being incomplete, and I spent a while assuming I had missed a document somewhere. I am glad I did not ask that and tried to do it on my own.
What was actually being communicated was trust. The lack of instruction meant they thought that I could work it out and if not that I would ask. I only figured this out by carrying on, building my own approach, and showing what I had done. The lesson wasn’t that Swedes communicate less, its that I was listening for the wrong things.
The same pattern applied to feedback on ongoing work. Long stretches of quiet mean things are going fine. We would sometimes go a long time of just sitting there silent and working on our projects. In the US, I feel like there are a lot of regular check ins to make sure you are doing good. But that would mean something is wrong in Sweden. The hybrid element sharpens all of this. When a large share of communication happens in writing, the sparseness gets amplified. A message in Slack that consists of two words and no punctuation is completely normal and carries no tone at all. But when I was new, I gave everything a tone and it sounded negative than what was meant. In person you have expression and timing to ask a quick follow up. Remotely you have the words, and there are not many over here.
The other hybrid difference is that the small clarifying question has a higher barrier when it requires composing a message and interrupting someones focus. I noticed myself batching questions, and sometimes sitting on them longer than I should have. That is a habit I have had to actively push against because when they do not say much, it makes the gap farther and farther. Overall, it has been a tough but rewarding process. I am glad to have learned a lot about their culture and way of working and communicating. I hope to bring back some of these skills with me to the US.