One Team, Two Countries: Amalga Group CEO Jens Erik Gould on Building Nearshore Culture Between the U.S. and Mexico
Jens Erik Gould, founder and CEO of Amalga Group, knows this challenge firsthand. After years of working across Latin America, including as a journalist in Mexico City, he learned a key lesson: building a company across two countries takes more than aligning operations. Employees must feel like they are part of the same team.
Why Does Nearshore Team Culture Require Deliberate Work?
Amalga Group’s structure makes that challenge concrete. The company has U.S. offices in Dallas and Salt Lake City, and operations in Mexico in Monterrey and Mexico City. Its Mexico-based support functions, including customer experience, legal operations, sales, finance, and engineering, support U.S. companies.
The economic connection between the two countries is already enormous. U.S. goods and services trade with Mexico reached an estimated $964.1 billion in 2025, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. Proximity and aligned working hours are also important advantages of nearshoring. Monterrey is less than a two-hour flight from Dallas and sits in the same Central time zone, so a client can walk the operations floor and be home the same day.
But proximity alone does not build a shared culture.
Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley describes the challenge facing geographically dispersed teams as “social distance”: physical and cultural separation can weaken emotional bonds and contribute to misunderstanding and mistrust. Her research on global teams emphasizes building unity while still recognizing differences in location, language, and identity.
For Jens Erik Gould and Amalga Group, this difference is critical. A nearshore team cannot just be an extension of headquarters; employees in both countries must see themselves as equal contributors to the same company.
“The mistake is thinking that proximity automatically creates alignment,” says Gould. “Being in similar time zones makes collaboration easier, but culture still has to be built. People need to know that their ideas, their work, and their perspective matter regardless of which side of the border they are on.”
What Makes Employees Feel Like One Team?
Amalga Group has experimented with simple ways to create those connections. For instance, the company has hosted a remote Fall Guys tournament, providing employees with an informal setting to interact beyond client work and scheduled meetings.
There are also opportunities to connect in person. Amalga Group recently participated in a service trip to a center for underprivileged youth in Baja California, which Jens Erik Gould described as bringing people together from both sides of the border to support communities and vulnerable children. The experience gave participants a shared objective unrelated to KPIs or client deliverables.
These activities do not replace strong management. The goal is to give relationships a place to grow.
The business reason matters as much as the human one. In nearshore outsourcing, a team that feels like a second-class extension of headquarters turns over faster, and every departure costs the client process knowledge and rework.
“Building one culture across two countries takes more than putting everyone in the same meetings,” says Gould. “You need to create opportunities for people to connect, while also giving those relationships room to develop naturally.”
Why Isn’t Technology Enough?
As Jens Erik Gould notes, cross-border collaboration has become technically easy. Teams can share documents instantly, hold video meetings, message colleagues, and manage projects from different countries. For a nearshore company operating in overlapping U.S. time zones, those tools remove many of the obstacles formerly associated with international work.
Technology makes it easier to connect, but it does not create a feeling of belonging. An employee can join every meeting and still feel like an outsider. This risk grows if leadership or recognition is focused on one country. The real challenge is making sure geography does not create a main team and a secondary team.
How Can Leaders Build One Culture Across Two Countries?
Building a single culture across the United States and Mexico does not mean asking employees in one country to become more like those in the other. Instead, leaders need a common purpose while appreciating local differences. Neeley’s research argues that global leaders should recognize those differences while deliberately highlighting unity.
Leaders must make sure geography does not create two classes of employees. Teams in Mexico should not feel like an add-on to the U.S. group. Communication, recognition, leadership access, and development opportunities should show that everyone belongs to the same company.
Employees also need opportunities to get to know colleagues across the border beyond daily tasks. Cross-team projects, online events, and face-to-face gatherings help build trust. The aim is to ensure no one feels like the “other” team.
What Should Cross-Border Culture Ultimately Achieve?
Amalga Group’s experience shows that nearshoring is about more than shifting work closer to the U.S. Aligning schedules, technology, and processes can happen fast, but building trust between locations takes time.
For Jens Erik Gould, the goal is not to erase differences between U.S. and Mexican teams, because those differences add value. The real challenge is building a company where geography does not decide whose opinion matters.
Frequently Asked Questions About Nearshore Teams in Mexico
What is nearshore outsourcing?
Nearshore outsourcing places a dedicated team in a nearby country rather than a distant one — for U.S. companies, most often Mexico. Amalga Group runs nearshore teams from Monterrey and Mexico City, both in Central Time, with U.S. offices in Dallas and Salt Lake City.
Why is culture harder to build across a border?
Physical and cultural separation creates what Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley calls social distance, which weakens trust even when time zones align. Proximity removes scheduling friction; it does not create belonging.
How close is Monterrey to the United States?
Monterrey is less than a two-hour flight from Dallas and operates in Central Time, so clients of Amalga Group can visit the operations floor and return the same day.
About Jens Erik Gould
Jens Erik Gould is the Founder and CEO of Amalga Group, an American-owned nearshore BPO and outsourcing provider headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with delivery centers in Monterrey and Mexico City. Amalga Group builds and manages dedicated nearshore teams for legal, financial services, technology, telecom, retail, and healthcare companies — including legal intake, legal call center, records retrieval, contact center and CX, back-office, and finance and accounting operations — at 40–50% below comparable U.S. cost. Amalga Group is ISO 27001 certified and HIPAA compliant, with SOC 2 Type II in progress. Prior to founding Amalga Group in 2021, Gould worked in the financial sector, contributing his expertise to firms including Apollo Global Management.
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