Happy Diwali

Interesting event this week occurred as a UK accounting company with British founders sent me a Happy Diwali greeting. Further proof that the world is indeed changing. Can you imagine that happening 10 years ago? Far from being worried about cultural differences, smart companies are beginning to realise that the differences are small, they just need to be slightly more aware to stand out from the crowd.

Email – the big enemy of a global company

Sorry for the long delay in posting. I’m now back from my summer vacation feeling refreshed and ready to start posting. I’ve been talking about this internally for a while and feel strongly enough to publish!

I cannot stress how strongly I feel about email as a communication medium amongst geographically distributed teams. Email has become the easy way out; a fire and forget, backside covered, quick and easy method of getting your point across, issuing an instruction or complaining about something. After all, it’s far easier to send an email than try and talk to someone with a different accent to your own, in a different time zone and who may not be available to talk when you need to anyway. The reality is that email is one of the biggest trust and relationship destroying tools available within a global company, especially an SME. Emails are often misinterpreted, misunderstood or just plain badly written. Adding to which, more and more people are drawn into the discussion as issues escalate and others are copied in. More often than not, a point requiring simple clarification has escalated into a time wasting non-issue, that could have been nipped in the bud had the two original parties simply had a conversation with each other from the outset. Most things can wait until a convenient time to talk has been identified. A word of advice to any leader of a globally distributed company is to mandate voice or video communications wherever possible with email as a last resort or a follow up.

Cultural differences or trust?

Often issues when working with an offshore operation are put down to cultural differences.  But I wonder how much of the issue is simply one of trust between co-workers?  When you work side by side with someone and have lots of regular face to face interaction, it’s easy to build up trust.  With trust comes the ability to give someone the benefit of the doubt.  If a deadline is missed but isn’t usually, the natural inclination is to assume something out of the ordinary must have happened.

Add distance and a different country to the equation and only occasional face to face time, and suddenly doubt enters the equation.  The temptation is to assume the worst and be pleasantly surprised when things go to plan and deadlines are met. Fundamentally, trust goes out of the window.

Yes cultural differences will mean that people go about things in different ways but if you are able to build trust and assume your co-workers are fundamentally good at their job and have their heart in the right place, then actually everything should be fine

I’m not saying that you naively assume everything is ok from the very beginning.  Trust has to be earned, but once it is, you are better off assuming that fundamentally you’ve got good people who do their best to do a good job more often than not. On the other side, remote team members should realize that trust should not be lost of easily given away and everything possible should be done to maintain it once it’s earned.

This then becomes self fulfilling and the foundation of a high performing remote team.

What gives India its edge?

I’ve just arrived in India this afternoon and was thinking about a comment I heard yesterday from my barber of all people!

He spent his early years living and working across various southern African countries and has spent the last 20+ years living in the UK.  When I got my haircut yesterday, he said he had just come back from a short one week trip in India, the first time he had visited the country.  His comment that struck me was “everyone is so industrious and hard working.”  In particular, he thought this was very different from most other countries he had lived in.  “Even the poorest are prepared to work hard and not just hold their hand out and expect to be given something”, he continued.

I can’t comment on his experiences of Africa and I am sure he is generalizing.  There are bound to be plenty of hardworking, industrious people in African countries as well as a fair number of people in India that do not work hard.  But, overall, I agree with his observation.  India’s hard work attitude, it’s culture of education and the young age and size of it’s population will mean that most other countries will find it hard to compete.

PS. I have just seen a news report from the G20 conference.  This probably won’t get reported in the western media but Manmohan Singh (Indian Prime Minister) view of the conference is that this is the first time the views of emerging countries were taken into account and he felt that power was beginning to shift to the larger emerging economies including a stronger say in the running of the IMF.  I wonder if this financial crisis is not just cyclical but the beginning of a permanent structural change in the balance of power?

Cultural Differences – how to succeed in India

There are so many rules that I can think of for maximizing your chances of success when you run an operation in India. This week, one of the rules that really came to mind was the idea that you can never take what seems to be a no brainer situation at face value.

This weeks situation was one where we were to move into our new office in Pune. Everything was set for the move, scheduled on January 31st. In the western sense, every eventuality was covered. However when I arrived in Pune on the 30th, I began to wonder about what could go wrong at this late stage. My instinct told me that we needed an alternative plan. I asked my team to come up with a plan B. During the day we worked on the alternative plan and guess what, it became apparent through the day on the 30th that we would have to invoke that plan. The unthinkable looked like it was going to happen and eventually it did!

In the end, the move went ahead as planned with the usual teething issues. But there was a sting in the tail. Just as the move was happening, it became apparent that the submarine cable linking Asia to Europe and East Coast US had been cut causing a major Internet outage across India and the rest of Asia as well as the Middle East. The result, a shiny new office location, fitted out on time, designed to provide services to western based clients but with no network connectivity at all. As I write this, the team are working furiously to try and rectify the situation.

It just goes to prove, in India you need to think of the worst case scenario, and then double it and think what else could possibly go wrong! With that attitude in mind, you just might succeed in India!

Cultural differences – organizing interviews

So it’s been a while since I last updated my blog.  December was a write off and I am pleased to say January has gotten off to a flying start so it’s been manic.  I’ll try not to leave such big gaps in the future.

Today we are interviewing for two account managers for our UK operation.  The job ad was placed online before Christmas and to date we have had 17 responses from some pretty good candidates with wide and varied backgrounds.  We took the responses we had received up until December 28^th and decided to offer interviews to those that seemed to fit the bill, 7 altogether giving us just under 4 possible candidates for each position.  We decided January 10^th would be interview day.  We called each of the candidates at least 10 days ago to confirm their availability.  We then emailed the schedule along with the job description and a few days ago re-confirmed the interviews.  I do not believe we could have been any more organized.

As I sit here with my whole day allocated to interviewing, as of 3.15pm, I have had a total of 3 interviews so far.  The 8.30 interviewee turned up 10 minutes late, the second didn’t show up, the third was 20 minutes late, the fourth was on time.  The fifth was due to turn up at 2pm but still isn’t and the 6^th looks like they will not show up either.   Assuming the 7^th turns up, we will have had a 43% drop out rate of confirmed interview to the candidate actually showing up. 

The point here relates to cultural differences between India and the west.  Since starting this company, our clients always express concern that they get drop outs at interview stage in India.  We see drop out rates ranging from 10% to occasionally as high as 40% with no logic as to why it happens.  They say it must be cultural differences between India and the west and they sometimes get frustrated that this is the case.  We are constantly looking at our processes and our documentation to see what can be improved.  Having not done any volume recruitment in the UK for a while, I never expected to see exactly the same situation arise.  The reality is that as far as interviewing is concerned, there doesn’t seem to be any difference at all, in fact, I know in India we do far better than this

Brand India is tarnished amongst UK SMEs

I am becoming increasingly concerned at the perception of Brand India amongst the SMEs that we talk to.  Overall, an India strategy works.  Our own clients have mostly enjoyed incredible success as a consequence of deploying teams in India.  The big Indian outsourcers continue to grow at a phenomenal pace proving that India delivers.  However as we go out and visit potential new clients, particularly in the SME space, many companies prefer to consider Eastern Europe over India without really looking at the facts.

Eastern Europe has its advantages; shorter flight times and perceived easier cultural alignment (a European city is a European city is a European city).  hOHowever it also has some serious shortcomings, the biggest problem being complete lack of scalability.  It does not take long for an attractive destination to become maxed out and costs to begin to rise significantly.  Take Romania as an example, with a total population of 22m, the country has about half the population of a small Indian state and there are 28 states in India!  Our own company has operations in Eastern Europe because for some companies and some activities, particularly those on a small scale, the region makes sense.  However if everyone starts to see Eastern Europe as the only answer, it won’t take long for the location to lose its appeal.  Quickly add 1,000 high-end, high skill jobs to a typical Eastern European city and watch the costs rapidly rise to Western European levels.  Take Prague as an example.

The concern I have is how India’s brand seems tarnished amongst those SMEs and from what I can make out, for no real reason other than rumour and conjecture. 

Perhaps with 10+ years of 40% annual growth amongst the major Indian players, Indian authorities and trade bodies don’t see the issue and have become complacent?

Perhaps the infrastructure and overall environment is causing an issue?  I know from personal experience that many are shunning India because they believe they’re bound to get ill during any visit.

Perhaps people are confusing consumer facing call centers in India that should never have been offshored in the first place with other more realistic activities?

We need to recognise that the decision making process amongst SMEs is different to those of large corporates.  With large companies, buying decisions are often made high up the organization with only symbolic and occasional visits to India by the top brass.  In these cases, it is left to middle management who have had little involvement in the decision making process to get on with the day to day execution.  Making the initiative work is good for their career prospects so these intrepid middle managers venture out to India for the first time and realise that it’s not as bad as they thought; the hotels are great, the food fabulous if they stick to some basic rules and the hospitality as warm as they will find anywhere in the world.  But most importantly, the people on the whole are great at their jobs and extremely loyal.

With SMEs, the senior management is hands on involved in both the decision and the execution.  They perceive that India is a difficult place where airports are crowded, hot and noisy, where you’re bound to get a dose of diarrhoea, where you can’t escape the stifling heat and where you can’t get people to work the way you want them to anyway.  After all, they keep seeing TV ads about banks and insurance companies bringing their call centers back home anyway.  With perceptions like those, they will not even consider India for a moment.

I believe Brand India needs some serious attention if it is to replicate its success to date amongst western SMEs.  The reality is that India has a phenomenal, scalable and intelligent workforce.  It has fantastic amenities, the airports may look shabby but the luggage usually comes through quicker than at Heathrow or JFK and no mainstream western airline can hope to compete with the service standards of Jet Airways or Kingfisher Airlines. 

It’s time India started reminding SMEs about this and why it has a unique place in the talent war that we are currently in.

Cultural Differences – Indians in Norway

One of our client teams recently arrived in Norway. Apart from being freezing cold and about 30 degrees Celsius colder than where they’d just come from, they were coping with the trip incredibly well. A few of the team had travelled to the US, UK and other countries previously but some had never been outside of India. Coming to the US or UK where there are sizeable Indian communities is one thing, travelling to a country like Norway is completely different!

Much is said about the negative aspects of managing and coping with cultural differences but let me give you another perspective. During my meeting with the team and over dinner with them later in the evening, two things struck me;

1. 11.  Last Friday (9^th November) was Diwali in India. This celebration in India is as big as Christmas in Christian countries. Everything closes down, it’s a time for families to get together. Yet despite this, 6 intrepid souls from India (some with young children of their own), were in Norway away from their friends and families.

2.   2.  One of the tasks that this team will perform is application maintenance. Upon arriving in Norway, it became apparent that some of the applications they were due to manage had Norwegian variable names and comments making the task extremely difficult. Rather than complaining, the team asked if they could take Norwegian language courses so that they could improve their productivity.

I’m not being judgemental about people from any other country; however I wonder how many other nationalities would have the same attitude as these guys. For all the discussions about cultural difficulties, of course there are issues to overcome but there are also positive attributes that bring balance to the issue.

To our team in Norway, (you know who you are), I am proud to call you my colleagues.

Finally, to the client representative who is looking after the guys from India (you know who you are!), THANK YOU, you are making a world of difference to these guys and making their stay that much more pleasant.

Managing Cultural Differences

I had lunch with a UK based client today that has a team of IT professionals in India.  Much of the conversation centered on how best to manage the team from a cultural perspective.  Should an empowered style be used or a more autocratic style?  What’s best for maximizing productivity?  I would say that there is no hard and fast rule and that it very much depends on the team that you have and their experiences.  A team of very high end professionals with global experiences will not take well to an autocratic, command and control management style but a team of less experienced professionals may prefer clear and specific guidance.  I believe it is dangerous to generalise on how to run a team in a specific country.

While on culture, I was reminded of a situation last week.  I was in Bulgaria with another client and we were in a bar in Sofia.  Around the table were 3 people from the client organization (a UK listed software company) including one of their executive directors.  Next to the executive director was a young Java developer from Sofia.  What struck me was the ease with which the conversation flowed between the two.  There were none of the hierarchical barriers that I have witnessed in other countries.

But with both of these points, the overall comment I have is that you should not generalize.  All countries have their cultural differences, some positive, some negative but in the main all manageable.  It is possible to get productivity in almost any country as long as you are sensitive to the working culture and most appropriate management style for your team.

Finally, an interesting note on globalization.  I have just spent two hours on a call with some of our people in Oslo, Chicago and myself in London.  The purpose of the call was to go through our new web site, page by page, checking content, making amendments via the content management system on the fly and getting an agreed list of actions for launch.  The conference call itself cost nothing (Skype Conference Call) and Jennifer in Chicago can go ahead today and carry on working on the site during her working day (it’s almost 9pm where I am but only 3pm where she is).If this isn’t an example of globalization in action, I don’t know what is.  The barriers are gone, you can get work done anywhere, and if you get it right, productivity can soar.