CORPORATE/ GENERAL/ CULTURE

Differences in Corporate culture

The article is based on the experience between Indian and European Corporate Culture

I recently visited the office of Adyen HQ and Uber HQ in Amsterdam and observed what makes the employees there a costly asset as compared to the Indian Employees.

Well, one thing is for sure. We Indians are the best in the market if we have to solve any problem in the least time. To be precise, the problem arises after the deadline is over. However, in terms of productivity, we are far far behind other countries.

We Indians are bound to come on time, with a 9 to 6 shift, where the motive of most of the employees is to spend time in the office and Go home. Some Indian companies have also worked on flexible timings, but there is still a debate on whether it is fruitful as compared to the western people.

The biggest difference in productivity is, by the way, the Team coordinate. Short example (Amsterdam): Team has decided on a list of tasks that need to be performed to make a feature live today. The tasks are divided into the set of dependent and independent tasks. Independent tasks also include the Writing Unit Test and another task of executing these tests. Note that there is no testing team to test on the dev or stage environment. Now any member can pick any task and start working on them. As soon as any member gets blocked, the team senior will leave their task and will get the task of the team sorted. Once the picked task is completed, the member will pick up the next task. But, to note that the independent task is not allowed to be picked by the same member (Member who wrote the code will be different from one writing Unit test will be different from the member executing it). This way the team works together and independently. Most important, before the tasks are provided to the team, there is a complete analysis of the feature from the Business and Technical point of view. After the task has been picked, it is bound to be fully developed. To stop any tasks in between, even the higher management has to provide a fulfilling reason to the Product Team.

Now let’s discuss how the feature is built here in India. The management decides on some feature that needs to be built. The team is then provided with a deadline by when the work needs to be completed. The output is set in the mind of the team and all the tasks with the specified timeline are provided to all the members. Finally, the feature is tried to be rolled out, irrespective of how many patches are present in the code

If any problem is being found by a person, instead of highlighting the issue, there is a culture where the person reports directly to the team. Once the bug is resolved, the team then sends out a mail for the resolution of the bug, where they ethically point out to the person who actually found out the issue.

Whereas in India, if a bug is found out, people make it their duty to point out the bug publicly irrespective of how the affected team is going to correct the bug. Also, once pointed and mail shared that bug might even be deep forgotten.

They believe in the goal and cause of the organization. They work as if it’s their organization and also they are made to believe that they are important just like the management of the company.

In India, people are confused on to understand what the company is actually trying to achieve. Many times they themselves are not interested. Also, they only believe in the increase in their salary in every appraisal. Also, a new trend of changing a company every 1–3 years and getting a major hike is mostly in action among the employees. Few who are active in their initial years, with the interaction with their colleagues and their motivation level start to lose their interest as well.

Yes is a very important word. Being straightforward, a yes would mean that a person is very clear and he accepts something. It may be a deadline, a feature to be built, or agreeing to a viewpoint.

Whereas, in India, all the work starts with Yes. Which lead to delay in deadlines, chasing unrealistic targets, overburdening or even trying to work on something which is not even understood completely.

So now an Indian Employee would even prefer to work with these companies, even when finances are not even discussed. So before discussing different Indian NRIs becoming big CEOs, we should first improve our work culture so that these CEOs prefer working for Indian companies rather.