Culture Clash
|
| (Outsource Magazine - Sep 20, 2010)
|
By Outsource Mag |
India is the workshop of the outsourcing world – so isn't it funny that cultural misunderstandings still dog interactions between the workshop and the West? Funny, that is, until the costs start mounting up... In this Outsource exclusive, we bring you two perspectives on the reasons behind some of these misunderstandings: IndiaThink's Brandi Moore looks at how and why Americans sometimes get hold of the wrong end of the cultural stick, while Vandana Saxena Poria of Get Through Guides gives the view from the other side of the world...
Brandi Moore, India Think
Brandi Moore is the founder and CEO of IndiaThink.com, specialising in cultural competency training based on her extensive experience negotiating with and for Indian companies. She is an author, academic and online columnist for Outsource.
Vandana Saxena Poria, Get Through Guides
Vandana Saxena Poria is the CEO and owner of GetThroughGuides.com, a publishing and training company focusing on finance, accountancy and management. She works closely with the UK government and in 2008 was awarded an OBE for services to British Trade, Investment and Education.
The View from the US
Are you culture-blind?
Americans and Europeans often enter a relationship with India assuming business cultures are shared. This filters down to all aspects of the relationship including everything you need to deliver success: communication, team building, project delivery timing, and managing employees. But perhaps the most important difference between Indian and western business cultures is preferences around contracts; in India, contracts on paper are not valued in the same way they are in the US, the most litigious society in the world. I recently heard Julian Millstein a well-known outsourcing lawyer in New York speak about managing outsourced relationships and he said "by the time you call me about the contract, you have a real problem." He would be best served to provide that similar advice to his clients as they embark on building a relationship with India before they invite him to the table. Americans think relationships come after contracts are signed while Indians prefer to establish them before signing. If Americans build a strong relationship from the start, spending time with potential vendors before engaging in deal negotiations, they win because they have vetted the firm and its competencies and they have built relationships they will call on when things go badly. As a friend at a large outsourcer told me: "Americans that use time to build relationships are spending it wisely." For those of you that travel the RFP route, rethink your strategy. When companies engage Indian outsourcers before they send out a bundle of requirements they leverage the knowledge and expertise of three decades of outsourcing.
Outsourcing: people vs. tasks
When approaching outsourcing, organisations focus too often on reducing staff onshore and moving jobs to India, rather than selecting functions to eliminate. Ben Trowbridge from Alsbridge told me this is the biggest mistake new outsource initiatives face – for two reasons. First, moving headcount to India requires equal, if not more, management hours from the US. Managers must learn how to negotiate cultural differences and manage timezone complexity as well as bringing new staff up to speed – something many organisations don't prepare for. While this is happening, the organisation continues to view the role in the same way so the new employee in India is judged on the same basis. These two people of course will never be the same if only measured by proximity: it's difficult for a remote employee to perform exactly the same actions as someone who was previously in the office. The second problem with this approach is that Americans miss the value that outsourcing brings an organisation. Indian outsourcers have unique processes developed around tasks, not people, that offer efficiency. Trowbridge said most structures like this fail to provide the cost-reduction planned and organisations inevitably bring in consultants to design a more efficient plan a few years into the project.
Let India join the team
As the world moves to virtual workplaces, many of us don't have the right skills to make remote workers feel like they are part of our mission. This is critical for Indian teams. When I spoke with Ben Trowbridge, he said he was often shocked at how few managers ever make the trip to India. This makes it hard for groups on both sides of the ocean to feel connected. Jensen Crawford, from Fetch Technologies, relayed the same issue. Crawford knew his staff communicated with their Indian team over email but until he went to Bangalore himself, he "never realised how little information was actually making it to India." Crawford changed his model to develop a team approach. Initially, they thought of India as staff augmentation. Simply changing the vocabulary reduced the "finger-pointing whenever there was a problem" and started to connect people. Crawford also set up "cultural exchange trips where twice a year a member of the US staff would travel to India for a month and vice versa." Fetch included the Bangalore group on all team meetings and sent on the prized company swag, such as t-shirts, that seem to glue technology teams to an identity. By developing these relationships, the team began to thrive because they were working with other people, not just India.
Project transitions
Most westerners are accustomed to working in low-hierarchy work environments where big-picture tasks are assigned and performed independently with little direction. In India, specific tasks are laid out by the top of the organisation and pushed down. When these two philosophies intersect, problems show up. As Jensen Crawford reports, "Indians don't say ‘no', they say ‘I will try'" to those above them. This is a real problem when projects are sent off to India from onshore teams without context and with weak requirements: India is in the dark but the onshore team assumes they will devise solutions by thinking out of the box. Sudhakar Shivashankar, a Program Manager for WalMart, relates how this problem is exacerbated when the India-based team arrives late to the project after all of the design and strategy has been completed. With "limited or no proximity to the end customer, the outsourced partner in India may not understand certain business decisions, justifications and urgency to meet customer demands." Shivashankar recommends replicating positions, such as architect and business analyst, in India and the US to streamline project transitions. "The idea that requirements and designs can be thrown to India rarely works." By using a team approach, the gap of conceptual conversations and decisions is eliminated.
Virtual tools
Indians tend to be indirect communicators while Americans are very direct. This difference leads to emails from the US asking very direct questions with responses from India that appear to talk about something else. Indians are more attuned to keeping harmony in communications. In an outsource relationship, this is magnified because the US is the customer and the goal is to please the customer. It's very difficult to interpret messages from an indirect culture when accustomed to a direct communication. Americans often do not have the training to see all of the subtlety that Indians are skilled in adding to their communications. Solution? Tools with rules. The use of tools eliminates some cross-cultural issues.
The View from India
Welcome to Incredible India!
It's not called incredible for nothing. The country, its people, the culture, the history, the languages, the traditions, the religions, the geography, the patience, the tolerance, the intellect, the traffic, the rich/poor divide, the big/small divide, the various local and international attitudes, etc – it's all just simply incredible! And the only way to know and understand this is to spend some time in India. We are a culture of contradictions.
With such diversity, there is still a great unity – teamwork and individual excellence blend in a very different way here than anywhere else. However, you do need to understand that we are not Europe or the USA, so whilst we may watch your movies and emulate some of your fashion trends, we much prefer movies with songs and dances and love our own brightly coloured fashion too…Whilst costs make India look all rosy and ideal, you do need to beware. We don't understand you as well as you may (or we) think we do! Health warning: some of the comments below are general and are not meant in any way to cause offence to either party!
Small talk is less important
When Indians are planning to woo a client in the USA, they will value small talk and the whole ‘getting to know you' part. However the US culture of ‘time is money' and ‘lunch is for wimps' does not go down too well with Indians in general. Indians find it puzzling that Americans are not so proud of talking about their children's achievements or the latest family vacation and want to stick to business.
Deadlines and time-keeping
It has to be said: Indians in general are not the best at time-keeping. Generally in family-run or local businesses, if a meeting in India has been planned for 10.30am, it will invariably start at 11am – and possibly even in the afternoon! The outsourcing sector is a lot better at time-keeping but generally this is a difference. By the same token, Indians are often over-optimistic about completing a task on time and would rather say, "yes I can do it by Friday", when they should really be saying "I need another week". Many Indians have not yet learnt that it is better to be more realistic and plan for a potential delay in the beginning, than go back and ask for an extension later.
Often it may be because they have not thought through clearly enough how many steps will be involved and how much time they will take. They are more concerned with ensuring that the person at the end of the phone is happy with their answer than actually considering if they can deliver on it. Instead of asking your Indian counterpart, "can it be done?", try asking, "what are the steps needed to implement this solution? Who can do it? How long will it take? So based on this, how much time do you really need?" Once you have the answer, still add a margin of 20% (but don't tell us you are doing that!).
Language issues
It is sooooo hard for Indians to understand other accents, especially when someone speaks, puts inflections and makes a joke at the same time. It is just too hard for us to understand it all at once. Equally Indians don't like it if you slooooowwwww dowwwwwn and speak as if they were in kindergarten. This can cause major issues, though, as there can be a lot of misunderstandings and, as explained above, Indians generally will not like to say they don't understand in case it makes them look bad. So the solution is to ask your counterpart to confirm at the end of the meeting their action items and why the action is needed. This will ensure that they are clear on what the problem is and what needs to be done about it. Also, because of the SMS culture here, you may get emails frm Indians in sme strge lking language – because there are short cuts for all words. Why spend 20 minutes writing in the Queen's English whn u cn abbrvte vrythg??? Indians do not fully understand the fact that Americans like proper formal reports in good English and full sentences. Oh, and the less said about Hinglish (Indian English) and English the better. Have you plugged a lacuna lately? Or pre-poned a meeting? Look, there are probably more Indians speaking English than those in English-speaking countries, so who's to say the US/UK version of English is the correct one anyway?
Misinterpreting requirements
Controversial to write, but it has to be said: the Indian education system is far too theoretical and does not teach people to think outside the box enough. So when a client asks for possible solutions, it can be a struggle. If Indians have not been taught effectively to reason and come up with possible solutions, you can't expect them to be able to do so overnight. We are not talking about the top ten per cent of the population (remember most of them would not be working in the outsourcing industry, or if they are, they are at the top); we are talking about the ones that westerners may deal with on a day-to-day basis. Please do not judge by your standards – if you think that you are so bright, why is India the world-leader in IT solutions? So we can do it, but we need to expand this to more of the Indian population. Patience is a virtue – just confirm back what needs to be done, why and by when.
Sometimes, the way we do business in India means that we simply cannot understand the requirements of a client in the US or Europe until we see for ourselves what the problem is and you come here to understand why we have a problem. For example, a friend of mine runs a company in India which draws maps for all over the world. In early 2004, they were approached by a UK company to do a streetmap for London. The Indian team kept making ‘simple' mistakes, like not being too careful about road names, positions of churches etc.
The UK client was getting increasingly infuriated as each page had to be proofed hundreds of times; in the end, they got so fed up that they got on a plane and came to India. When they tried to get directions to the office (no street maps available here - or if they were, they were grossly inaccurate), they suddenly understood why the team in India were having problems. The UK client then paid for two of the Indian team to visit London and understand the issue. When the Indians landed in London they were shocked to see how every street was labelled, how the underground was easy to navigate and the quality of maps that were produced. They went back to India full of new ideas and subsequently there were no further problems.
Understanding customer service and empathy
To a large extent, customer service does not exist in India (unless you count walking into a shop and then being followed around incessantly until you leave). So we do not have many examples to relate to when it comes to what is thought of as ‘good customer service' by western standards. Indians are not always sure of what you mean by "be more friendly with customers". Asking about family is too invasive, but talking about the weather is boring. So where is the mid-point? In India, we talk about cricket, Bollywood, the Monsoon delays, kids' education and local soap operas, for example. This cannot be done with Americans, so what do we talk about? Times are changing though – India's younger generation thinks global and acts local. There is a great similarity in thinking professionally with the western world, but Indian society's strong family roots and relationship orientation are very important and cannot be ignored. Equally, the mind-body-spirit balance evolving in India is proving a good indicator for tomorrow's world. The key is to give each other credit and respect. It goes a long way. |
|
© 2012 Alsbridge, Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy