What did we learn in the past 18 months...
Spending the last year and a half in one of our large offices in India I’ve learned so much about how another culture works, lives and plays.
- Bangalore has a job market that is continuing to grow and gets highly competitive at all levels.
- Since I was typically hiring individual contributors and junior level managers I got a taste of how this market impacts loyalty.
- People will leave at a moments notice with every excuse imaginable just to get out of their obligation of a 30 day notice period.
- Much of the workforce is in their early to mid 20′s and have a very casual approach to work, it’s nothing for them to have multiple deaths in the family over a period just so they can not work for days or weeks at a time.
- They are quick to scream favoritism when those that work really hard earn opportunities to do work outside of their normal duties.
- They are exceptionally clever. They find every way under the sun to buck the system if given the opportunity.
- They will pressure high performers to work less so they aren’t expected to do more... Which means they’re capable of doing a lot but would rather not.
- Junior leadership is often afraid of the “tough” questions their teams may ask when something changes.
- Independent thinking is not common and often frowned upon or shut down by senior management.
- The incentive system is poorly designed and does not foster productivity, in fact it drives mediocre performance.
- You don’t want to overpay because they’ll just take that salary and try to negotiate higher somewhere else.
- You don’ t want to pay too low because the quality of worker diminishes significantly. Ironically the lower paid workers work harder but they aren’t generally as skilled.
- Most of the businesses serve other businesses so they don’t see your company’s clients as their clients, YOU are usually the client.
- If you have them speaking to your clients you need to set the tone up front about who they serve, why and what’s expected.
- Job titles/ Designations mean everything.
- Being social is important, especially during meals and hanging out after work or on weekends.
- They are very detailed and will ask a lot of questions and work hard to be precise in their execution of tasks.
There are so many things learned at different levels in the organization... These are primarily at the individual level. Senior Management is a whole segment unto itself.