Engaging with Indian Companies and Workforces

We’ve begun a pilot programme called Engage which helps British, European and American businesses work more effectively with Indian off-shore companies and visa versa. Each context has an entirely different set of challenges.

I’m Learning As We Go

Yesterday, Ved, Progga, and I sat down with the principals of a company for whom we offered a two-hour training session before they flew off to work with their call centre. The feedback was fascinating for me as a Westerner who has yet not been to India, although Ved and Progga were not surprised.

Where I Come From: Going Backward to Move On

I’m new to ThinkPlank and joined as a specialist in learning. Most people use the word training.

However, if you read the learninglaboratory blog, you’ll know I don’t like the word at all. Training is too often substituted for learning — it entails acquiring skills in a single context to be used in a limited number of ways.

Learning, on the other hand, focuses on acquiring skills and the ways to use them across contexts. The confusion in priorities is the reason for complaints about graduates not knowing how to think through problems and workforces being unable to innovate.

But I digress.

Back to Learning In and About Indian Workforces

For those of you who are interested in learning this and more, Ved will be giving a lot more information and context for work in India at ThinkPlank’s workshop in two weeks.

For now, here’s what was most relevant for me in our preliminary discussions when shaping face-to-face communications training:

1. Trust is a big issue and effects every aspect of business. There is much less transparency in the problem-solving approach, with a tendency to delay or disguise bad news. This can be a problem when trying to fix things going wrong. If you don’t know where the problem is coming from (or why), how do you fix it?

2. Trust effects the ways in which you can work with people. There is a much lower tolerance for expression, both emotional and physical, and that makes breaking the ice harder. Without penetrating the usual work mode, it’s obviously very challenging to learn about the people in the workshop. Without that, it’s (again) hard to find the reason for problems and help solve them.

3. Lack of trust is cultural to a developing and transitional environment — it’s not necessarily personal. So it’s a bigger issue than it would be if it weren’t so ingrained. Such deep rooted behaviour can not be changed as adults. As Ved said, if you want to create a concert pianist, you get them at 14, not at 24. So how do you get around and over this?

4. Theory and practice don’t meet often when it comes to fulfilling a task. Many Indian software engineers can tell you exactly why and how something is done, but this fluency is not often demonstrated in the problem solving and when faced with unstructured problems.

5. The “Process” is often the goal. In other words, processes get so much focus that the actual output becomes less relevant in practice.

All that said, there are still ways around all challenges when working with people. Stay tuned as we explore.