Comment by xwolfi
5 years ago
People who go to HR over this...
I am French and I work in China with a lot of Indians. It's been interesting for everyone to say the least. I swear and speak my mind way too much for a corporate Indian, so much that when I spoke frankly to someone higher than me telling him his process was useless and was going double our wasted time for really only the appearance of regulatory compliance, all he could say was ... thank you. He d never met a younger subaltern resist a stupid idea in India before, in public :D
And of course it's neither our faults: in a French company we spend maybe more time fighting each other than doing the work, while in India they double their wasteful process every 2 weeks to a point they all do their job well but produce nothing at all :D
I've worked in France, US and Finland (all that is super subjective). In France you talk and take informal breaks all the time. In US you occasionally take a long break with a colleague. In Finland the breaks were organized and everybody took them (some food, tea, coffee). TBH I prefer the Finnish way. I'm fine with the US one, but I dread the French way.
What you describe as the "Finnish way" seems like it would translate better to a distributed company. I've been working remotely for over a year now, and I've found that those serendipitous conversations by the coffee-machine "French way" breaks just don't happen remotely.
I don't have much experience with remote besides COVID and it was in US so I have no idea of the cultural differences.