Comment by stingraycharles
1 day ago
My favorite part of German work culture is watching an excel sheet together and going over the numbers.
My actual favorite part of German work culture is that meetings always have an agenda, that part is a delight when doing business with German customers.
Your meetings have an agenda? We just debate something and are stuck on some minor unimportant point that doesn't matter and the meeting goes into overtime and then we schedule 2-3 follow-up meetings where everything we said is now completely irrelevant because our assumptions were incorrect from the start. And then you finally get to work and you can't implement it like it was specified since everyone forgot that you can't really do X so you have to it some other way making everything that was discussed completely moot.
Sorry, the zoom meeting link has changed so now the meeting will take 4 hours and you must get the agenda by FAX.
(this is what happened to OP)
I toured a German Siemens factory and was startled by the unfamiliar safely culture.
Big bits of equipment moving around fast and limited guard rails.
The culture of taking personal responsibility is vastly different to where I’m from.
As a German I envy your meetings with Germans