Pain points of working in India — Understanding the Time Conundrum


“Traditional businesses — from diversified conglomerates to industry bellwethers — are realising that the flipside of an international CEO with a ‘global perspective’ is the difficulty in accommodating diverse trains of thought.”
International CEOs and our foreign university educated CEOs have similar pain points of ‘cultural mismatch’ while applying alien templates to Indic scenarios.
The pain point felt most frequently, is the Indian understanding of time. Judgements on attitudes and performance are often (wrongly) made on this single parameter. This induces anxiety and frustration on a day to day basis and erupts during performance appraisals.

The frustration of expat managers is understandable because the business practices they bring are deeply rooted in an Abrahamic template of being ‘vision-led-shepherded’, ‘compliance-audited’ with ‘written standard-operating-procedures’. This is alien to Indians, who have been brought up on an intrinsic Vedic template. Belief, is both subtle and deep rooted. And our beliefs drive behaviour. The Vedic and the Abrahamic templates vary fundamentally in their philosophy towards work, as is explained in the pictures below.

In the mind-boggling Indian diversity, a common identifiable thread is our concept of time. In the workplace , it takes the avatars of punctuality, deadline overshoots, last minute work a skewed work-life balance, all, collectively affecting the measurable output.
“In countries such as the USA, Germany, Switzerland, that are inhabited by ‘linear-active’ people, time is clock and calendar-related” says Richard Lewis writing in Business Insider. In such countries, people tend to treat time as a linear entity. The belief is ‘there was nothing before the Universe came into existence, and God will bring it to an end’. Connecting these two points is a straight line called time. It simply means, that they treat the Past as over; the Present is actionable in a series of small tasks, and plans are in place for the Future. Perhaps, the diagram below illustrates:

Linear active’ people are programmed to be linear, and cannot fathom why an Indian did not turn up when they say “I will be there in 5 minutes”. It is not that people want to be rude or uninvolved. It is just that, in their working style, being strictly on time is not seen as a necessity. The pain point is culture.
For most people, it is difficult to imagine that time could be connected to anything other than the clock and calendar.
However, there is another way. In multi-active cultures like the Arab, Latin and the Eastern hemi-sphere, time is event and people driven. It is not taken to be an absolute and diminishing commodity. Time can be manipulated, stretched, or dispensed with, depending on the work at hand and the people involved.
As Guillaume Sicard former President of Nissan India confirmed “Time management is quite fluid in India. They will work late hours into the night, even on weekends, to meet the deadline. Americans or Europeans would never do that. There they believe in a strict 8 to 5 pm working day.”
The belief here being, that there was no ‘big-bang’, the (Multi not Uni)verse always existed, without a beginning or an end. Yet this formless, ever expanding Universe does not stay the same. Every yug is different and repeats. To quote Richard Lewis again, “…cyclic time is not seen as a straight road leading from our feet to the horizon, but as a curved one which in one year’s time will lead us through “scenery” and conditions very similar to what we experience at the present moment…..”
In the ‘Present’ we are co-creating our ‘Future’ based on our ‘Past’, all three being a ‘real and simultaneous’ experience.
Rather than frustration, the positives might be more interesting to explore. I decided to explore, the impact this could have on day to day work-life, as is explained in the table below:

This table is by every means incomplete and completely open to disagreement. It might just be helpful in ‘pain-point’ management to help understand how the ‘other’ side of the world lives and works.
In the next part, I would like to put my thoughts together on work meetings (that rarely start or finish on time ! ).
Sources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-understand-time-2014-5?IR=T
[Source:https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/argumentative-too-emotional-are-indians-tough-to-work-with/articleshow/45638709.cms]
