USA – Part 4 - The Working Environment

It has been almost four months that I have been working in US and I must admit the experience has been great; touchwood! The entire approach seems different from that back in India. The focus and priorities seem to be well defined.

This is my first experience of working from the client’s location. The first day I had been a little apprehensive of how things would turn out; but touchwood it has been like a party so far. The most amazing thing that I found was the amount of value they give you as a person. It took me a while to get the computer as I landed up in US on a short notice and the company has a lot of processes before they issue a computer. But, it was a pleasing surprise to be allotted a designated cubicle with name plates on it (This is quite different from working as a Service provider where often with the projects changing one has to play musical chairs and have no fixed place). My Lead Engineer got all the things arranged for me. From getting the required badges to internet connection and stuff; he got it all done.

I came to US at a time when the economy was still going down with no signs of it bottoming out visible. In such scenario, one would assume a lot of cost cutting measures being enforced. So I used to find it odd when my colleagues out here used to take color print outs of almost all the reports for review. Back at office in India, the color prints required special authorization and was out of bounds for common use. The entire approach as I mentioned is different. The thought process out here is that saving on the color prints would just result in a minor incremental saving; but if the efforts are channelized towards saving on some core activity of the company or product design activity, the benefits would be higher. And this is quite true! We often tend to get entangled in looking at trivial things that we almost end up being “penny wise and pound foolish!!”

Another important aspect that I found here was the self discipline in the people working here. To my surprise, there were no measures to check if an employee has turned up for work or not; no biometric system and no flash cards. The company expects the work to be done; they work on Management by Objectives. So it doesn’t matter if one works from home or here; the work needs to be done. The use of technology like webex is widely used for this purpose. A big difference that I also observed was in terms of the internet usage. Here Internet is treated as a source of information and so each and everyone has unrestrictive access to the internet while back in India there are a lot of curbs on using internet back in office (Some of them are justified for meeting clients security concern; but when such restrictions are imposed for marketing people, it defies logic).

Constructive Criticism; often heard in training sessions is seldom seen practiced in corporate. However, I have seen that being practiced here. People speak up their mind; put forward their views even if it is completely opposite to the immediate superiors view point. Atleast this created an atmosphere where people feel for the organization and associate themselves as being stake holders. The paradigm shifts from autocratic leadership style to democratic (participative) leadership style. And if, I assume such an environment is present across all the corporate in US, it just justifies the reason for numerous success stories (successful organizations) in this part of the world.