India - The Road to Excellence

Recently, I met with a senior executive from Europe. He heads the IT operations of a well-known European bank in Chennai, India. He has been living in Chennai for the last nine years and it was interesting to see India and her modern IT workforce through his eyes. While talking about the work life here in India, one of the most interesting phrases he used was, 'I always wonder when I will find a European worker in an Indian office.' On the surface this might seem like a supercilious comment. However, there is a reason behind his search for a European worker in India and he most certainly does not mean European by ethnicity. After a discussion with him, I realized that what he alluded to was that he wished that Indians adopt a European attitude towards corporate life.

To better understand this statement and its implications on our current and future generations of Indian corporate workers, we must consider the key differences between the work style of Indians and Europeans.

During our conversation, we started discussing aircraft and I was talking about the comfort and safety of the Boeing 777 - of which I am a big fan. The Boeing aircraft are built at the state of art Boeing plant near Seattle in the United States. The senior executive from Europe started talking about German engineering and its excellence and how influential it is in today's motor world. Sometime during this chat, he quietly slipped in a question - would I get into a plane that was entirely built and assembled in India? Although I wanted to say, 'Why not?' my conscience told me to shut up. When he saw my response was muted with a reluctant smile and said, 'It is fascinating that Indians work better abroad but don't do the same quality of work in India.'

I have worked in India and abroad and I know that this statement has a lot of truth in it. There are many variables at play when comparing the quality of work delivered by Indians in their native country and abroad: motivation, the financial aspect, lesser bureaucracy, higher quality of living, and possibly even a constant reminder that they are foreign workers all creates the need and pressure to perform better are all variables that favour better work from Indians while they live abroad. Whatever the parameters may be, the underlying fact is that our work lacks quality at home.

The primary difference between the way we work in our corporate offices here is that somehow we seem to develop a careless attitude towards work. Whereas a worker from Europe does the same standard work whether he works in his home country or abroad. Sadly, the poor-quality Indian way of working is not limited to the corporate world. We see sub-standard services at hospitals, government organizations, public services,, telecom industry, internet providers, airport authorities - the list is almost endless. Poor quality has almost become a benchmark in itself. In places where excellent quality should be expected, we bow our heads and accept anything that passes the bare minimum criteria. This mentality is so deeply-rooted in our culture that it has, today, paved the way for Westerners to fear that nothing of great quality can be expected from Indians.

Another key difference between the Indian mindset and a European's is that, generally, European managers do not have a fear of getting their hands dirty. When you see Indians in managerial positions, they generally do not 'have the time' to look at the details of work done by their teams. They do not like to assist their staff with the day-to-day operational duties. In short, a manager starts to consider himself solely as a supervisor and avoids being a subject matter expert.

The third difference is something that we start to see right from a very young age in India, starting with the way we perform at schools. With our school systems forcing students to believe that writing volumes in exams or staying back late for special classes will guarantee good grades, it is easy to carry this mindset into the corporate world. This results in producing copious amount of useless work and staying late at the office with the vain hope of becoming productive. However sophisticated our offices look, however expensive our systems are, and however polished and westernized we may appear to our Western counterparts, the harsh reality is that we are still considered 'third-world.' This is not because of the explosive population (a large percentage of which still lives dangerously near or under the poverty line) or because we are still largely dependent on agriculture for our GDP. The face we present to the western world today is primarily through Information Technology and other corporate channels. Westerners don't come to India to judge us based on our farmlands or the quality of village life; they visit cities and corporate offices and see the work we do there. These are the segments of India that hold the most educated, well-travelled, multi-culturally exposed populations. This face of India is what needs an incredible amount of sincere and credible change toward better quality in delivery of products and services. Every Indian worker that faces the globalised world today should rise up to the challenge of being quality-centric and committed to all work he or she does. The day this happens, I believe Europeans will start flying in planes that are built in India. I hope that day is not too far into the future.