Work Culture

This post is another written for Deshpande Foundation's blog. To read what others have written on the same topic, click here.

I arrive at the office every day at anytime between 9:30 and 11 am. Sometimes my coworkers are already at their desks and other times they stroll in an hour behind me. As much as I like to try to convince myself that I’m a morning person and that I can get much more done early in the day, the truth is that India’s work schedule is much better suited to my body’s time clock.

After I enter the office I am offered a hot cup of sugary milky chai (what I have affectionately come to call a hot cup of diabetes- it really has that much sugar in it!), a staple in the Indian workday. I’ve never needed a caffeine jolt and never liked coffee, but that cup of chai seems to pick me up, calm me down, and keep me going all at once.

At present, my work day largely consists of research—sitting at my desk meticulously planning with occasional meetings and trips to the field. After spending a year and a half in India, though, I have come to learn several things key to surviving in a local non-profit work environment:

1. Meticulous planning may be a great exercise, excellent in theory, and is certainly a worthwhile skill to pass on to your colleagues, but most people don’t plan, and even when they do, the plan is often ignored.

2. Meetings never start on time, most participants don’t actually participate, and meetings often run late because people’s mobiles repeatedly interrupt meetings.

3. Your superiors are “sir” and “madam” or “ma’am”, unless otherwise instructed. Those thought of as your inferiors will call you “madam” no matter how many times you tell them not to.

4. Your personal life and professional life will not be separate.

I think Giselle and Mari have described a great deal about the importance of personal life in a professional environment. I’d like to hit a little bit more on point 2, more specifically the idea that a meeting will have 8 attendees but only two of them will be making any sort of verbal contribution. Aside from the lack of personal-professional divide, this is the most important difference between my work life here and in the US.

Most people don’t participate in meetings because aside from senior officers, staff are not encouraged to voice their ideas, inside or outside of meetings. Even when they are, they often don’t speak up. At the risk of making broad generalizations and not offering much complexity where complexity is due, I see this as a broader product of India’s educational system and hierarchical society, where creativity, critical thinking, and confidence are not inculcated in the system and encouraged as much as they should be.

I see this as one of my greatest upcoming challenges as I pursue my work at Bhageerath. My top priority is evaluating Bhageerath’s programs, but I also want to leave knowing that the staff can work together to carry out evaluations in the future. This means forming a committee to oversee the evaluation, and training them in evaluation by doing evaluation. I will be using new and unfamiliar training techniques and require constant feedback and ideas.

What makes me confident that we can succeed at this is the personal relationship that I have built, and will continue to build, with my colleagues. Their acceptance of me as a person has made them more open to my professional ideas, and vice versa. Now we just have to wait and see how it works!