Outsourcing: Evalueserve Interview (Part 6)

By guest author Tony Scott

Cultural Differences: Can Indians and Chinese Provide High Value-Add?

Tony: So let’s talk about this as it comes to the culture of the people providing this “high-touch – technology-enabled” model. First of all, you have four different locations from which you are providing services. Do you find differences in the cultural approach of the employees whom you have in those locations? How do those differences impact your ability to deliver this kind of model to your clients?

Alok: Definitely. I think that India and China tend to be more hierarchical in nature and tend to be more “yes-oriented societies” for cultural reasons from the past – whether it is because of the Chinese culture of all these kings and emperors, or in part because of the British culture in India. But I think that one can actually change cultural behaviors. To a great extent, you can modify a culture that people have grown up in and achieve what you want to achieve. For example, there is no particular reason why I should be the one who is coming up with innovative ideas and why the person who is actually doing the quantitative programming won’t come up with innovative ideas. Instead, if anything, it may be that exactly the opposite is true because the quantitative programmer is closer to the client. He or she knows the problem better than I do, and the likelihood is that that person may come up with better ideas than me. That doesn’t mean that it takes away responsibility from me, but it does imply that the more junior person cannot just be a “yes man” and follow whatever I say as if it is the rule of law.

Tony: But sometimes those behaviors are really ingrained – how has that worked across your locations?

Alok: It takes time, but again these things are not easy to change. We see for example in Chile that people are much more like Americans or Europeans, less hierarchical in nature. In Romania, we haven’t been there that long yet, so it’s kind of hard for us to say. In India and China we have tried to at least modify the culture within our centers.

Tony: So when you look at the cultural issues, has that created a challenge for your company in terms of being able to move into higher level products and technology-enabled services?

Alok: Initially, yes. But now that we are nine and a half years old, the culture internally is the Evalueserve culture, which is a mix of course of the Indian culture or the Chinese culture or wherever we are working, and the core cultural values that we as a company believe are important.  It has become easier over the years, but it is definitely always challenging.

Tony: What have you done internally to try to overcome that?

Alok: Part of it is an obligation to train. We had a two-day training session for all the project managers and group managers in early March, and this is precisely the entire theme of the conference. We are stressing the notion that innovation is important, moving up the value chain is important, and providing higher quality or value-add is important, and to do all of that, bringing up internal ideas from all levels is important. We are bringing in external trainers to help change our employees’ viewpoints on this.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Outsourcing: Evalueserve Interview
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