INDIA
Sample Workshop

"Mission Critical Cross-cultural Issues

“Working Effectively with Indian IT Professionals”

Workshop Objectives: 

1. To increase the participant’s intercultural competency and confidence in understanding and working with Indian counterparts

2. To present an overview of key elements of the Indian culture and their impact on workplace behaviors, performance and communication styles, to include common misperceptions and stereotypes relative to American and Indian working styles. This will include an understanding of core Indian values, the historical foundation of Indian beliefs, perceptions and business behavior

3. To identify differences in American vs. Indian communication styles, presentation skills, motivational strategies, and issues resolution styles

4. To acquire practical skills and behaviors and develop best practices to effectively and productively communicate with the Indian team, to include business and social contexts, pro-active listening and feedback skills, practical discussion, negotiation, e-mails, face-to-face meetings and teleconferences

Module One: Major Challenges of Offshore Development Models

The workshop leader and participants share their experiences and discuss/categorize key issues and challenges in virtual and onsite team performance in the offshore development arena.     

Module Two: Introduction to India and its business environment

This module provides the India’s cultural mindset map relevant to the current work being done Client Company and TCS teams. This introduction of India’s key diversity issues (language issues, religion’s impact on behaviors, educational system differences, male-female relationships..) has been found to be a very useful foundation for latter modules dealing with workplace behavioral issues. 

Module Three: Comparison of Workplace Cultural Values: Indians and Americans

An analytical approach is utilized to define “culture” and “cultural difference” in the present IT context. After a short role play, small teams of participants engage in discussing/understanding the differences in the core Indian and American values.

DAY TWO

"Building Strategies, Skills and Action Plans for Working Successfully with Indians"

Participants have an opportunity to apply the learnings from day one in a very interactive, skills building approach with the use of client-specific critical incidents, case studies and other exercises. These may include the following the following topics:

1. How to improve brainstorming, idea generation and knowledge transfer

2. How to deal with the language barrier (Indian English: speed of speech, accents, pronunciation, enunciation, vocabulary)

3. How to minimize the impact of time zone difference

4. How to enhance the quality of face-to-face meetings as well as technology-enabled virtual communication (e-mail, phone conferences, and video conferences)

5. How to ensure shared understanding of project activities

6. How to build and sustain trust and long-term meaningful relationships with Indian team members (mentoring, socializing, understanding Indian names, gift giving, recognizing Indian holidays, personal assistance…)

7. How to manage issue resolution and avoid conflicts

Contact us to discuss how our training, consulting, and coaching services can help your company become culturally savvy.