India Cultural Awareness Webinar

Many of our clients are moving to running training through webinars during the Covid 19 pandemic and today saw me delivering an India cultural awareness webinar for a UK-based aerospace and defence company who have number of large-scale projects in India.  This programme had originally been arranged as a ‘live’ training session but had to be moved online due to the current work from home policy in the UK.

On the whole, I find that webinars work best when restricted in length to about one hour but today’s session was so interactive that it stretched out to well over two hours and probably could have lasted even longer – if I hadn’t had another client webinar to jump onto.

The key issues which were raised during this India cultural awareness webinar centred around three main areas of concern:

• An inability to get the India-based suppliers to adhere to the project timelines and milestones which have been agreed
• The impact of metrics on the behavious observed within the India supplier team
• Whether or not having ‘boots on the ground’ in India would help to break some of the log-jams

These are issues which arise time and time again when running sessions on India and the difficult area to talk through is which of these challenges are caused by culturally different apporaches to day-to-day working and which could be clssed as more ‘business as usual’ issues.  For example, is the apparent inability to stick to project plans the result of the Indian hierarchical ‘command and control’ approach or is it simply that the team leader apparently has no project management qualification?

This question is impossible to answer unless you have a good knowledge of Indian business culture and that is why this type of India cultural awareness webinar can prove so invaluable to any business with interests in India.