Recently Matt was telling me that there was a certain amount of backlash in "The Valley" against working with Indian or Chinese colleagues. Not because they are not competent. But because it required people in California to stay at the office late in the day to be able to attend meetings with their Asian colleagues.
Interestingly, on the east coast, the situation is a little different. We benefit from the willingness of our colleagues in India and Eastern Europe to stay late for meetings (sometimes quite late). In order to be considerate to our colleagues overseas, we scheduled our daily SCRUM meeting early in the morning. By early, I mean 9:30.
Now, what is starting to happen is that our employees are complaining that this meeting does not match the core hours of our flexible time policy. The core hours are described in the employee manual as 10:30 - 15:30.
So begins the clash between HR needs and business needs. We need the help of our overseas colleagues to complete projects because there is not enough local talent to answer the demand. And we need to provide a comfortable, inviting work environment for our employees in all of our offices.
Anyone has smart ideas on how to solve this?
3 comments:
Hire people with young kids. They're in the office by 9. Don't expect overtime.
Offer bagels in the morning? Make sure there isn't enough for everyone. You snooze, you lose.
There are a few short-term solutions like offering incentives for those who come early and what not. But I see the long term solution is to change the mind set, this means explaining to the employees that the overseas resources are part of the success of the organization, they are not competitors but rather partners, if they fail in doing their jobs because we can't come half an hour early we will fail as an organization too.
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