Culture Shock Challenges – Liluah to London Syndrome

Culture issues are the utmost critical challenges for all the Industry in this world of globalization and most of the companies are taking several measures to address them. However it’s got a different dimension for the IT and the ITeS companies who have a unique challenge of employing fresh engineering/science graduates out of college in large nos.

With my personal experience in both IT/ITeS space I have seen companies recruiting fresh engineers/science graduates etc who are brilliant in their studies and have been extremely competent in terms of knowledge and skills as required for their jobs.

However many of the fresh recruits have grown up in small town and villages from where they moved out to Engineering Institution/Colleges at Kolkata and other big metros for their professional studies. Upon completion of their course they have been recruited in large IT/ITeS companies and within few months they were given overseas assignments of importance based on their technical skill and initial performance at work.

This makes absolute business sense for the company considering the candidates potential to deliver and career sense for the individual as this opportunity will surely add immense value to his/her profile. However in this perfect win-win situation lays a challenge which I call “Liluah to London syndrome”

To explain this better lets take an example of a situation where the employee happens to be a bright student studying in any of the good district schools and cleared the State Joint entrance examination successfully to get through in any of the leading Engineering Institution in the city for his/her BE/BTech degree.

In this entire process he was primarily restricted to his village or town and might have traveled from his home town to the city by local train or bus. In cases of exception he might have traveled by express train but surely have not availed high end express trains like Rajdhani or Satabdi and certainly not the domestic airlines to visit other places far off.

The reasons are clear and more or less the same where the employee’s family could not afford to go for intermittent vacation due to financial constraint.

With this backdrop he is now being suddenly asked to board either British Airways/Lufthansa or Singapore Airlines to leave for London/New York or Singapore on official assignment for a reasonable period of time. This is actually a huge paradigm shift for someone who was never been exposed to adequate domestic traveling which is usually the basics and foundation for an overseas travel.

This situation or the (so called syndrome) is unique for the industry and creates major culture shock challenges which leads to initial confusion, misunderstanding, apprehension, adjustment problems which might lead to attrition, dissatisfaction, unhappy and disillusioned employees.

Most of the companies have realized this (I am not sure about syndrome :)) in different form and shape and today several organizations have a well placed grooming session for all employees leaving for overseas assignment. However keeping in mind that on the job exposure is better than classroom learning it would be a wonderful suggestion to make people travel first to domestic destinations before asking them to leave for overseas locations.

It is always better to hop onto Lucknow in between before leaving for London from Liluah !!!

Contributed By:

Mr.Ranjan Sarkar

(Associate Vice President-HR, Acclaris)