“In Switzerland delays are not acceptable. After one minute you are late, and if a meeting is planned to finish at 10 am you can leave without any excuse, even if the meeting is ongoing.”
”In India, we always ask the people about their family and background to understand them better and make a personal rapport, here in Europe I feel people are not interested to share about family or not coming forward for personal connection in the workplace.”
“In Switzerland, I was trying to implement a management control for the extra hours in the factory in order to avoid that people include in their report extra hours not really done (as Latin, I can understand people being motivated to increase the hours if they know that there is no control). HR swiss explained to me that everyone should be reporting the hours really done, and that he cannot imagine that someone can include more hours than the officially done.”
“Different rhythm of life and impact on working process as well. No decision will be taken fast, immediately in Turkey , even with the remark “CRITICALLY URGENT”. Prior to take the decision, people will take a cup of tea…. ”
“In Switzerland, tense conversation. Each sentence must stick to the business, no extra comments, and no funny stories!”
"In Portugal, I had embarrassing situations by calling people using family names without position treatment of “ Sr. “ or “Sr Engenheiro” or “Sr Dotor” "
“In German speaking countries, you address someone formally by saying “Sie”, and by applying the last name. This causes sometimes confusions, especially in emails (Austrians then write “Dear Mr. Prof. Dr….”, although this sounds very strange for foreigners. Otherwise, Austrians might feel upset if they are only addressed by their first name without using academic titles); especially in communicating with old people you have to take care of this”.
“If you ask Austrians “how are you?”, they will truthfully answer your question (if someone has a headache, he also says this). In most other countries, people always answer this question with “fine”. This led to embarrassing moments for some of my friends."
“I attended several meetings in Austria that were finished sharply because we were running out of time (one hour had been scheduled for that meeting though the meeting was important). It seemed that the meeting could not take more time than expected though no one had any other meeting right after ours.”
“The use of academic titles generally very important in Austria (and to a certain extent in the Czech Republic), whereas not at all in the UK (one must have one, but one must not call the person Dr., etc.)”