Global Policy Forum

By Saritha Rai

Arun Kumar had never shaken hands with a foreigner nor needed to wear a necktie. He vaguely thought that raising a toast had something to do with eating bread. If it was dark outside, he greeted people with a "good night." But Mr. Kumar, 27, and six other engineers graduating from the local university with master's degrees in computer applications, were recently recruited by the Hyderabad offices of Sierra Atlantic, a software company based in Fremont, Calif. And before they came face to face with one of Sierra's 200 or so American customers, the new employees went through a grueling four-week training session aimed at providing them with global-employee skills like learning how to speak on a conference call, how to address colleagues (as Mr. or Ms.) and how to sip wine properly. "Teetotalers practice by sipping Coke out of their wine glasses," Mr. Kumar said at the session in early July.

As more and more service- and knowledge-intensive jobs migrate to India, such training programs, covering some substance as well as style, are increasingly common at companies with large numbers of Indian employees.It is particularly imperative for employees of software companies to appear culturally seamless with Americans. American clients account for more than two-thirds of India's software and services export revenues. Growing at 30 percent a year despite a global downturn, the sectors account for 18 percent of the country's total exports.

Sierra Atlantic, a midsize software services company whose clients include the Oracle Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., says that one-fourth of its 400 employees, all but a handful of them Indian and most of them working out of the Hyderabad offices, are constantly interacting with foreigners.

For Sierra and others, including the Bangalore-based Wipro Ltd. and Infosys Technologies, two of India's largest software and services exporters, the training in Western ways is intended not only to help employees perform daily business interactions with American or European colleagues and customers but to help the companies transcend their image as cheap labor.As India's software companies expand, they are competing to hire the most skilled engineers. And Mr. Kumar is typical of the thousands of eager young engineering graduates from small-town India who are thronging India's technology hubs - cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai - in search of these jobs.

Though he and his peers are technologically adept and fluent in English, most lack the sophistication needed to flourish in a global business setting. "It is not always understood that speaking a common language, English, is rarely a guarantee of communicating the same way," said Partha Iyengar, vice president for research at Gartner India Research and Advisory Services.

That point has been increasingly driven home as top Indian software companies like Infosys, Wipro and the Bombay-based Tata Consultancy Services have moved to the next level of competition by offering product development, call centers, support services and bidding on multimillion-dollar deals. Such companies already provide services for some multinationals, primarily those based in the United States, including General Electric, American Express and Nike. They are expected to gross an estimated $12 billion in export revenues this year, up from $9.5 billion last year, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies, the industry trade group known as Nasscom. And that means more contact with customers and clients abroad - and more often as full professional partners. "Your interaction with people of alien cultures will only increase," Col. Gowri Shankar, a 30-year veteran of the Indian Army and Sierra's trainer, told Mr. Kumar and half a dozen other young engineers that morning in July, "and you should be equally at ease whether in Hyderabad or Houston."

Colonel Shankar and some other trainers are on the staff of their companies , though some companies, like Wipro, bring in Americans.The Sierra programmers listened raptly as Colonel Shankar listed common complaints: speaking one of India's many languages in front of foreigners, questioning colleagues about their compensation and cracking ethnic jokes. Some things he covers are not acceptable in any corporate setting and some are particular sore points with foreigners. He is fiendish about punctuality and a stickler for protocol. "Americans are friendly, but do not slap an American on his back or call him by his first name in the first meeting," said Colonel Shankar, whose training materials are fine-tuned by information from programmers returning from trips abroad.

Across the world, Global Savvy, a consulting company in Palo Alto, Calif., trains high-tech employees to work together in projects around the world. "The training in American culture is not to make Indian software professionals less Indian," said Lu Ellen Schafer, the executive director. "It is to make them more globally competent." Among Ms. Schafer's clients are Cisco Systems and the LexisNexis unit of Reed Elsevier as well as Wipro and other Indian companies. Ms. Schafer says she urges her American clients to refer to Indians as "consultants and partners," not "contractors and vendors." She prefers to train Americans and Indians together, to stress that globalizing is a two-way street.

For the Indian software companies that have expanded their lines of business, there are new cultural challenges. "The Indian programmer mind-set is to provide only what is asked, but the consultant is trained to offer alternative viewpoints," said Ranjan Acharya, corporate vice president for human resources development at Wipro, which has trained 650 of its employees in what it calls "power consulting." Still, he said, "we train our people to appear right,'' without appearing to be the final authority.

The pressure in consulting, a business many of the top software companies are trying to ramp up, has become intense as global giants like Accenture expand in India. "While Indian companies do very well at the low end," said Andrew Holland, executive vice president for DSP Merrill Lynch, "global corporations still prefer to look at large consultancies like Accenture higher up the chain."

And the competition on the low end will soon include software companies from countries like China and Russia.

Companies that distinguish themselves as strategic partners will separate from the low-cost pack, said Marc Hebert, Sierra Atlantic's executive vice president for marketing.

Whether the cultural training will make a difference is unclear. "As an aggregate, Indian software professionals have not changed in the way they present themselves," said Peter Nag, vice president and global program management officer for Lehman Brothers in New York, which is a client of Wipro. "We find that Indians hesitate to say no even though we ask them all the time to speak their minds. Then there are small things, like getting up from the seat when a senior colleague enters the room. This feels strange." "But there are many good individuals _ technically qualified and culturally sophisticated," he added. "They are the types we would hire here on Wall Street."

Still, some companies training their employees say they are already seeing the benefits. Sierra said that in February its Indian unit won a bid against a technically able Indian competitor because the Sierra employees were seen as a better fit. "It all adds up to better rates and bigger projects," said the project leader, Kalyani Manda. Ms. Manda said she noticed a difference when she herself conformed, even in a seemingly minor way. On her first trip to the United States three years ago, she wore a salwar kameez, a loose-fitting Indian garment, and felt totally out of place. "On the next trip," she said, "I wore pants, fitted in better and delivered more."

As the training of Sierra's fresh recruits progressed, Mr. Kumar, who has never written a letter before except to his family, exulted, "I wrote a business letter to my project head which I began with 'Dear Mr. Hari.''' A colleague, Aastha Vij, 23, was equally jubilant. "I'm actually looking forward to meeting my first American client," Ms. Vij said. "I'm no longer nervous."

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