Team culture

Some time ago I was doing a project in Germany. I worked closely with a lot of people at the client, on location in Germany.  What better way to discover the cultural differences

I was surprised. Germany and The Netherlands are neighbouring countries, but there were more differences than I expected.

Compared to Dutch people Germans have a more formal way of communication at work. So it’s possible you are good friends for years, but still in business meetings you will call each other sir/madam (if other people are present). In The Netherlands you almost never call somebody you know sir/madam, there are other ways to show you respect people.

It’s also always clear what the hierarchy in the company is, lot’s of people even have that in their signature, which makes escalation paths really clear . Disagreeing with somebody above you in the hierarchy is not done in Germany, but Dutch people are always ready to discuss everything with everybody, because it is possible you have a better solution for a problem than your manager. On the other hand it does take much more communication time in NL because of that.

Because of the different cultures within this project (German, Dutch, Greek, Romanian) the culture in the project changed from the local German working culture into a mixture best suitable for this project. For example everybody was on first-name base, but decisions from higher levels were always accepted as a fact.

As always a project team should find its own culture for maximum performance. Working with people from different cultures means you have more options to choose from and more to learn from each other. Of course if the cultural differences are big, everybody needs to change their behaviour more to fit in the culture, althought the tendence is to stay closest to the clients culture.