Professional Approach- India vs Abroad (Page 2)

Sowmyaa, Jassi was a secretary so she used to bring juice and all..but still I am not sure if doing personal stuff is part of a secretary's job or not. I agree with you Aparna, Americans do give importance to family life..My employer is so understanding and I can take days-off / work from home when I really need to. Whereas in India I was working more than 10 hrs a day. I was expected to keep working and my mom used to be so pissed-off that she called up my boss and kind of scolded her.

Bringing Juice /coffee tea in where i worked in India was the peons job !! I don't recall our Office secretary ever doing these jobs Although we(Managers) did occasionally use our Office boy/ peon to do our personal work like pay a bill or pick up laundry ( that too after we buttered him , spoke to him sweetly and tipped him a little )

JJKN is a very bad example of professional life in India, to put it mildly.

Arre' ya all T.V serials are pathetic examples . Even this Sahara One Serial - Kittu sab janti hai is about a T.V News Channel . What they show makes you want to laugh !!

Aparna I agree with your views about bosses in India expecting you to over stay and not respect the demands of your personal life. I work mostly with Asian bosses. Asian managers are not as easy to work for as an American , European or best of them all an Australian. They expect you to work long hours...but somewhere down the line do acknowledge that u have a life out of office. Japan is the most peculiar place where your boss works so hard that you feel mighty guilty about leaving! but yeah.. no one is as bad as desi boss

Sowmyaa, back to the topic, I would say some of it is prevalant in the government sector. I have seen it first hand amongst my fathers colleagues. Of course , there will be the sycophants who will run errands and try all kinds of things to please their bosses but it is more or less a custom where a senior official's secretary or a junior official will carry his bags , arrange tickets and so on..

I have no first hand experience but from what I have heard from cousins etc. , it is true that bosses in India in private sector delegate you more work and expect you to work like dogs thinking about your family last. Reminds me of an incident when my bro was working more than 12 hrs a day to meet some deadline and one evening around 9 PM he went to a nearby PCO to call his home and met his boss there, and his boss aked him what he was doing here, he should be at work and when he said he came to call his home, he said whatever, do fast and get back to work. He was utterly pissed off.

That is what I usually hear from friends in India too that they or their husbands have no time for their family.

But in US also, if you have a desi boss there are chances that there will be politics and chamchagiri specially if your boss has worked in India and gone through it. But it usually isn't that bad.

Best I have heard is Europe where people take 2 hr lunch break and have a nap and leave at 5 sharp. Nobody forces you to work more than that and you are never under pressure.