#NotesFromMyCornerOffice - Issue 2 Of "Chai", Calendars & Cultural Code-Switching: My Take on Thriving in Both Indian and Global Workplaces

The Comfort of the Familiar

There is something undeniably comforting for an Indian to work in an Indian company. 

For two decades, I worked exclusively in Indian MNCs — big, fast-growing brands, where everyone spoke the same cultural shorthand. Meetings started with "How’s the family?" before pivoting to business. Your colleagues got you — they understood why you took a chai break at 4 PM, why festivals meant impromptu holidays, and why a "5-minute meeting" stretched into a 30-minute discussion. Time zones? Not an issue. Hierarchies? Understood without explanation. There was an ease to this familiarity, a rhythm that felt like home.  

But home, while comforting, has its limits.

In an ecosystem where everyone thinks alike, growth often follows predictable paths - similar approaches, similar blind spots, similar ideas. I didn’t realise how much I’d adapted to this mindset — until I joined Revolut.  

My first month here was a revelation. The first time I suggested a "quick call" to my London colleague, I received a politely baffling response: "Can we sort this via Slack first?" Meanwhile, my Mumbai team was already dialling in, deep into solving the problem. In that moment, I realised I was straddling two worlds — each brilliant, each maddening, and each with something vital to teach the other.  

The Indian Workplace: Where Relationships Are the Real Operating System  

There is magic in how Indian companies work. Walk into any office at 4 PM and you’ll find: 

• The chai network where more deals happen than in boardrooms  
• The human algorithm — when Ramesh from Finance "knows a guy" who can fast-track approvals  
• The festival effect where Diwali decorations appear mysteriously overnight and productivity politely vanishes for three days  

We excel at what global firms struggle with:  

• Speed of trust – Need alignment? One hallway conversation beats six calibrated emails  
• Contextual intelligence – No one needs explained why "urgent" means "yesterday" during quarter-end, or why a certain email was priority one as opposed to the rest   
• Pace and jugaad – When systems break, we MacGyver solutions with Post-its and grit. What might take an American team somewhere 3 months to build, test and dog-food before launching, an Indian team delivers that as an MVP in 3 weeks and says - “if something breaks, we’ll fix it.”
• Scale thinking – "Will this work for 500M users?" isn’t a hypothetical here — it’s table stakes. 

But this comes with shadows:  

• The cult of availability – Late evening calls, weekend pings, cancelled leaves, the unspoken rule that real commitment means always being "on"  and always being a phone call away
• The documentation dilemma – Why write it down when Priya’s been here since 2017 and keeps it all in her head?  And what happens if Priya is unavailable? We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. 
• The ambiguity tango – "We’ll see" might mean yes, no, or "ask me again after the cricket match"  
• The response chase – Why look at this email now? Let’s wait till there is a follow-up call to actually get started

The Global Workplace: Where Systems Meet Soul 

My first month at Revolut was a masterclass in cultural code-switching:  

• German precision meeting Indian flexibility: When our European team insisted on perfecting a process our engineers would’ve hacked in hours, we created a hybrid — slower than what the India team would have liked, but with a solution that saved future heart-burn

• Brazilian "no stress" colliding with Japanese "perfect or nothing": Our LATAM team’s rapid prototypes got sharper thanks to Japanese exacting standards. And taught our South East Asian colleagues to take a chill-pill
• American directness tempered by British politeness: Learning to say "this isn’t working" without causing existential dread  

The gifts of global work are real:  

• Boundary ballet – Culture and colleagues who guard weekends and holidays like sacred territory (and expect you to do the same)  
• Documentation devotion – Knowledge lives in Notion, not neural networks. Everyone has access to information they might need - saves 100 hours of conversations just to locate who the ‘right’ person with the intel is.
• Clarity as kindness – No more reading between the lines of polite "shayads" (maybes). A Dutch designer’s "this design is bad" might sting — but will save weeks of revisions. 

Yet the frustrations bite:  

• The alignment avalanche – Getting people from five different countries to agree, makes herding cats look easy!
• The "but in my market" syndrome – Explaining why India needs 17 payment options to someone used to two  
• The professional-polish paradox – Missing the messy humanity of colleagues who know your kid’s exam schedule  

Cultural nuances get lost in translation — what’s assertive in New York is rude in Tokyo, what’s polite in London is passive in Berlin. The phrase "let’s circle back" means maybe in the U.S., no in Germany, and we’ll discuss after lunch in Spain.  And if you are Indian, you do know how Indians want consensus (especially when it comes from the Boss!).

Then there’s the myth of the "global monoculture" – the assumption that a Google meet with colleagues from 10 countries means everyone thinks the same way. At Revolut, each of our teams have an average of 3.5 nationalities, which has led to a shared culture built on curiosity, not conformity. Beneath the surface-level English fluency and corporate jargon, deep cultural currents shape how people communicate, make decisions, and define success.

The Real Takeaway: Be Culturally Bilingual At least Once, If You Get The Chance 

Make no mistake - I loved working for every Indian organisation I have been a part of, and am incredibly proud of my achievements every step of the way. And Indian workplaces are truly setting global benchmarks every single day! But if you ever get the chance, I’d urge you to expose yourself to a ‘global’ workplace.  Revolut rewired my instincts. And that’s the real value of a global team: it doesn’t just expose you to the world — it changes how you think.  

The next frontier of business is not just technical skill — it is cultural agility. The ability to navigate unspoken norms, to decode accents and idioms, to respect hierarchy in one meeting and flat autonomy in the next. You develop a global mindset. And that’s the kind of education no MBA can replicate.  

Because the best leaders aren’t just comfortable in both worlds — they know EXACTLY what to steal from each.  

Thoughts? Disagreements? Let’s debate. 🙂