This column continues the results from an informal survey conducted by Kriengsak on perceptions of the characteristics and behaviour of Thais and expatriates working together in Thailand. This column provides expatriate reponses; the previous Thailand Tales presents Thai perceptions of Expatriate Colleagues. - (Eds.)
| What are 3 strengths of Thais with whom you have worked which you would like them to sustain? |
- Loyalty, if they feel they are treated well according to their criteria
- Friendly Patient
- Thai design people are usually more creative. This is a position I find easy to employ in Thailand. When I ask for marketing staff, I got many good selections.
- Social Bonding - Smiling - Helpfulness - Caring - Politeness - Positive attitude - Service oriented attitude - Teamwork - Sense of duty
- Working with details (This is a pro but also a con) as in business sometimes "sufficient" is more effective than "complete".)
- Staff take more care in respecting seniority. Usually in my country it is not quite common as we address each other just by the first or last name whereas Thais take care to address seniors as "Khun" This was quite uncomfortable for me when I first arrived.
- Thai People are more co-operative among colleagues when a project is assigned to them.
- Sense of belonging - once they know where the company is going especially when they can identify the role they have to play
- Ability to work long hours without question
- Jai yen (Patience), certainly is a strength to maintain while at the same time maybe be somewhat more open to farang colleagues about own ideas and thinking, this will improve communications
- Sensitivity, Thai people are more aware of other people's emotional reaction than most farangs, very good in human relations
- The ways Thais address problems amongst themselves. They are very careful to preserve the relationship with another person and this means that office harmony is preserved
- The importance of trying to develop a personal relationship before doing business vs. a foreigner who wants to get straight down to business without bothering about the need for establishing personal rapport.
- The respect for authority. If you work in an organization where there is an opportunity for putting in procedures for routine work, I have found Thai's will follow procedures much better than foreigners doing like tasks. The foreigner does not show respect for authority e.g. a foreigner is much more likely to disobey a safety rule than a Thai in an organization where safety means the difference between getting hurt or not. In Thailand I managed to run a company that statistically was 4 times safer than a similar business in my country and we were part of the same multinational group
- Their ability to accept and work with foreigners.
| What are 3 weaknesses of Thais with whom you have worked which you would like them to change? |
- Time management
- Process driven (no flexibility based on personal initiative)
- Failure to separate personal and professional life
- Work ethics
- Seniority system
- Communication - not speaking up when they should / Lack of assertiveness in negotiations
- Personal Chitchats, which has nothing to do with work and which sometimes leads to gossip and rumors.
- Personal Commitments - do not set goals when something has to be accomplished in a given time.
- Thai Staff generally learn to work "just enough", although they are more detailed, but they usually don't take pride and effort to excel in their work.
- Thai Staff (at least in my case) generally don't get very excited to see the rest of the world - not even their own country. They don't know much about the current situation of the country. Over my last year I have been to more places to learn about the situation and culture than any of my staff. I think this would help the individual to understand the entire business structure of Thailand, if not they would only be able to handle a Tambon business. (Sorry, I may be little frank but my comments are from an international business view).
- Thai people should be more honest in terms of their declaration. Most resumes I see state fluency or good command in English. In fact, many could not hold a decent dialog in an interview. I was told by my staff that that is a norm in Thai as not many expect that this part of the experience is tested. I could not accept that as an excuse.
- Acceptance of change, Thais usually like to stick to the current work practice and change always disturbs and annoys them.
- Thais like to bring friends into their business. I never like the idea for example, when it comes to buying products or services, they would recommend their friend regardless of whether it would benefit the company. (This was my experience, helping a friend is not a big issue, but not caring about the company is something I don't quite like).
- Walking out on the company without notice but expecting to be paid all benefits.
- Not taking responsibility for workloads at critical times.
- Expecting more for nothing.
- Reactive work methods rather than proactive (requires more supervision)
- Analytical ability, especially the ability to identify a potential problem
- Foresight
- Curiosity, critical thinking - on the one hand maybe too curious about personal matters, Nit-Noy irrelevant to work while at the same time less curious about understanding casual relations, trying to have an open and critical, questioning mind (Samkan for scientists)
- Not alerting their farang boss about a problem until the disaster has or is about to strike
- Not committing anything in writing
- Tolerating and protecting corrupt work colleagues
- Lack of ability to work together as a team
- Telling you what they think you want to hear rather than the truth e.g. I can get this job done by next week, but when next week comes it has not been completed and in reality was never going to be done on time
- More proactive to ask questions, and seek clarification, particularly about job goals and targets
- More proactive to say "there's a problem"
- More proactive to suggest improvements
- Change mind-set from 'show me the procedure and I'll follow it' to 'what end result do you want me to produce and how much flexibility do I have to get to the agreed end result?'
- Less 'blindly' following the status leader
- Less waiting for the 'peechai' to indicate what happens next
- Companies need to be more focused on the right person for the right job, rather than quite often putting wrong people in jobs and often recruiting staff who are massively overqualified for the job
| What behavours do you think you exhibited that have discouraged Thais with whom you have worked? |
- Work like the army style. I started working with the Singapore model, that is tasking and expectation. That is a complete failure. Later I noticed that all the staff expect training (proper) instead of on the job.
- Speaking in English profoundly caused a staff barrier with me. Slow down and speak in broken Thai. This helps a lot later.
- Generally, the staff I had don't like to be left alone. They want to be guided.
- Favoritism - when an employee performs well with task, we become dependent on them and it looks like we show favoritism to this one employee.
- Not smiling enough when they greet me.
- Directions to not eat in the office
- Directions to not use mobile phones in the office
- Directions to be more competitive.
- Not to issue corrections or reprimands in front of their colleagues. I have also noticed that there is a negative feeling if I ask them a question that they don't know the answer to - some of my staff can't actually say "I don't know". I have to remember to just keep talking if that appears to be the case.
- 'Too strong', direct critical reactions to their work
- Not keeping promises
- Too serious, thinking too much
- Challenging an incompetent but senior Thai publicly in shear frustration at his stubbornness
- Lost my temper in my office. Having said that it did result in my staff not allowing a situation to develop again that might result in such an outburst, but the staff were very unhappy at the time.
- Not realizing that saying 'no' is impolite and upsets people
- Not realizing that there is a language barrier, sometimes forgetting that staff who speak good English are not native speakers of English, and that a misunderstanding has occurred
- Take owns job too serious
- Too task orientated
- Too straight and outspoken
| What have you done that successfully changed Thai staff to improve their performance? |
- Training, training, training
- I try to make it clear where the responsibility for completing a task lies,
particularly one which is repeated each month. My main aim is to make each team member as self sufficient as possible with regard to their day to day tasks. I try to stress that it is not my job to tell them what to do in every case. So over the past 6 months we have come to a situation where all regular correspondence can be passed to the account managers without instructions, except for unusual cases, and I can be confident that it is being dealt with. This leaves me more free time and I think all of the team respond well to the added responsibility. This also exercises their analytical skills on a regular basis. Of course it is not possible to help anyone improve unless they want to. The hard work has been done by the team members, the success is theirs, not mine.
- Induce critical, independent thinking
- Motivation to understand work and own role/contribution rather than direct knowledge as orders/job descriptions
- Understanding the importance of continuous improvement and adaptation
- Used my senior Thai connections when staff did not want to accept the changes that had to be put through egg the dismissal of a senior manager. Once they knew I had the connections and was prepared to use them, they were more prepared to deal with me and accept the direction I wanted to take the company
- Sacked incompetent staff who hold back the organization
- Supported and encouraged Thai women in all positions from shop floor through to director level. By doing this we were able to get a nice balance into an organization between the female desire for establishing certainty and security with the male characteristics for managing chaos and risk taking. Many of my farang colleagues share my view that they enjoy working with Thai women, and in many instances find they are more competent than their male colleagues. Likewise they find them much easier to work with than western women.
- Involved them more in meetings.
- More emphasis on payment for performance More individual coaching of staff
- More training, specific to job needs
- Keeping a promise and earning their trust.
- I adopted your techniques mentioned in Thailand Tales on meeting with Thais on leaving the translation to someone else. This worked but some staff felt that I didn't give them a chance to speak English. I had been telling them that learning English is daily - business decision is immediate. A good illustration is I usually don't speak English out of my office or business, I correspond with a Chinese or dialect such as Teochew/Hokkian, etc. That does not stop me from learning English. Because I knew the importance of that in business it came so naturally.
- Training
- Leading by example (Work ethics)
- Fair but tough guidance without favoritism
- Start to learn Thai language
I don't want to interpret the above raw responses. I will let you decide how to use them. If you have any comment, please feel free to email me. If you have more things to add to the list, please let me know as well. I would like to thank all the contributors who spent their time and effort in response to the questionnaire.
Kriengsak Niratpattanasai
DBS Thai Danu Bank, Bangkok, Thailand
(We are pleased to advise that Kriengsak now also writes for the Bangkok Post)
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