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“Prepare to be frustrated and try to remember, it gets better”

Dutch culture training review
For even the most culture-savvy expats, Dutch directness inside the workplace can serve as a bit of a shock. According to ASML design engineer Marco Allegri, who joined the Dutch work culture from Italy, the transition can be a little frustrating. But, he says, once you learn where it stems from, you’ll learn to appreciate the typical Dutch communication style. Recently, he attended the training “How to be successful in the Dutch high tech work culture“.

Joining the Dutch workforce can be fraught with challenges, especially when coming from another country. While some cultural norms are easy to notice, learn and understand, others can be a little shocking or even frustrating for those with green behind their ears. In the Dutch work culture, it’s often that you need to look no further than communication. Not so much in terms of language-ability barriers, as the Dutch are extremely talented in a number of languages, but in their style of communication – where the “Dutch way” can feel a little, well, ouch.

Marco Allegri - Dutch culture training

Marco Allegri.

“Working in the Netherlands has been a relatively smooth transition for me. ASML has gone out of its way to provide me and other expat employees with all the necessary help, resources and a number of on-boarding activities to feel part of the team from the very start,” explains Marco Allegri, a mechanical design engineer who joined the Dutch semiconductor equipment giant after moving to Belgium from Italy. But, despite his positive start with the company, even he has to admit: there are certainly some cultural differences. “Compared to my previous job in Italy, I’ve noticed that the Dutch workplace has a very no-nonsense approach to work, with extreme attention to process, procedures and details, which was all a little new to me. I’ve also found that this down-to-business approach you find in the Netherlands can often result in communication or feedback that’s both instant and rather harsh.”

 

Can you recall a specific moment when you experienced this?

“Oh yes, definitely. It was the first time I received direct feedback from my previous team leader. We were in a meeting having a discussion, when suddenly he cut me off, almost mid-sentence, in complete opposition to what I was just saying. He totally disagreed,” recalls Allegri. “Let’s just say, this wasn’t something I was used to, and I didn’t dare to try to respond or argue. What would I even say?”

'Even if your opinion contradicts your boss or management, they want you to speak up'.'

In Italy, according to Allegri, 90 percent of the time, people probably wouldn’t speak up in direct opposition. And, if they did, it would have been full of niceties and politeness. “You’d take small steps and ask if you could add something, or mention that you had another perspective to offer, but never would you do it in such an immediate and direct manner,” expresses Allegri. “In Dutch culture, on the other hand, this is an expectation. Even if your opinion contradicts your boss or management, they want you to speak up – you just need to be sure you have supporting facts and evidence. That’s what drives people here. In Italy, it’s very hierarchical. Even if the boss is wrong, he’s right – because he says he’s right and he’s the boss. There’s not really room for discussion and it would never be so direct.”

 

Giving feedback

This experience served as a real eye-opener for Allegri. As he continued to grow within his role and the company, he saw this sort of communication style being used by nearly all his colleagues, especially those that were Dutch. “At first, you know, it’s really a bit of a shock. But that’s how it’s done here, and I’ve really come to enjoy it. It’s this style of direct communication that gives me a clear understanding of where things stand, what has to be done and how to achieve it,” remarks Allegri. “It’s never personal, it’s always facts first. When you have data to back up your opinion, you can be sure that the people here are open and will actually hear what you have to say. That’s kind of a new idea for me.”

Check out the training

However, for Allegri, there was still a real challenge to this sort of communication. In his experience and with his cultural background, giving this type of feedback was no simple task. That’s when he registered with High Tech Institute for the training: “How to be successful in the Dutch high-tech work culture”. “This training provided us with a really good theoretical overview on why the Dutch communicate in this manner. By far the most impactful information I received though, was in learning to provide this sort of direct feedback as well as how to deal with the vast number of stakeholders in meetings and in our day-to-day work,” highlights Allegri.

'The techniques for dealing with disagreements between or influencing stakeholders were enlightening.'

“The most helpful aspect of the training was learning how to structure my feedback, being sure to kick the ball, not the man – so to speak. Also, the techniques for dealing with disagreements between or influencing stakeholders and creating buy-in from a position without power. This was really enlightening and again put a real emphasis on using facts, data and figures to support ideas – that’s central to Dutch-style communicating. I especially found the exercises and scenarios that put the theory into practice to be useful. I wish we could have done even more because that’s something I’m still implementing in my work today.”

Culture training - participants working in groups
During the training participants work in small groups to practice the theory.

 

What advice would you give to other expats that are looking to work in the Netherlands?

“Sometimes, the Dutch struggle to put themselves in your shoes. You have to remember that they’ve grown up being integrated into the ‘Dutch way,’ which I’ve come to really appreciate and even favor. But sometimes, they lack perspective from the other side,” illustrates Allegri. “So, my advice to other expats coming to work in the Dutch high-tech is rather simple. Prepare to be frustrated. Prepare yourself for tones that will seem harsh and procedures that will seem endless. But also try to remember, it gets much better. That’s just the way things are done here, and they have a very strong track record.”

This article is written by Collin Arocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 9.1 out of 10.

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Rule 2: Focus on outcomes

Humans are habit-driven creatures. Some research suggests that up to 95 percent of the day, the average human is purely on auto-pilot, executing according to the habits that have been built up over the years. Habits have many advantages, including not needing willpower to execute them, but of course, there are risks. The primary risk is that one easily gets stuck in operating in an activity-driven way rather than an outcome-focused way.

Once you’ve clarified your purpose (rule 1), the next step is to concretize this purpose in tangible, concrete and measurable outcomes. Failing to do so often leads to a major gap between what you say you do and what you actually do. An illustrative example is often found in startups. Every startup wants to grow its business, but translating that ambition into actual outcomes requires setting specific targets. Yesterday, I talked to a startup where the co-founder responsible for sales had a very concrete goal for the year: go from the current 4 paying customers to 26. You may debate if 26 is the right number, but it for sure is concrete and specific.

Translating your purpose into concrete, tangible and measurable outcomes allows you to evaluate whether your actions and tactics are having the desired effect. For example, most companies want to shorten the time to market for new functionality. Specifically for functionality realized in software, doing more frequent updates in the field is obviously the way to go. Transitioning from yearly to quarterly releases, however, also means that release testing, updating documentation and all other activities related to a release have to be performed four times as often. Initially, many companies look to maintain the same, frequently manual, processes. Soon, however, it becomes clear that simply executing these processes faster won’t result in the desired outcome as the overhead is too high, people complain about the repetitive nature of the work, and so on.

When it turns out that the desired outcomes aren’t realized, the next step is to change your tactics. In our example, this means automating much of the work that’s now being conducted manually, so incorporating continuous integration and testing to increase the quality of the software well before the point where a release is scheduled. There are also tools for automatically generating necessary configurations of software, documentation, test case selections, and so on, that further limit the manual effort required to allow for more frequent releases.

If only a high-level intent had been expressed of shorting the time to market for new functionality, it wouldn’t have become clear that the current processes are insufficient. Instead, everyone would have complained about the difficulty of accomplishing things and the ways of working wouldn’t have changed.

One challenge I wrote about earlier is that we generally don’t control the outcomes of our actions. However, we can influence the outcome while allowing for other factors on which we have no influence. This means that when our actions and tactics aren’t resulting in the outcomes we hoped for, we need to assess whether this is caused by factors outside our control or our actions. For example, in stock market investing, poor returns can be the result of our selection of stocks and funds or due to a general bear market. The answer to this question can be easily answered by comparing your returns to a stock market index, such as the MSCI world index. If you’re doing worse than the index, it’s because of you. If not, it’s factors outside your control.

Translating a qualitatively defined purpose into quantitative outcomes is far from trivial. One of the challenges is that the defined outcomes often feel like approximations rather than accurate incarnations of your purpose. Here, the general advice is to follow the “perfect is the enemy of good” approach and allow yourself to start with some imperfect metrics. Once you’ve used these for a while, you start to learn where these work and don’t work. Following an iterative process, you can then, over time, come up with a better set of outcome definitions. Until, of course, you feel the need to redefine or adjust your expressed purpose.

'The challenge is to translate your purpose into quantitative targets'

I’m certainly not the first one to talk about these topics and several approaches exist for companies and individuals to use, including Hoshin Kanri and the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) model. The challenge, however, isn’t to pick the perfect system to follow but rather to sit down and translate your purpose into quantitative targets. For example, the Software Center for which I have the privilege to act as its director has the ambition to grow in size and impact. For 2021, the quantitative outcomes we’re looking to accomplish include adding two new partner companies and to double the number of social media connections we have on Linkedin, Youtube and Twitter.

Defining a purpose without connecting concrete, tangible, quantitative outcomes to it easily becomes aspirational without actual progress. Many have ambitions along the lines of exercising more, losing weight, eating better, and so on, without ever doing something about it and, consequently, never achieving the goal. Having clarified your purpose (rule 1) without clearly specifying the outcomes (rule 2) results in the same situation. Define a set of outcomes and, even if you’re far from satisfied with them, execute and iterate to improve over time. If done right, you’ll realize that you’re acting more and more in line with what you want your life to mean. Why settle for less?