🇮🇳 India · 🇺🇸 USA
By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
Picture two office workers at 9pm on a Tuesday. One is in Bengaluru, still at his desk because leaving before the senior manager would be considered, at best, eccentric and, at worst, career-limiting. The other is in Chicago, having logged off at 5:01pm, posted a meditation selfie, and is currently informing her therapist that she feels "misaligned with her company's values." Both are employed. Neither is particularly happy. The International Labour Organization reports that 51 percent of India's workforce logs more than 49 hours a week, placing the country second globally for extended hours — while Gallup finds that only 31 percent of American workers describe themselves as "engaged" at work, a ten-year low. Two countries, two crises, one suspiciously similar outcome.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Address senior colleagues as "sir" or "ma'am" until explicitly told otherwise | Leave the office before your manager, even if your work is done |
| Stay visible — attend optional meetings, reply to late-night messages promptly | Openly disagree with a superior in a group setting |
| Build relationships through small talk, shared meals, and chai breaks | Assume a vague "yes" in a meeting means the answer is yes |
| Expect decisions to travel up the chain before coming back down | Interpret "we'll see" as either encouragement or refusal — it is neither |
| Bring something to offer collectively; the team is the unit of achievement | Confuse warmth and hospitality with flat hierarchy |
| Be patient with layered approval processes; speed-running them creates enemies | Assume written job descriptions define the actual scope of your role |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Use first names immediately — "Mr. Johnson" will make your CEO visibly uncomfortable | Assume informal culture means your job is secure |
| Speak up in meetings; silence is read as disengagement, not respect | Stay late performatively — no one notices, and it reads as poor time management |
| Be direct, specific, and brief in emails — no elaborate preambles | Take "let's circle back" as a commitment; it is a polite deferral |
| Document everything — agreements, feedback, task ownership — in writing | Assume a friendly workplace means an emotionally safe one |
| Treat one-on-ones as a forum to flag issues early | Wait to be told what to do; self-direction is both expected and evaluated |
| Read the DEI and benefits fine print; policy gaps matter more than stated values | Confuse "open door policy" with "you are genuinely welcome to use it" |
The first thing a foreign executive notices upon joining an Indian corporate office is that nobody disagrees with the boss in a meeting. This is not because Indian professionals lack opinions — they have plenty, delivered with considerable force in the lift afterwards — but because Hofstede's cultural dimensions index assigns India a power distance score of 77, compared with a global average closer to 55. High power distance means deference to authority is structural, not personal. The boss is not merely a manager; the boss is a node in a network of obligations that stretches, in some cases, all the way to familial metaphor. Colleagues refer to senior figures as "sir" with a sincerity that would cause most American middle managers to short-circuit entirely.
This hierarchy is reinforced by genuine precariousness. India's private sector labour market operates with limited formal protections for white-collar workers, and job insecurity — real or perceived — compels many employees to signal commitment through visibility rather than output. The result is what researchers politely call "presenteeism": the practice of remaining at one's workstation long after productivity has departed for the evening. The average Indian worker clocks 46.7 hours per week according to ILO data, but in the glass towers of Hyderabad and the co-working corridors of Bengaluru the figure climbs considerably higher. A 2025 job listing from a Bengaluru startup requesting staff for an 11am-to-11pm, six-day schedule was met with online outrage — mostly from people who were not being offered the job.
The controversy reached a cultural inflection point in late 2024 when Larsen and Toubro chairman SN Subrahmanyan publicly mused that employees should work 90 hours a week, asking rhetorically what they would do sitting at home "staring at their wives." The remark drew immediate condemnation from across the business community, including RPG Group's Harsh Goenka, who responded with an eloquence best described as pointed. L&T issued a clarification. Subrahmanyan did not retract. The debate crystallised something real about Indian corporate culture: the aspiration toward extraordinary effort is genuine; the question of whose extraordinary effort benefits whom remains, as ever, conveniently unexamined. That Boston Consulting Group found 58 percent of Indian workers reporting burnout — the highest share among eight countries surveyed — suggests the effort is, at minimum, having consequences.
American corporate culture presents the opposite problem with roughly equivalent results. The Hofstede individualism score for the United States sits at 91 — the highest of any country measured — which means that the American worker arrives at the office as a sovereign self, expects to be addressed by first name by the CEO, and reserves the right to regard any hierarchy as provisional. Provisional being a polite word for "subject to disruption by a better offer." Power distance scores just 40, meaning that disagreeing with one's manager is not merely acceptable but, in certain tech-adjacent cultures, considered a demonstration of creative vitality.
This flattening of hierarchy produced two decades of hustle-culture mythology — the fifteen-hour days celebrated in founder memoirs, the open-plan offices designed to communicate that work was not a job but a calling. Then the pandemic happened, remote work became normal, and a generation of workers discovered that a "calling" without a commute was just a job with worse boundaries. "Quiet quitting" — the practice of doing precisely what one's job description requires and nothing more — entered the cultural vocabulary and has not left. Gallup's 2024 data shows 31 percent of US workers as engaged, 17 percent as actively disengaged (what Gallup clinically terms "loud quitters"), and the remaining 52 percent occupying the philosophically rich category of "not engaged." That majority is, statistically speaking, present, logged in, and somewhere else entirely.
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The DEI convulsion of 2024–2025 added another layer of institutional turbulence. Mentions of "DEI" in S&P 500 annual filings dropped from an average of 12.5 references per document in 2022 to roughly 4 by 2024 — a decline that some characterised as prudent recalibration and others as a particularly revealing stress test of corporate conviction. At-will employment, meanwhile, ensured that workers who objected too loudly to these recalibrations could be thanked for their contributions and shown the exit with a thoroughness that would baffle their counterparts in most of Europe.
The forum record of cross-cultural encounters between Indian and American workplaces is, to put it generously, illuminating. A viral Reddit post from a US-based professional working remotely for an Indian company described a reporting structure in which multiple supervisors issued conflicting directives, daily check-ins were mandatory regardless of timezone inconvenience, and accountability was applied with a vigour inversely proportional to the clarity of the original instructions. Commenters recognised the experience immediately and attributed it to the collision between high power distance management norms and the American expectation that one's job description constitutes a binding contract rather than a loose approximation. The Indian firm was, by its own lights, being thorough. The American employee was, by their own lights, being managed into incoherence. Both assessments were correct.
The reverse encounter generates its own friction. American employees joining Indian multinationals report disorientation around the expectation of after-hours availability and the social consequences of visible early departure. Indian professionals joining US firms, meanwhile, sometimes find the informality disorientating in the other direction: the boss uses your first name and appears to welcome disagreement, but the at-will clause means the relationship can be dissolved without notice or ceremony. A story that went viral in late 2025 described an Indian employee receiving notice of dismissal via a three-minute video call before the formal email had even fully loaded. Under Indian labour law, most employees are entitled to at least one month's notice. Under US doctrine, the call itself was already generous. India offers the comfort of stable hierarchy alongside its suffocation; America offers the freedom of flat structures alongside their particular brand of institutional cold-bloodedness. Neither has found a convincing way to describe this as a selling point, though both keep trying.
r/expats — Moved from Mumbai to a mid-size American tech firm. The first week, the VP walked over, introduced himself by his first name, and asked what I thought of the onboarding process. I thought it was a test. Spent three days composing a diplomatically worded reply before I realised he genuinely wanted to know and had already forgotten he asked.
Quora — An Indian engineer who'd spent twelve years saying "sir" to anyone holding a title two levels above his moved to a San Francisco company where the CEO sent him a Slack message with his first name and three emojis. He spent a week assuming it was a bot.
r/india — I worked remotely for an Indian company from the US for eight months. I had four managers, none of whom knew the others had given me instructions. When I asked who I should report to, I was told "all of them." My job description mentioned none of this. The accountability, however, was crystal clear — and pointed entirely at me.
Internations India — The thing nobody tells you about American corporate culture when you move from India is that "we really value your input" and "we're going in a different direction" are the same sentence, just eight months apart. The informality is real. The security is not.
r/cscareerquestions — Three-minute Zoom call. That was the notice. In India I would have had a month, two rounds of HR conversations, and a farewell lunch. Here I got a calendar invite titled "Quick Sync" and a pre-written severance agreement in the chat. I don't say this as a complaint — just as a data point about what "flat culture" actually means at the end of a contract.
Both countries have constructed elaborate narratives to make overwork sound like virtue — India wraps it in collective duty and national ambition, America dresses it in the language of passion and self-actualisation — and both narratives are beginning to fray at precisely the moments when the data becomes impossible to ignore. A workforce where 58 percent report burnout and a workforce where 69 percent are not engaged are, by different routes, arriving at the same destination: a quiet consensus that the arrangement is not quite what was advertised.
For anyone choosing between the two, the practical calculus is this: Indian corporate culture will make you feel watched and included simultaneously; American corporate culture will make you feel autonomous and disposable at exactly the same time. The choice, ultimately, is about which form of workplace anxiety you find more artistically interesting. The offices, to their considerable credit, remain very well lit.
Sources: ILO Working Hours Data 2024 · Gallup State of the Global Workforce 2024–2025 · Hofstede Insights Cultural Dimensions · Business Standard · People Matters · Boston Consulting Group Worker Wellbeing Survey 2023 · HR Dive DEI Rollback Analysis 2024 · American Bazaar Online (2025)
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.