KZBlog

I was asked recently to speak at a meeting of Kazakhstani managers about what expats think of doing business in Kazakhstan. Because I’m not really a businessman, I asked to focus on working with Kazakhstani and what came out is that the group really wanted to know what problems foreigners had working with Kazakhstani. There were also some specific questions about actual situations where there had been misunderstandings. I thought I would share some of the issues that came up. It might be interesting for Kazakhstani to know what one expat thinks are the biggest misunderstandings when working with local people and for people planning to come here to work, here’s what you can be prepared for.

1. In Kazakhstan, it’s not uncommon to have a ten minute phone call to set up a time for a meeting that lasts five minutes. Email and telephones are still not considered to be reliable or formal forms of communication. More and more in the West, people are using technology to avoid meetings. But here face-to-face meetings are still valued even if there are more efficient ways to transmit information. Interestingly, a number of expats I know prefer to communicate by email or at least text message because of the language barrier. If something is written down in Russian or Kazakh or bad English, they have time to analyse it and double check it, whereas in a phone conversation or face-to-face meeting you don’t always realize that you have misunderstood something.
2. It is not rude or pushy in Kazakhstan to call someone to tell them you are emailing something, then calling them a minute later to ask if they got the email, and calling a third time 5 minutes later to ask if they have replied. Some of this behavior has to do with the fact that the Internet is not as reliable here as it is in the West (and yes, in the US the Internet does go out sometimes too). Some of it I suspect is due to the mistrust of a new technology since it especially seems to be older people who do this. I also think it points to a difference in prioritizing tasks.
3. I did this thought experiment about priorities at work. What order would you do the following tasks in?
   1. email a client with a one sentence answer to a question
   2. edit a 2 page document for a peer that you have already been working on for 2 days
   3. Call a partner organization to let them know that the time and place of a meeting you have tomorrow with them have changed.
   4. Prepare for that meeting
   5. start a 10 page analysis that the head of the company has asked you to do.

   These are basically in the order that I would do these tasks. Get the quick (1 and 2) and urgent (3 and 4) tasks out of the way before dealing with a big task (5). However, many Kazakhstani at the meeting put task 5 first because the boss ordered it. They felt that preparing for a meeting tomorrow was not an urgent task at all. And a report for your peers had low priority. Many did say they would write the client first because it would take so little time. So one major area of miscommunication might be in agreeing on the priority of tasks. Your colleague who is bugging you to answer his email may feel that his task is important and should be finished immediately.

4. A final issue that comes up frequently is the lack of negotiation on the part of local staff. Many expats feel that the Kazakhstan side never compromises or negotiates, but expects compromises. When Kazakhs are told, “We can’t do that,” or, “We don’t want to do that,” these are not taken as serious excuses. Foreign consultants and freelancers often cite a feeling that local businesses think they work directly for them and can be given any amount or range of work outside the original agreement. Local companies rarely try to negotiate or convince workers to take on extra work by offering more money, or easier working hours or any other benefits. Overall the idea of what constitutes a reasonable workload, a reasonable salary, and reasonable demands on workers seem to be very different.

So those are a few of the issues that came up frequently and that seemed to resonate well with the Kazakh managers. A lot of people told me they had never thought of this behavior as strange or unreasonable.

At the risk of ending up with lots of comments just complaining about Kazakhstan, what do you readers find hard about working here? And to be fair, what do local people think is weird, rude or unreasonable about foreign workers?