In my experience as a corporate trainer as well as having worked in an ForEx dealing room in Dhaka, and now in a 100% local Bangladeshi quite small enterprise, a fundamental issue at the workplace is "culture".
In the bank I was in a team of fundamentally very hard workers. They are very smart, quick thinkers, have a lot of work load and do it all at the expense of "work-life balance". But the fundamental problem is one of productivity, of mindsets and a mental approach that degrades productivity and perpetuates the issue of working long hours without being able to enjoy a good home life. A big issue for that is "Sir office theke na jaowa porjonto ami jete parbo na". While this might seem "irrational" the reason is often that some sir at the top has neglected/or taken on a certain bit of extra work, and now insists on his subordinates to (help him) do it last minute.
- first of all it is completely unprofessional to delegate work after work hours for which your subordinate is not supposed to be responsible. This lack of accountability is insane.
- secondly, in doing so, often times the subordinate has wasted a lot of time (many hours) not doing anything and simply waiting for the task to come his way!
- Bottlenecks and backlogs - everyday we stayed late at the office because we were waiting for someone else's work to come through to us which we would have to work on and complete. Often times the backlog was perpetuated because the other office had its own similar dynamics that are mentioned above.
When we were training X MNC or Y Big Bangladeshi Conglomerate, we were trying to observe, evaluate and help them apply certain skills that would increase trust between employees from different departments (meaning often times they would not even be interacting with each other much). We often saw here that there was fundamental issues in workplace communications that were ineffective and often counterproductive with different employees being on different wavelengths.
There is a fundamental issue of mindsets where managers stifle creativity or new ideas simply because of their seniority (implying experience, age, knowledge, etc). On the other hand, as in the case of Kabir bhai's uncle, there is an intense need for micromanaging, simply because while 1 employee has good talent and accountability and skills, the rest are all incapable of owning up to responsibility.
I have noticed this in quite a few places, there is a mindset of inferiority where "upor theke na order ashle ami eta korte parbo na" or "apnara senior, apnader kothatei shob cholbe". Business processes in local firms are intensely bureaucratic and personality/individual focused rather than process driven. And a fundamental problem I'm facing in my work is that, I cant really change the processes with my limited resources. On the one hand, my biggest assets regarding product knowledge and technical skills are in a position that new ideas, criticisms or objections regarding say product delivery are dismissed outright by them. They are very dogmatic in their mindsets and opening them up to change is really hard.
While those who are out there on a day to day basis interacting with the market do not have the support and resources necessary to contribute to crucial decision making. So when there arises a problem from the customer side, there is often a blame game played, jharis and shouting bouts, after which people seem to hurry up and run around a bit, and then the problem repeats itself.
Overall, the biggest problem is of the lack of accountability, and how often times people dont take any responsibility. And this gets perpetuated and standardised in workplace culture. The damage this does to productivity is terrible. People work hard in Bangladesh, but they are incapable of working smart and of correcting the problems due to established workplace culture and bad management practice. And its actually sad, that because of resource-constraint even impact-assessment, follow-ups and performance evaluations get thrown out the window instead to focus on day-to-day operations most of the time.
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