They Paint the Office Walls in China

JeremyGThomas — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:46:26 GMT

Update: I was wrong in saying they painted the walls white. They actually put murals of atheletes on the walls.

Five of the people on my team work out of our China office in X’ian. Last week they informed me they were taking Monday off for a team building exercise. Each team was given a wall in the office to paint. And they didn’t paint murals. Nope, just a fresh coat of white paint.

On Tuesday they were instructed to work from home to avoid the overwhelming smell of drying paint. So we had our weekly standup meeting on instant messenger (I actually found this to be a rather effective way to communicate with my team there) instead of on the phone.

I love these little cultural differences.

I must say, though, that I’ve never had a team of more enthusiastic, dedicated people than my team in China. They own their work and take personal pride in getting it done the right way. Now if I could only figure out how to do Agile with them…

Blog Posts From Active Developer Blog Tagged With management

They Paint the Office Walls in China