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There are many subtle pitfalls with names that are not obvious. It’s best to ask a person from a given country and culture and have them explain them. There wa
by koliber 2y ago
There are many subtle pitfalls with names that are not obvious. It’s best to ask a person from a given country and culture and have them explain them.
There was a time when I was leading an engineering department for an American startup. The company had emails in the form of firstname@company.com. We had a guy named Piotr (Polish version of Peter) working for us. A new person joined the team and HR decided to give him the name Piotrek. The problem is that Piotr and Piotrek are two forms of the same name and are practically interchangeable. Since a big part of the engineering team was polish it was hard to remember who had which address. I asked HR to add last names but they would not have it. One had Piotr in his resume, the other Piotrek, hence different names, hence it stays.
They demonstrated cultural insensitivity at its finest. The real problem though is that they did not listen to feedback from someone in that culture and applied their understanding of what is normal and proper.
If you are managing an international team do take time to ask people about their names. How to pronounce them. If there is a nickname they like to use when working with American teams. If the accent marks matter or not. Names are very personal and applying norms from one culture to another can cause friction.
- tokai 2y agoI don't get this. So many names in so many languages are the 'same' name while being spelled and pronounced slightly different. To me your HR did it right. How should they ever catch every similar name and flatten them together? Did the piotr(ek)s have a problem with it? Cause your story makes it seems like it was other people just being annoyed at having to remember which person had with mail. Personally I would be angry if HR just assumed that they could rename me to a close variant of my name.
- koliber 2y agoThey should not try to catch them and "flatten" them. That would be unreasonable. They should have listened when a Polish person told them the names are the same and should be treated as such. It's perfectly OK to "flatten" Piotrek to Piotr in Polish. It's not like that in other languages, and I get it. But here's its fine.
- marcosdumay 2y ago> How should they ever catch every similar name and flatten them together? They don't have to solve the problem of every similar name. They just have to be humane to the people that are actually there.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoThere are people in india whose names are spelled differently in different dialects. They may have birth certificate, vaccination records, medical records, school registration, and adult ID card all spelled differently.
- dmurray 2y agoThis doesn't sound culturally insensitive. Sounds like they would have done the same with two Americans who preferred to be called Mike and Michael - to the extent that they put those names on their resumes. It does seem a little inflexible and not forward-thinking, though. If you insist on everyone being firstname@company.com you are going to have a clash within your first 30 hires.
- koliber 2y agoYeah. The inflexibility is the problem. We told them and they ignored it.
- watwut 2y agoPiotrek is diminutive of Piotr - it was grammatically correct to call both guys both names in Polish. That being said, HR giving people the name they put on CV is correct. It was not culturally insensitive at all. The naming policy that cant handle two Toms or three Janes in the same team is shortsighted at best.