Advice: Is work culture completely different in Singapore? What can I do?
I am an US account manager and work with a few companies based out of Singapore. They are by far the hardest, most difficult clients I run into, consistently and I work with most countries.
I get tons of gaslighting “We decided together on this location” when we didn’t at all. I’ll respond “No that location will not work because of X,X,X, we have never spoken about that and here’s my paper trail”
“No we were told we could have it”
That conversation happens over and over. “No” does not seem to work. What is the deal? Is there extreme pressure to do everything leadership says? Is there no guilt on how much time and crap they put their partners though?
Also they will message me dozens of times a day and night through Telegram, it leads to a ton of confusion when trying to relate the info/asks to email threads.
Sorry for the rant, just looking for some insight. I also feel bad having to be so blunt in my ‘no’s’ trying to be nice, but how do you be nice to someone who doesn’t give a fuck about the contract or what they signed on to?
Do you all have any advice on setting boundaries or communicating, is there something culturally I’m missing?
Netizens’ comments
- Quite possible there are multiple decision makers and they are beating around the bush too. Therefore, making it hard to get a commitment or response from the one you correspond with. I’m quite certain you would have seen emails with a ton of people cc into it.
To deal with such people, I normally stick to emails and send a summary of every meeting/phone call (not like they will read it but to protect myself).
It’s damn painful but necessary to keep everything on e-mails. There is also always that notion that customer is king and should always be accommodated. - If you work with SMEs across the world, you’ll meet this same thing over and over. Not just in Singapore. SMEs, especially those owned by a single boss or family, can get very gaslight-y. They are hard to deal with cos they don’t have a work culture of procedures/processes and proper documentation.
Remind them of your contactable hours and don’t respond outside of them. You should always summarize your call or telegram/whatsapp message in a follow-up email after. And remind them that it you’ll not accept any agreements verbally or through text messages unless it is followed up by an email. - Welcome to SG SMEs, AKA the idiot chumps of SG. There’s a very good reason the grads here worth their salt absolutely refuse to work in SMEs.