Work Culture differences between the UK and France
I recently spent a year living and working in Paris for a small startup. This was a new experience for me, as I had not lived or worked in mainland Europe for any significant time before this. My prior work experience had been in the UK, India, China, and Singapore for a larger company.
The startup was a little unusual in terms of language for France, as English was the business language for meetings and documents1. For this reason I expected the company to have a work culture roughly similar to the UK, just with more French spoken in the corridors. In the main this expectation was correct, but there were some obvious differences I wanted to write about.
To give a bit more background on the role and the company. I worked as the Operations Manager with a team of 3 beneath me, the company was around 30-35 people strong, and specialised in manufacturing technology. My role was mostly office based, with some factory visits included.
So lets get to it, some of the main differences I saw between UK and French work culture:
1. Public Celebration of Success
Once a week I gave a presentation to the whole company about the progress of major projects. I inherited the template from my predecessor, and when I updated it I introduced a celebration/thank you slide at the end. In the slide I called out people for small successes in the previous week e.g. shipping out a feature, building a big piece of equipment on time, or publishing a new research paper.
I thought this was a non controversial way to make other people in the company aware of others work, and celebrate small wins publicly.
I was wrong.
It was such an unpopular addition that after a few months the CEO asked me to remove it. The complaints ranged from too many people are being celebrated, to not everyone mentioned gave the same contribution to a success, to people disliking that they were being celebrated publicly.
Even after tweaks to solve the complaints I had to admit defeat and shelved the slide. I moved towards verbal only thank you's during the presentation, which generated no concerns.
This example is not to say the French do no public celebration. It was done after MAJOR successes, but the idea of small wins being called out was not liked. More than once someone mentioned the small win slide felt like an "Employee of the Month" poster.
2. Government Subsidies as a Major Revenue Driver for Startups
One unexpected feature of French business was the importance of government in decisions. For our startup this came from both direct subsides to us and which customers we targeted.
For direct subsidies the team spent a significant amount of time applying for, and working on, research grants from the French State. These varied in size from small numbers (~1 month burn) to larger amounts (~6-12 months of revenue).
On the other side we often focused our sales and marketing efforts towards potential customers which had received government subsidies. For example we once went through a database of companies that had received government research grants, and marketed our product to them as a way to spend the money. In another case a project was delayed for >6 months as the customer was delayed in applying for specific government financing for the project.
The support came across as unusual for someone from the UK, as I had not seen government subsidies as a big driver of decision making before. However when speaking to people more knowledgeable than me in the UK grant and innovation space the UK is also not averse to dishing out government money to startups.
The one thing I don't know for sure, but got the sense of, is that there is an expectation that the big French companies will use government financing to support small French startups. You could imagine it as the government asking big companies to provide a market test for startup financing.
I am not sure if this a healthy relationship for startups, and I often thought back to Alex Danco's discussion of this phenomena in the Canadian startup environment.
"The minute you take SR&ED [Canadian Government Financing] money, some meaningful part of your startup becomes a government work program. And the minute any of your startup becomes a government program, I can pretty reliably tell you what'll happen to the rest of it. By seeding an ecosystem full of SR&ED funded startups, the Canadian government inadvertently drained the spontaneity and curiosity out of our startup scene. It's hard to recover from that."
I admit I have a free market bias, so the proof will be in the long term results. Maybe government involvement is necessary to kickstart an ecosystem, much like DoD financing in the USA.
3. Difficulty in Firing
One thing I did expect, and saw first hand, was the difficulty in firing people. On numerous occasions I would be sitting in an Exec meeting and the delay on a project would be tied to one individual or another slipping up. But it was generally agreed that unless the person wanted to leave there was little no action we could take to remove them from the position.
This is not as much about the specifics of employment law in France vs the UK, but more the mentality around performance management solutions. In the UK Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) would have been discussed, and a more active approach to changing the situation would have been on the table. In France there was more of a fatalism that some of your hires would be great, and some you would just have to live with until they left.
4. Longer Lunches
Working in the UK I used to eat at my desk with little to no lunch. I became addicted, and still am, to £3 supermarket meal deal2 while trying to complete a spreadsheet in front of my computer.
In France this was replaced by 1.5-2h lunches at restaurants. It was quite normal (2-3x/week) to go to a restaurant and get 3 courses. The idea of doing this regularly in the UK would never have even occured to me.
The other point about these lunches was booking meetings in this time was in effect forbidden. In the UK it is perfectly normal to ask someone to have a meeting at lunchtime. Sure you should try to avoid it but if they have to eat at their desk everyone understands. The idea of doing this in France was close to blasphemy.