Doing Business in Germany

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Let’s get a bit more serious, shall we? This blog is for business professionals as well as business students, and I’d like to talk a bit more about doing business in different countries in addition to visiting them. I thought I’d start with my favorite blog topic: Germany.

A bit of background: Germany is located centrally to Western Europe and is highly influential throughout Europe. In fact, West Germany wasone of the founding countries in the precursor to the European Union (the ECSC,then the EEC). As of 2013, Germany had a population of 80.62 million people and a GDP per capita of USD 47,627.40 in 2014. To give you an idea of how this compares, the U.S. GDP per capita was USD 54,629.50 in 2014.

German culture is associated with many positive, but strict values. They place an emphasis on structure, privacy, and punctuality. Hard work and organization is appreciated and rewarded (if any of my friends or family are reading this, they may wonder why I haven’t yet moved to Germany…). On the whole, the country is process driven and a great follower of rules and regulations. People in Germany may come across as perfectionists, not seem highly complimentary, and might appear unfriendly to those of us raised in the United States or similar countries. Don't take it personally! On a more positive note, Germany is also known for fairly high levels of social rights and equality.

If you are going to Germany specifically for business reasons, you will want to keep some additional things in mind. When you first meet with your German colleagues, a handshake is the standard form of greeting, just like in the U.S. I’ve also heard that titles and last names should be used until given permission otherwise, and I hope to report back on this at a later date. Until then, better safe than sorry! Similar to the general culture, there is an emphasis placed on planning and decisiveness; it’s unusual for change to occur after you reach agreement with your German counterparts. A couple things did strike me as quite different from business culture in the United States. First, Germany has a high regard for technical experts, so if you are working at the executive level, do not be surprised if your meetings are full of people with technical and engineering backgrounds. Second, hard work and merit are what get people ahead in Germany, whereas social intelligence is also strongly considered in the U.S.

So if you are going to work in Germany, what does this mean for you? I’d suggest:

• Following the greetings laid out above
• Arrive to any meetings on time, fully prepared, and visibly organized
• Keep to your schedule; don’t go past the planned meeting duration!
• Expect direct, formal communication from your German colleagues and respond in kind
• You may be from out of town, but don’t expect a lot of overlap between work life and personal life

Perhaps this should have been at the beginning of this post, but I have not yet been to Germany for business reasons myself. However, I plan to remedy that soon and wanted to share my research on doing business in Germany. For anyone who has been to Germany for business, what were your experiences? Do you have any corrections/additions to my notes above? Comment below!

Want to learn more? Source 1; Source 2; Source 3; Source 4