Working Together, Growing Together: Lessons from 3 Months in Vietnam

It's mid-January when I arrive in Nha Trang, the location of our Vietnamese office. My inbox is already flooding with messages from colleagues eager to grab a bite or have coffee. I couldn't wish for a better welcome. The first two weeks are mainly focused on catching up with everyone; what everyone's working on, what's on people's minds, and the latest office gossip. Since my last visit in 2023, a lot has already changed. Teams work more independently and security requirements have been ramped up so much that I almost can't get into the office. After two weeks of work, the office closes for a week: it's time for Tết, where the new year is celebrated over five days. You can think of it as a combination of Christmas and New Year's Eve rolled into one. Vietnamese hospitality shines through once again: I have multiple invitations to celebrate Tết with colleagues' families. I end up in the nearby city of Đà Lạt to spend the week with a family I've visited before, an experience I will not soon forget.

After Tết, it's literally back to business. The developers, testers, and team leaders give me insight into the challenges they face daily in collaborating with our Dutch office and primarily Dutch clients. They share ideas about how we can further improve our collaboration. At the same time, I try to provide more insight into how we work in the Netherlands, both in the office and with the clients themselves. What our clients find important and what the latest 'trends' are in the Dutch market. Together we brainstorm about how we can better align our services and way of working with client needs. We also look at what we can improve in the Netherlands to make development run as smoothly as possible.

“These three months have mainly shown me what happens when you make room to learn and build together. Not separately from each other, but as one team, the Netherlands and Vietnam.”

Additionally, we also need to look further into the future. In the Netherlands, we've been dealing with the question for a while: how do we make ourselves more scalable? In Vietnam, there are already many ideas about this, and we're working together on a strategy where both visions come together. Fortunately, I'm not alone in this – our Operations Manager and one of our founders from the Netherlands come by for a few weeks. After their visit, I can't look at another sticky note, but the many workshops have paid off. There's a plan that we can work with in both the Netherlands and Vietnam.

But what I learned most from were the conversations I had with colleagues outside of work. It's the most normal thing in the world here to have breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, play football, badminton with colleagues – you name it. These are the moments when people share without filter what's going well, what's not going so well, where they see opportunities, and what ambitions they have. And it didn't stop at talking: we decide to set up additional teams and allocate budget for several initiatives.

These three months have mainly shown me what happens when you make room to learn and build together. Not separately from each other, but as one team – the Netherlands and Vietnam. And what we in the Netherlands might learn most from? Vietnamese hospitality. Just ask yourself: would you take a colleague to your family's Christmas dinner?

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Stefan Tolboom is Operational Lead, gespecialiseerd in Agile werken en teamontwikkeling.