ChinaSolved.com recently had the good fortune to work with 2 interns from New York University who spent a semester living, studying and working in Shanghai. Anna Tse of New York, NY shares her thoughts and impressions about the HR situation in China-based international companies.

Keeping Your Troops -Anna Tse

If you have qualified, well-educated local Chinese working for you, be prepare because they will leave. There will be no two weeks notice and no warning - they will simply quit and walk away. If you want to keep your employees around you must create an inclusive corporate environment that fosters loyalty, commitment, and open communication. You want your employees to stick around not only because of the pay but also because of where they work and who they work with.

Loyalty: Create team building activities or company outings. Have company spirit and company pride.

Commitment: Outline clear and straightforward incentives for longtime consistent excellent performance. It can be an increase in end of year bonuses or added benefits. Delegate responsibilities that make employees feel that they have a stake in the general well-being of the establishment.

Open Communication: Conduct weekly staff meetings and encourage your employees to voice their opinions and concerns and more importantly actually address them.

Finally, this should go without saying: Respect your employees. They have feelings too.

By Guest Author — Frank Mulligan, in Talent-Software (See Profile)
Original post

In China hiring is job number one. But what about the times when you have gone through the process and have actually found someone you think is a strong fit for your company. How can you be sure that they are the right one?.
What are the signs you did a good job in the hiring process and got yourself a Star, or at least a good employee:

1. Stars hit the ground running and things seem to happen quickly. Look for solutions to problems you have been fretting about for some time, and also for problems you never even thought you had.

2. Fitting in comes easily to Stars. If you find have an instinctive level of comfort in the information you are willing to share with a new recruit, like as not you have done a good job in hiring them.

3. Good staff have sufficient understanding of themselves to get over the cultural contraint on having opinions in China. They also know how to express these opinions without alienating everyone on the time. Look for the new staff member speaking up at meetings.

4. Consistency is key. If the candidate at interview says he plays tennis and you see him heading out the door to play tennis you have a greater chance that the stars were not in your eyes when you interviewed him.

5. The candidate had an interesting personality at interview and they still have. And it doesn’t grate on your nerves.

6. You are not having to continue selling them the role after they have joined. This is the case with many candidates in China who take jobs on the basis that there is a 3-month probation period, during which time they can decide if they want to stay, or not. Call them the Unstable Dwarf Stars. True Stars know themselves well and see the fit that the new role has with their career.

7. You just learned a new thing. Even after many years in the business.

8. At interview you identified the new employee’s motivation as a general dissatisfaction with the status quo in his previous company. On the job you can see that he wants to work in a new way.

9. At the very least you have the sense that there is no need to pass judgement on the new employee yet. There are no signs that there is a specific problem. This may be the case if you are busy, and everyone in China is busy.

10. They haven’t complained yet, and there is no hint of a soon-to-be request for a higher salary.

By Guest Author — Barak Paz-Tal, Marketing VP and Founder of Meijob.com (See Profile)
Originally posted at Meijob.com on March 30, 2007:

We chose to open the editor column with a question. A question that includes many sub-questions, each of which demanding a thorough discussion. Let us present those questions to you, inviting you to reply and refine our observations. Our question – and it is a question, rather than simply an admonition – deals with what many foreign business men working in China experience as a lack of integrity and credibility.

There are, for sure, misunderstandings in any intercultural exchange. These arise many unanswered questions on both sides - mainly regarding the other’s intentions and motivations. These questions must be answered or they will transform into discriminatory suppositions or even generalizations of a racial character. The following is a question of that kind. It is a question raised by foreign colleagues, brought to their Chinese partners for their input, and now presented here – again, as an open question waiting for suggestions and not as a remonstrance only demanding to be heard.

Let us open with a first hand story:

“About 9 months ago, when we setup our Beijing office, we were looking for a recruiter to help us build our team. One of the candidates I interviewed, though missing the relevant experience, seemed to have a potential and I decided to give her a chance to prove her capabilities and gain experience. We agreed that she would start working from the beginning of the following week, on Monday, 9:00 AM.

I arrived to the office at 8:30. Forty five minutes later, the new recruiter still didn’t knock on the door. I decided to call her to make sure she is ok, but ooops, there was no answer. At about 9:50 I received an email from her saying: “I am sorry, but after I have considered, I have decided to take another job opportunity…”

There were many ways to behave differently in this situation, and which I would have appreciated much more:

1. Informing me during the interview of having other alternatives and delaying the final answer.
2. Letting me know sooner of the final decision - at least a day before the date agreed upon.
3. Not choosing the above, at least contacting me by phone to personally and respectfully decline my offer.

Acting like she did, what would your behavior during the job seeking process reflect on your behavior during work itself? Would you respect your own promises? Can your boss trust you?”

Two more cases would serve as adequate examples in this context. The first deals with a small scale factory in one of China’s cities, whose manager preferred to commit oneself to a task he knows he could never deliver instead of admitting it is way out of his league, while misleading a potential costumer. The other evolved in an encounter between a foreign company and a local recruiter who concealed important information about a candidate – details that would have probably interfered with his chances to win the job and were doomed to be revealed sooner or later. The result was a loss of time and money on the part of the employer, and a greater loss – that of professional integrity – on the part of the recruiter.

Now here comes the question: Why? Is it about “losing face”? Is it considered to deliver some kind of benefit to the agent choosing this kind of path? Here are a few possible answers, a result of a modest brain storming we conducted (among Chinese and foreigners alike), to which we are inviting all of you to add, refute, or suggest solutions.

First, our attention was directed to the popular guiding principal of benefit seeking. One commentator related the discussed phenomenon to China’s phase as a developing country: “The Chinese focus on economic development, on benefits. At the same time, our system and economic development are not mature. People work hard to make life better, while unemployment rates and competition become higher and fiercer. Although our country dedicates a lot of efforts to those aspects, it is still a process and it will take time. The same goes for the business environment created therefrom.”

Another remark traced the reasons not only to China’s economical condition but also to its historical and social circumstances: “Not only foreign employers have this kind of problem. Chinese companies too find the 80’s generation hard to trust and self-centered. For them, the concept ‘信’, instead of trustworthiness, means ‘believe yourself only’. The fact that the bulk of this generation is made of only-child families might have a connection to its self centeredness. Cooperation, communication and thoughtfulness are something they don’t know. So, they either don’t understand or don’t care to understand the other’s point of view.” This might also be a depiction of a generation that was born after the popularity of communal values had faded, not to mention traditional values, he adds.

The above may still have some relation to the known “losing face” concern. Numerable examples, too many to narrate here, demonstrate many Chinese employees’ preference to refrain from asking questions or saying “I can’t”, “I don’t know”, “I am not sure” when entrusted with a task. The question hanging in the air is why an employee would not say “I don’t know how to do it” or ask for help, preferring to just do a bad job. How come giving poor results is less “losing face” than asking for help?
It seems that many Chinese employees/suppliers/candidates stop at thinking about their short-term loss –- whether this of “losing face” or that of losing a business/employment opportunity — not considering the long-term loss they risk in grasping to the immediate opportunity with their teeth. The evasive candidate preferred to first say she wants the job so the employer would stop looking for other candidates, and save her real answer to the last minute - not considering her self integrity. The factory manager preferred to say he can deliver and not loose face in the immediate situation, and then vanish - risking in harming his business’ reputation. The recruiter preferred to earn 3 months commission knowing his lie will eventually be known – thus losing an important client (and many other potential clients who are the disappointed client’s acquaintances). Why? Might the reason for those choices be the size of the Chinese population - the size of the market - that creates the feeling opportunities will never end, even if you burn some bridges now and then? If that is indeed the case, which is a question to debate about in itself, can self integrity fight and bit self benefit?

See the original post HERE