Talent Challenges in China

Once the hiring test is passed, working with Chinese employees presents other challenges.

Fragile Egos. Ba Ling Hou (the generation born in the 1980s) is the first Chinese generation after the introduction of the one-child policy. Growing up as the center of their family, these so-called “little emperors” are generally more self-centered and more individualistic than their parents. They tend to be less political than the older generation of employees and less receptive to hierarchy. However, this generation is more receptive and adaptive to Western style management. Those who gain a foothold in MNCs have oftentimes exceeded their peers in academic achievements and hence expect to win the race for higher pay, position, and title. These young Chinese employees are also smart, outgoing, and want to be independent. However, they did not necessarily learn how to cope with failures, exercise judgment, make decisions, and be a part of the team.

Unrealistic Expectations. Frequently, Chinese employees have high expectations and exhibit an attitude of “I disserve it” without reflection about their skills and abilities. Employees believe that they should be entrusted with interesting and challenging tasks, promoted, and offered better compensation and benefits packages at least on an annual basis. These high expectations are often fueled by open discussion and comparisons of their packages with colleagues, college peers, and friends. However, since status is very important in Chinese circles, a promotion or even a change in title without a change in duties can satisfy Chinese employees more than any other perk. But keep in mind that such promotions can backfire too. As a real life example, a 22 year old employee refused to report to a 25-year old manager with the argument that the manager was too young and did not know much more than the employee. The employee did not see how she could be successfully trained and mentored by a person from the same age group.

Weak Loyalty. In the US, the average length of time an employee stays in a job used to be five to six years. In China, it is two years. It is worst among Western trained and English fluent Chinese professionals who make "hopping around" from one international company to another a sport. Employees view employers as stepping stones to become more marketable in the future. As one applicant explained to me, referring to the question “How long do you envision yourself staying in this company?”,“The relationship between me and the company is give and take, if it works well for both of us, I’ll stay. If the company falls short, then I will need to leave”.

The Glass Ceiling. As much as employees desire to work for international companies, they perceive a glass ceiling in these organizations. Only a talent localization strategy can help eliminate employees’ fear of the “glass ceiling”. To execute it properly, coach-type Expatriates must be hired with the brief to share knowledge and mentor local staff.

What Vacation? The culture of a taking a vacation by Chinese employees is developing but is not there yet. Chinese prefer to take one day or even half-day annual leave on short notice with little consideration to work schedules, deadlines, and priorities as opposed to a vacation well planned in advance (as traditionally done in the West). Interestingly, annual leave is oftentimes used for interviewing at another employer. During my early consulting days, I was told that whenever an HP employee took leave on Tuesday morning; that meant they were interviewing at Microsoft.

The Weakest Link of a Customer Experience Team

For several years now, in-house customer experience teams have been mushrooming in the corporate world. They are responsible for ensuring positive customer experiences with the company or its services and products. There is also no shortage of consulting companies that can provide such services.

The work of any customer experience team requires a holistic view on issues customers care about. Multidisciplinary in nature, the work of customer experience teams centers around soliciting customer feedback, codifying customer journeys, and adjusting processes, systems, and technology. In addition, understanding and redefining organizational culture and talent requirements is also vital to the teams’ efforts.

A great example of a customer experience team is the one set-up by American Airlines. Pretty much all of the team’s initiatives are talent focused. Consider:
• Controlling ground delays and better informing customers when unexpected delays occur;
• Smoothly and more efficiently processing customers when boarding aircraft;
• Improving interactions with customers (including for example a new staff performance requirement to greet first-class passengers by name); and
• Efficiently handling baggage and quickly resolving issues with misplaced or misdirected bags.

The emergence of customer experience teams is an interesting trend. Customer experience teams are overtaking HR departments in generating and acting upon customer literacy as popularized in the book by Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank, “The HR Value Proposition” (2005). As a result, the strategic contributions related to talent are now increasingly made outside of the HR department. Another trend is blending strategic HR and talent management with the authority of Chief Operations Officer.

Consequently, HR is increasingly losing (yet another chance?) edge to impact the people agenda whereas their administrative efforts only seem to increase day-by-day.

For HR to add value to the business:
• HR needs to be proactive in helping line managers build the organization's core capability;
• HR must contribute to strategic conversations; and
• HR must take a hold off and lead costumer experience teams (presently dominated by professionals with backgrounds in Operations, Marketing, and IT).

Hiring in China will test your patience

China is a unique cultural experience and this definitely extends into recruiting and hiring. What you consider to be common sense will not necessarily occur. Your patience will be put to the test.

Job Advertisements. Since working for foreign companies is still considered prestigious, Mainland Chinese are more likely to respond to job advertisements in English than in Chinese; irrespective of their English skills. But even if candidates demonstrate a high level of English, they will spend little time to review job descriptions and job requirements and may only know that the company is an international player. Furthermore, Chinese applicants believe in a numbers game; the more companies they apply to, the more likely they are to land a job. So, leaders in their industry can literally be overwhelmed with totally irrelevant applications.

Employee Referrals. Chinese Employees are very keen to refer their friends and former colleagues to fill open positions. Most of the time, they will forward a Resume of active candidates who they know, but not necessarily someone who excels at any key skill for a particular role. Rewarding such referrals financially with an employee referral award is probably a nice gesture, but in this society seems to be obsolete.

Resumes. Chinese like to oversell their skills and exaggerate their experience and knowledge. In addition, the majority of Resumes and cover letters are poorly worded. External recruiters tend to copy and paste Resumes of their candidates on the recruitment agency’s letterhead thereby taking care of the formatting; however, syntax and grammar mistakes still appear often.

Interviews. More than a few Chinese candidates will not bring along any copies of their Resume and may not even have a pen and paper with them to take notes. Late arrivals and not knowing the name of the interviewer is common as well. Annoying as it sounds; Candidates in China tend to leave their cell phones on and will not hesitate to pick it up once it rings. Other question that one needs to answer when recruiting in China is whether or not to consider candidates who come late to an interview or cancel it with every possible reason.

Communication Skills. “What’s your strength?” is one of those question that deliver no real value in getting to know the Chinese candidates. Communication skills are quoted most. Too often, everyone assumes strong language skills equate to being an effective communicator. However, even the best linguistic capability does not make one the best communicator. As a hint then, check candidates' “presentation skills” because this may be a good indicator for how well they convey concepts and ideas.

Salary Negotiations. When asked about their desired salary during the interviewing process, it is usual for candidates to express their net salary expectations (after all taxes and other government mandated contributions are subtracted).

Offer Acceptance. When making a decision whether or not to accept an offer, Chinese candidates living with their parents frequently consult both mam and dad. Salary is often the sole variable, parents are interested in. It is usual, particularly in Hong Kong, to contribute around US$500 to the household by the offspring as soon as they get their first job. A comprehensive assessment of the employee value proposition is missing. I once had a talk with one of young potentials who intended to leave the Agency lured by a higher package and title by the competitor. Only after she realized that her new manager is inferior to her current one, she changed her mind.

Cultural Fit, What Rubbish!

All companies probably believe that they must ensure "cultural fit" when hiring new people. However, too many players do not have strong cultures to speak off and are confused about the “best” talents that they require to successfully and meaningfully go through this exercise. Specifically, more often than not, companies:
1. Describe their cultures in similar ways; collaborative, entrepreneurial, and family-like. They also like to refer to themselves as complex, ambiguous, and challenging environments. Ad agencies in particular tend to identify their cultures with “chaos” which they embrace rather than try to tame by enforcing specific rules and structures.
2. Articulate the same values. A recent study by Ki and Kim (2009) showed that “respect to clients”, “service”, “strategic”, and “results” were the most frequently emphasized values among ethical statements provided by 605 public relations agencies in the United States. On the other hand, “balance”, “fairness”, “honor”, “social responsibility”, and “independence” were the least frequently mentioned values in their ethical codes. Surprisingly as well, none of the sampled agencies included any sanctions regarding enforcement of their particular code of ethics.
3. Remain misaligned when it comes to talent practices. It is not uncommon to find that employee policies and operational practices do not actually support their cultural statement (e.g. we are open-minded). At the extreme, employees that are in fact closest to the desired culture may not experience and receive sufficient recognition, advancement opportunities, and high job satisfaction levels.
4. Demonstrate "me-too" thinking when preparing talent policies, rewards, and benefits just like they go on the same mission relevant to their industry. Almost uniformly, ad agencies aspire to “generate big ideas” (award-winning ideas or outstanding advertising campaigns) and provide a full range of communications services for their clients.
5. Look for similar skill sets, knowledge, experience, and just about everything else when looking for talent; self-starter with a `can-do` attitude, ability to contribute to and lead diverse teams, ability to present logical and persuasive arguments, passionate, and driven, etc.
6. Settle down for generic and inclusive corporate cultures. Many employees cannot explicitly discuss and distinguish between the cultures of the companies that they have worked for. Worst, many successful careers can span a number of companies over several years which suggests that either employees are simply good chameleons and flexible and adaptive enough to blend in or that there is nothing unique and extraordinary about their different workplaces.

Hence, checking for cultural fit is of substance and should only take place if the company understands what their actual and desired organizational culture is, has low staff turnover, and is growing at a steady pace so as to ensure successful acculturation processes by new hires.

Performance Conversations

One of the most important and original books of late regarding performance management is written by Christopher D. Lee, PhD, Performance Conversations: An Alternative to Appraisals (2006; published by Fenestra Books, Tucson, Arizona). The author thoroughly critiqued the performance appraisal tool and provided an alternative approach; Performance Conversations Model.

Having observed the book's core ideas implemented into a corporate setting in Mainland China, I would like to share some of the challenges that arose.

First, performance conversations created impractical employee expectations for receiving a raise or bonus after every performance conversation. But, since these conversations occurred on a quarterly basis, managers' obviously could not increase pay every 3 months for an employee even if they received positive feedback. So, employees invariably felt disappointed.

Second, performance conversations were too structured mainly because a form needed to be completed every time conversations occurred. In addition, many participants were not dedicated to maintaining a performance portfolio and performance log - a journal of duties, challenges, and solutions (the so called "evidence") on a daily/weekly basis. Indeed, this prerequisite was perceived as a burden by most and just additional paper work.

Third, performance conversation meetings did not seem to be the best platform for addressing inadequate performance. Inevitably, this model linked the quality of an employee’s output with the manager’s performance in accordance with the fundamental belief that an "Employee can only be as good as their supervision, support, and guidance". Therefore, the manager who assessed an employee's performance as poor would also need to acknowledge their own weaknesses and mistakes.

Fourth, performance conversations did not alleviate the need for an “evaluation” and consequently demand for 360 degree feedback in the organization intensified. Employees also wanted to be assessed against a set of performance criteria for their current position.

For the abovementioned difficulties, China as a whole is not ready for a performance management approach based on Theory Y of human motivation.

Can HR Recruit Creatives?

HR departments in China are too often helpless when it comes to their capabilities to recruit Creatives. This failure results from the following issues:
1. Traditional HR departments take a passive approach and believe that Creative Directors prefer to screen creative staff themselves.
2. HR professionals do not invest the time to learn about and understand the market, advertising campaigns, and the people behind the scenes to really grasp how and what the artists' true contributions were and thereby make a proper skill assessment.
3. HR does not have an "eye for creativity" and is therefore unable to assess who has superior creative and design skills.
4. HR people are not trained in the Creative world and can not even differentiate between ATL, BTL, and digital works. If these are not clearly labeled, then they end up spamming Creative Directors' mailboxes with many inadequate candidates.

To change this defunct status quo, HR should:
1. Instigate the belief that HR’s assistance in the recruitment of creative staff is needed and necessary for Agencies to achieve their business objectives. Why else would Creative Directors brief HR on their staffing needs? HR must realize that Creatives have expectations and HR needs to deliver on them.
2. Achieve Partner status with the business, demonstrate an ongoing interest in the Creative process, learn more about specific campaigns (also the ones of from competitors), hold formal and informal meetings with all kinds of artists, talk with candidates about the different strategies and execution of successful campaigns, and recreate organigrams for project teams in target companies.
3. Develop into a learning unit. The department must comprehend inside and out Creatives' requirements, know what constitutes quality creative and design skills, and fully understand services offered by the Agency.
4. Have the drive to excel at this challenge thereby making everything aforesaid possible.

This being said, organizational support is also crucial to HR success in the recruitment of Creatives. An essential step to take is to invest more resources in the position of Recruiter by instituting greater financial incentives and designing an appealing career path to keep the "good ones" onboard. After all, they are the key to this entire process and Recruiters will need to be the ones to change their behaviors and learn more about Creative's and the "Arts".

General Manager – HR

Last year, I wrote about the semantics in development of HR as a profession. 2009 emerged as the year of a new HR designation; namely, General Manager – HR (GM of HR Department, GM Admin & HR Department).

This new title sounds promising at the onset but after closer review of several GM - HR Job Descriptions, one can quickly realize that the responsibilities of the GM - HR are basically the same ones as that of any other HR Head focused on administration, statutory compliance, and the entire gamut of HR activities without explicitly calling for business, strategic, and team leadership.

Added analysis into the Job Requirements by any HR Business Partner advocate will further cool down their excitement toward this new title. After all, the new designation continues to demand excessive HR experience; particularly one of HR Generalist and only introduces one modern and advantageous requirement; an MBA.

In my view, introducing any new HR title is pointless and confusing unless the "core" of the position is new. The GM – HR role would be of greater substance if the primary responsibilities were:
• To run multiple HR departments as value creating centers for the different companies under one holding company,
• To optimize HR services, and
• To lead the alignment of HR strategy with the business strategy across the different companies.

Accordingly, the ideal candidate would then be required to have more of an entrepreneurial and business track record with either an operational background or extensive knowledge and an understanding of the business model of each company and the value drivers of each business.