China Employee Retention Turnaround
July 4th, 2006 | by This is China! |-from Suzhou
A few days before our program with the University of Notre Dame International Executive Education Program in China, I was chatting with a friend about his role in our session. The University hosts the program about three or four times a year. My company Silk Road Advisors handles the China-orientation of the portion of the program: most of the participants – recently minted MBA students, executive MBA students, real executives and managers – have never been to China before. Our job is to force feed them the current realities of China’s social and economic revolution and how it will affect their companies, their jobs and their families in the near future. During the orientation we would have a panel of local General Managers of Suzhou factories discuss some of their adventures in starting up their companies. My friend – his name is Kevin – is one of the General Managers.
I asked Kevin how things were going at his chemical refining plant located in Suzhou New District, one of the two larger economic development zones around Suzhou; it had been a year since we had talked. He said with his Mississippi drawl he had been able over the past year to stabilize the employment situation at his company. Apparently he had been suffering the same high rate of turnover as so many other companies in Shanghai and Jiangsu province. I asked him if it was something he had done differently or if it was the general economic situation in Jiangsu was changing. He said the former.
“Chinese people really like training,” he said. “They like learning new things. We’re simply investing more in their professional development. In general, we’ve become more people-focused. We’ve got 50 people now (they had six when I first met Kevin three years ago). We’re sort of like a family now. We still take our annual outings together, frequent dinners and the like.
“I’ve got two people working on their MBAs now; the staff I’ll be taking to your Executive program will be starting the Thunderbird International MBA program in the Fall in the States; I’ve got one guy that’s just finishing his Masters degree in Chemistry.
“Our turnover is very little now,” he said proudly.
I was proud of him, too. In the current “hot” economic conditions in the Yangtze River Delta it is very difficult indeed to keep employees on board for any length of time. No mean feat.
