This is China! BLOG

A Sense of Belonging in China

At a recent meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio with the Board of Directors of a manufacturing company , I was asked by one of the Board members about salary standards that would keep staff in a company.

I answered the typically American metric answer that seems the silver bullet Americans seem to require to relax about solving complex questions. But I wasn’t about to let them get off so easily with what would be a pat answer. I quickly added that a proper salary level was important to employee retention, but so were a couple other points: job title; development path and professional training within the company; and a sense of belonging.

Chinese like titles that give them Face, that give them a feeling of being important and, more to the point, give others a sense of their importance.

And Chinese staff love education, love anything that gives them a sense of progress and of development. If Chinese can see where they will be in three years in a growing company and how they will evolve along the way, they will will greatly value the company.

These points are building blocks for the foundation many Chinese staff require to commit their lives to an organization: a sense of belonging. In America we go to work to have a job, to make money. Certainly many of us relish the challenges the work brings, and for some interaction with other human beings is a prime motivator.

Chinese, however, see work in a social context, as one of the circles of relationship that extends their ability to get around in the world and to have a sense of safety. The most intimate circles are: family, friends, classmates and then co-workers, even from previous companies at which they had worked.

Chinese employees prize a sense of belonging to the Group and to the Organization in a way that Americans do not. Americans - nowadays especially - do not trust organizations to care for them, to support to some extent their social contacts. Americans work their job, then go home; they do not expect nor do they want to see anyone from work during the evening and at the weekend. Chinese expect

My colleague Zhang Xiaoru, a Chinese lawyer at Silk Road Advisors, gave the Board an example involving her own cousin. Her cousin, a Chinese national, is a financial officer based out of the Shanghai office of an American Tier-1 automotive parts supplier. He is now in his early thirties, and worked in America for three years before being transferred to China.

He has received several offers from Western companies that would substantially increase his salary and even position. He will not move, though, because he has very good relationships with his co-workers and even with the American CEO of the company. And he has a clear path within the company along which to develop in a way he sees as beneficial to himself and to his family. He said that if he moved to another company he would have no idea of the environment and whether he would be able to grow with the company as he is now.

General Managers who spoke at a panel discussion Silk Road Advisors sponsored for the Notre Dame University International Executive Education Program in China a couple days ago cited the same observation. One manager said that sense of belonging gives a company an 8% annual turnover, while another GM attributed an 11% turnover to the same approach. The average in the Shanghai, Jiangsu Province area is as much as 25% in for some skillsets.

American companies that come to China and create just such a caring environment and corporate culture will find their costs due to employee turnover reduced and their rewards increased.

William Dodson
Suzhou, China