Doing Business in China For Dummies®

Avoiding a Shocking Corporate Culture

Controlling the workplace culture should be a top priority throughout the entire planning and hiring process. Regardless of how you run your company back home, we guarantee it has a much more developed culture of accountability and controls than what most Chinese employees are used to. Your Chinese employees need to both understand the controls and subscribe to the idea of having them. You need to get people to understand that when the system works well, the company does well and the employees also benefit.

Also, your China operation is going to need a lot of support from home (see Chapter 4), and having a common corporate culture helps a lot with that. Finally, Chinese people who want to work in FIEs are looking for something different from traditional Chinese company culture. They’ll appreciate your efforts to indoctrinate them into how you operate back home. The following sections explain how to export your culture and why it’s so important.

Passing up the Chinese imperial palace

Chinese imperial palaces were infamous for their over-the-top intrigue and politics. A very real risk of not implementing your company culture in China is having the FIE go the complete opposite way and become an imperial palace. Before you laugh, you’d be surprised at how many Western companies’ China operations have gone that route!

Imperial palace culture in a Western company can work something like this: You have a top manager who’s more concerned with enjoying ...