Employee satisfaction, just like customer satisfaction, is a variable concept: What pleases one customer or employee is likely to be completely different from what drives contentment in another. In other words, employees can just as well be segmented as customers.
And just like a customer satisfaction segmentation, identifying what motivates employees can be approached from different directions, whether in terms of demographics or needs.
One particular way in which workers can crudely be divided is by nationality. It has commonly been observed that international workforces differ greatly in what they look for in a job.
A caution against this type of profiling is the danger of stereotyping. This is especially so in the case of China, where the received wisdom has been that Chinese employees are solely motivated by money.
However, as the following study, reported in the Wall Street Journal suggests, this perception may well be an outmoded one:
Misunderstanding the Chinese Worker: Western impressions are dated – and probably wrong
By KATHRYN KING-METTERS and RICHARD METTERS
Ask multinational firms to describe what motivates Chinese workers, and the responses are remarkably consistent: Money is the only thing that matters.
"Chinese have zero loyalty to their employer," one executive at a manufacturing firm told us. Said the general manager of a Shanghai hotel: "The most important motivator is money."
But those perceptions may be outdated and wrong.
That’s the picture that emerged when we interviewed, observed and surveyed employees at three Western-branded hotels in China last year and this year. Many of the workers we studied wanted more than just a paycheck from employers, took pride in being part of a team and often were willing to go beyond minimum requirements to solve problems on the job.
While some of the West’s impressions of Chinese workers may have been accurate when U.S. multinationals first started doing business in China in the early 1980s, our findings indicate that what Chinese workers want from a job and what they are willing to put into it has changed since then.
And if what we discovered in the hospitality industry runs true across other industries in China, then multinational companies may be using the wrong incentives to attract and retain Chinese workers. By focusing solely on salary as a motivational tool, they are giving short shrift to things such as training, time off and community building — incentives that could go a long way in a highly competitive job market.
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on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction, Market Research China.
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