This week our group came up some questions to conduct the interviews with people in different fileds on the views about the current and future of the work. My interviewee is Jen, one of my friends living in Shenzhen China. She works as the senior management in a MNE, which is a world’s leading airline company. Jen worked in this company for nearly 10 years starting from Trainee after graduating from her master degree. She has similar value with me that’s why we could be friends. I asked her 5 questions about her work and workplace. Here are her answers.
- Q: What motivates you to work? A: The motivation for my work comes from the content of my work, which allows me to continuously learn and grow, broaden my minds, at the same time, I could be recognized by people around me during the work.
- Q: How to keep enthusiasm on your work? A: When it comes to how to keep enthusiasm on my work, I think my passion for my work actually comes from my drive. I feel that being able to do one thing well is a great sense of accomplishment, and I can also share this sense of accomplishment with people surrounding me.
- Q: Can you describe your current environment of workplace? Do you think it will affect your attitude towards your work and your working performance? A: I think our company culture is very good. Our company culture encourages employees to balance work and life, respect equality and collaboration. I really appreciate that most of our colleagues have the same values. As we said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, the culture and environment of the company will affect staffs’ level of engagement and working performace, epecially for me, it is influential.
- Q: What new technology do you need on your work? A: The new technology such as microsoflt teams, zoom which could allow us work remotely and connect us with colleagues all over the world will be more involved in our work. We use these virtual team meeting softwares during Pandamic.
- Q: How does work realize self-worth? A:1) Salary.Self-worth will definitely have a positive relationship between the effort you put in and the salary you get; 2) Happiness. If your values do not match the working environment and the company culture, you will not feel that what you do has self-worth; 3) The working environment and people or circles around you make you feel that you are constantly improving.
Jen agrees with the quote: “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, me too.
In my past working experience in HKTDC, I worked in different branch offices in different cities, with different bosses and team members. Besides the council’s culture, each branch office has its own culture which sometimes determined by the director of branch office (the leader of the branch office). My first 3 bosses come from Hong Kong, and they were born in 1960s, 1970s and 1980s respetively and all born and grew up in Hong Kong. They respect staffs views, and always encourage us to keep work and life balance. They would not find us during weekend or holiday except some urgent issues. Most of time, they would use email to communicate with us (internal staffs) and other staffs from other departments on working issues except when something urgent, they would choose to use sms, whatsapp or wechat. And my first 3 Hong Kong bosses trusted me including my morality and work ablity, and offered me a lot opportunities to join the high-level meetings / events(internal and external) as well as deploy me as project manager to accomplish the mega events to allow me grow up rapidly and built up good reputation in the Council. Besides the Directors respect our staffs and take each of us equality, my teammates in the first branch office are kind and nice. We collabrated well and worked for the same targets. Thanks to the good vibe of the office I worked, I felt like I can serve the Council for my lifetime~ haha
Situations changed when I was promoted and deployed to work in another branch office which is also one of the most important offices for the council. Even I got a better salary and higher position in the new office, the vibe of workplace and the relationship between colleagues were quite different from the previous one. I felt that there’s no teamwork spirits and no matter you put efforts or not, you will not be trusted and appreciated by your new boss. At the same time, recently years, wechat, microsoflt teams have become main tools for people communication in any issues including work. We got the wechat group, teams group to communicate with internal and external people all day. Most of time, people would find you anytime they want regardless weekend or holiday, working time or not, our Director did this also. He liked to line up wechat groups to deploy us with outsiders to discuss work no matter what time. This is very annoying for me and most of staffs who used to the work & life balance. The virtual meeting technology developed rapidly in recent years, especially in the Pandemic. As the article “Stories from the Global Staffroom: Experiences of Caring and Uncaring Architectures at work with Effy Harle and Jos Boys” mentioned, the online staffroom was a fun way of engaging with co-workers and it was quite an accessible way of engaging because you could swich it on and off, and you decided when you wanted to engage and when you didnt. However, aspect of it changed during Lockdown and now it’s morphed into this weird thing where you get all of the essential information about how we’re going to go back to work…. So, things are really important are now all communicated through this platform and so engaging with this platform has become compulsory. It’s become part of my job to read the posts, to press the “I’ve read it button,” and it’s really frustrating that they’ve hijacked their own staffroom. We started to use Teams, Zoom, wechat and other online communication tools to have meetings or discuss work at anytime and anywhere. They blur the private and working time which is very annoying and stressful for most of people.
Considering the unfavorable workplace environment and the contents of the work which were affected by the Pandamic (the border of Hong Kong and mainland China did not reopen at that time) could not allow me to learn more and develop well anymore, I feel I can try to change myself to get rid of this organisation and try to learn some know knowledge to improve myself. That’s why I decide to quite my job and gap my work life to come to UK to study. For me, life is a journey and Life is Self-cultivation.