Job Description: Chief Human Resource Officer

After working for a semiconductor company for several years, JZ and several colleagues decided to quit and form their own semiconductor company in Shanghai, China. In this new company, JZ worked as the chief human resource officer. Given the importance of the position, particularly in the company's early years, she had to work countless more hours than her peers. Every morning, she got up around 7:30 to get ready for work. She usually left the house around 8:30 and came back well past dinner time. Although it was rewarding for her career, she did not have much time left for her family; the nanny took care of the children. She experienced many challenges during her time at her start-up company, but through sheer persistence and hard work, she successfully took the company into the initial stages of going public. Being the head of HR meant that she had to deal with a variety of issues, but these three main aspects summarize her job: being a mathematician, teacher, and diplomat.

Mathematician

Being the CHRO means a lot more responsibilities, which require a lot more skills. Not only does JZ have to possess amazing people skills, but she also has to be effective with numbers. Managing the budget requires a great deal of calculation. Salary is only a small portion of the budget that she calculates; she also needs to calculate employee benefits costs, training costs, termination costs, etc. She particularly finds the last month of every year the most challenging because she is responsible for deciding the year-end bonus. The year-end bonus varies greatly. JZ evaluates the annual performance of the employees and decides the bonus based on this information. In China, employees openly discuss salaries with one another. The bonus is the primary topic amongst them when it comes to the end of the year. When they believe they did not receive a fair bonus relative to their peers, it dissatisfies them. JZ spends countless hours analyzing data and deciding the bonus as well as explaining it to any unhappy employee. Moreover, because the company has gone into the initial stages of going public, she has been collaborating with the finance department in deciding the distribution of private stock to employees to incentive them. This, once again, means that there will be unhappy employees and mimics the year-end bonus process. 

Teacher

She is responsible for developing new and existing employees. Because she believes in quality over quantity, hiring is selective and there are not too many new employees to train. Instead, she focuses more on developing existing talent into higher-performing individuals. She often works on Saturday with employees that she sees as a candidate for a managerial position. 

As mentioned before, she also grades her employees. She does this every quarter and collaborates with different departments to get an overall score of an employee's performance. JZ always talks with the lowest performers to understand their situations. For example, one employee was going through depression due to a divorce. Not only was she devastated about her marriage, but she was also worried about her future because there are a lot of stigmas around a divorced woman in China. 

JZ thinks company politics is probably one of the most annoying and difficult problems. Just like how there are friend groups in school, different departments often form cliques. The worst conflict happened when a ping-pong match escalated into a fight. There was already a lot of trash-talking during the match, and after an R&D employee dissed the capabilities of a marketing employee, the marketing employee refuted by asking why the R&D employee's girlfriend would cheat on him if he was so capable. It then became physical and JZ had to deal with the aftermath. She enforced payment penalties and decided to relocate both of them, one to Beijing and one to Shenzhen, because they could not reconcile. It also was meant to make the work environment peaceful and less awkward for the remaining employees. It was essentially a super far and permanent time-out. 

Diplomat

Because of her soft skills, she represents her company when it comes to meeting important individuals in the supply chain. Her company is only a design house and outsources all manufacturing, and one of the current issues plaguing the world, besides the pandemic, is the chip shortage. Nowadays, she often meets up and networks with manufacturers in hopes of getting more chip production allocated to them and pushing for faster production because of the rising demands from tech companies like Xiaomi, Huawei, and Oppo. 

The board of directors selected JZ to deal with government officials, an unavoidable process. In China, laws regarding corporations are different. The government partially owns all companies that are public. This implies that building a good connection with the government is essential for the initial public offering process. Also, the board selected her among all the executives because she is the least stubborn. There was a time when the VP of her company got into a heated argument with a government official about the incorporation location, and this almost ruined several months of progress.

Flesch Reading Ease: 48.5

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10.7

Passive Sentences: 0%