Annie Ren has a soft voice, a sparkle in her eye, a deeply spiritual soul - and she uses the word‘bullshit’a lot. Difficult to describe or characterize, Annie does not fit any ‘box’ - neatly or otherwise. She certainly doesn’t want to fit anyone’s mold. In spite of her current, corporate surroundings, she remains truly a ‘free spirit’，a ‘world-changer’，an artist. How unlikely to find such a person in a transportation company in China, in the department with the objective to standardize operating procedures! Yet, when we first met, that is precisely where I found her.
Annie provides the most vivid example of Generation Y that I have ever met. More than anyone else, she has given me most of my insights concerning the thoughts, ideas, dreams and possibilities of the members of this special group. A single child born in 1981, Annie has no siblings due to the family planning regulations enacted in 1979/1980. This law represented a momentous change for the country, considering that Chairman Mao would, not long before, visit anyone’s home who delivered their 25th child! Traditionally, the Chinese view having many children as a wonderful circumstance, but the country realized the need to give up this tradition for the sake of a better future. Many elderly Chinese have reminded me of the great personal sacrifice following this law represents; some even view this as their gift to the world.
Thus Annie, along with tens of millions of other children, grew up with no brothers or sisters. This unique situation makes the members of China’s ‘Gen Y’ fundamentally different from their peers anywhere else in the world. Never in history has such a large cohort of children been raised in relative solitude. As Annie told me, being an ‘only child’ was not an issue she discussed with her classmates. She and her peers merely accepted their circumstances as a fact of life. Not until her early twenties did she discuss with her parents why they had not tried to have more children. She understood their reason, yet Annie remembers being lonely as a child, and she still misses not having a brother or sister.
Annie grew up in Inner Mongolia. Her mother was a family doctor. Initially, her father worked for the government, but later in his own business. Annie faced what so many of her peers faced - the care and attention of her parents and grandparents combined with their constant pressure for her to succeed in every way possible. To illustrate, for many years, Annie’s parents forced her to play the piano. She practiced six hours a day - before going to school, rising at 5 am - and when she returned home. As a result, she was in a continuous battle with her parents; she hated it! She would sometimes try to trick her parents by recording her practice and playing the tape while they were in another room.
Like so many families in China, Annie's parents wanted her to ‘arrive early at the start of the race’，so they sought to ‘groom’ her academically and musically. She never had time just to play; she hardly had a chance to make friends. I have heard Annie’s story repeated by many of her peers, and I remain puzzled why so many parents, who as children enjoyed playing outside with friends, could become convinced that keeping their kids inside studying would be best for them. I do understand why parents and grandparents want their children to be successful; often that one child will be responsible for the family’s retirement income. At the same time I would expect grown-ups to have a stronger sense of how to help children be successful. Life experiences and social interaction contribute a great deal to career success, perhaps more than education in isolation.
Clearly, Annie has forgiven her parents; she realizes they loved her and simply did what they thought best for her future - just like many other families. However, asked if she would use the same methods with a child of her own, Annie doesn’t hesitate,“Absolutely not!” Annie confessed that until recently she remained unconvinced she would ever want to have children. In her words, “The world is not so beautiful, and the pressures on children are so great,” Now, she is more confident she could raise children the way she would want to - with no pressure and more freedom. She and her husband want two children if they can afford them!
When she went to college in Xian, Annie experienced much more freedom than she had living at home. She loved this change and didn't focus very much on studying. She selected classes based on her interests. Quite suddenly, her parents ended their financial support, forcing her to be independent at the age of 21. Thus, in addition to continuing her education, Annie had to find work. During this rough experience, Annie feels she learned a lot about life.
Purely out of curiosity about the world of business, Annie joined a company that implemented quality management standards in client companies. Starting as the general manager's assistant, she was often forced to improvise. While attending a presentation at TNT, Annie basically had to finish the talk because the consultant in charge was making a mess of it. This event led to Annie’s being recruited by TNT.
As a backdrop for meeting Annie at TNT, I must confess that I had never been a big fan of all the quality standards we had to implement, such as ISO. These industry standards require companies to comply with certain methodologies to assure their customers receive a particular level of quality. I argued that these standards measure process and form rather than relevant, substantive outcomes. My view was certainly not the prevailing one within TNT, and my management team had to spend a lot of time in rigorous review sessions to confirm our compliance with all sorts of policies.
While participating in these sessions, I met Annie, and she struck me as not particularly well suited for quality control and standard operating procedures. Although her team members all seemed very structured and organized, she seemed much more quirky and creative. Subsequently, I became very well acquainted with Annie through her work supporting our corporate and social responsibilities (CSR) activities. CSR initiatives enjoyed a very high profile inside TNT. For some strange reason, in China the CSR activities had been lumped together with quality control. However, this happy coincidence gave Annie a chance to work on many personally interesting and rewarding projects.
Because Annie’s direct boss was not particularly involved in CSR activities, she and I slowly developed direct communication on these subjects. I was amazed how much Annie truly cared for this work; she was a constant source of new ideas as well. Eventually, Annie became so comfortable sharing her suggestions with me that she was one of very few people who just walked into my office when it suited them to launch a plan or ask my views. Among employees older than Gen-Y, such behavior is unheard of in China - except for some very senior people like the directors of HR or TNT’s leadership role in CSR Under Peter Bakker's personal leadership as CEO, TNT took CSR very seriously. TNT became the first global corporate partner in the UN’s World Food Program, to contribute to solving world hunger. Peter interpreted this tragedy as primarily a logistics problem. In numerous other ways, TNT contributed knowledge and resources in times of crisis around the world.
A bit later, Peter also launched an ambitious plan to substantially reduce the company’s ‘carbon footprint,’ realizing that as a transportation company, we significantly contributed to the problems associated with converting carbon to energy, and therefore had an obligation to help find solutions. This ‘culture of responsibility’ infused the entire company, representing perhaps the primary source of organizational loyalty among TNT’s employees. For several years, TNT topped the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, reflecting the company’s global leadership in this area. In China, too, we did our best to contribute to these efforts; for example, by helping arrange the launch of electric delivery vehicles in China. Finance. Everyone else always asked for a convenient time to speak with me through my assistant, Linda.
I enjoyed my conversations with Annie, because they provided authentic insight regarding what she and her peers really thought. She asked me a lot of questions about how she should behave in a big company, and she openly complained about the old-fashioned behaviors and politics that irritated her. Of course Annie’s just ‘stopping by’my office raised a lot of eyebrows among more ‘senior’ people; several of them warned me about her ‘overly ambitious’ attitude. I mostly ignored these comments, observing in Annie only a genuine desire to understand company issues more deeply. I also quickly noticed that in fact, she was not really very ambitious; she never discussed anything like a career path or a promotion. Instead, she talked about culture, books, philosophy, and how we could create a better world.
Once I met Annie and a few of her TNT friends during a weekend. They had gathered in a coffee shop near my house that I also often visited with my family. The six of them sat there surrounded by a pile of books. They had created a book club to read and discuss modern Chinese and English literature. I then realized how similar modern Chinese are to their Western peers.
CHANGING THE ATTITUDES TOWARDS GENERATION Y
For me, Annie became her generation’s informal spokesperson. Based on our conversations, I began to realize TNT would have to do a lot of things very differently to make sure Annie’s generation really connected with our company.
As a result of previous discussions I had had with some members of my team, I was aware of an overwhelmingly negative bias toward members of Gen Y among older employees. I decided to raise the subject in one of our management meetings. I asked the team what they thought of ‘Ba Ling Hou’s’ - people born in the l980’s. As we went around the table, their responses stunned me. Everyone in the entire group had plenty of examples of Gen Y ‘kids’ being lazy, selfish, disrespectful, easily discouraged, spoiled and generally inferior. I realized we needed a fresh perspective. I asked everyone to give at least one positive example of a Ba Ling Hou. This time their pictures were not nearly so bleak. Much more encouraging themes emerged: creative, well-educated, open-minded, easy-going, flexible, adaptable, eager learners.
We were surprised to learn from Helena that by the end of 2009, already well over 60% of our staff was born after 1980; obviously, Gen Y issues were important for us to understand. I instantly recognized we had discovered one of our main challenges: Most of our non-managerial staff came from a completely different generation than their bosses. In previous discussions of topics related to ‘younger employees’，we had focused solely on how the new generation should adapt to the older generations. I determined to challenge that notion. What if instead we tried changing the older generation and provided them with tools to inspire and lead Generation Y? In short, what if we assumed that Generation X needed to learn how to work with Generation Y, rather than the other way round?
In an effort to really dig deeply into these issues, we looked more closely at our employee engagement scores. Indeed, staff born after 1980, still in lower organizational ranks, were less engaged than all other age groups. They also had gripes about how they were managed, and about lack of career opportunities and seniority-based remuneration. These data seemed to confirm some of the negative bias toward members of Gen Y, suggesting they were spoiled and undeserving. At the same time, the data showed that younger employees valued things like career development and the company’s CSR activities more than any other age group.
We decided to presume the positive side of Gen Y and engaged a large group of them in conversation. We involved Annie and a number of her friends in these IN CHINA, WE TRUST discussions, asking what they would find really exciting about working for TNT. A much clearer picture started to emerge from these open sessions: they wanted more open communication about what they were doing well and where they needed to improve. They wanted clarity about their career development. They wanted to be empowered to take some initiatives. They wanted to be more involved in CSR and community events. They also made clear they would not shy away from taking responsibility and working hard, as long as in return they would be treated fairly by their superiors. I started to realize that, having been born and raised in the Netherlands in the 70s, I actually shared more of Gen Y’s values and expectations than those of my own age group in China. This realization allowed me to identify with our youngest employees.
We initiated more discussions with the management team about our findings from these open conversations with Gen Y employees, and with little disagreement, we all started to change our perspective of Gen Y. A number of my team members realized there would indeed be great value in embracing Gen Y rather than trying to get them to change. For example, Andrew Yang appointed Max Sun as the Shen yang Branch General Manager, quickly benefiting from his intelligence and passion. I made sure to remind other young people often that we now had a branch general manager born in the 1980’s.
In one of our senior management conferences, we invited a few Generation Y staff to share their views about their work and their dreams. They did an excellent job, creating sympathy and understanding among the audience.
Frankly, simple, demographic facts accelerated the pace of change regarding how we related to Gen Y in our workforce. In 2007 less than half our staff was born after 1980, but by the end of 2010, this portion already exceeded 70%. Older groups simply became outnumbered, so they were forced to change their ways very quickly.
An additional challenge we faced was that TNT’s brand did not attract the ‘super-successful’ students. TNT is a large multinational firm, yet it is not GE, P&G or McKinsey. As I described in the chapter on Helena, we shifted our focus from recruiting in the top tier universities to the second tier in order to address this issue. We reasoned that expectation levels for landing a job at a company with a name that would make any mother-in-law proud would be lower among these candidates. Although many really bright students attend second tier universities, they would have already come to terms with the fact that they hadn’t gained entrance to Peking University or Harvard. They thus would have developed more resilience and a more realistic sense of available opportunities. Therefore, we tended to attract people who in many cases felt they had disappointed their parents and grandparents - yet they had already adjusted to this. Friends of mine at McKinsey indeed confirmed they face this problem of unrealistically high expectations. Recruits used to being recognized as ‘the best’ often suffered unexpected disappointment when they didn’t excel within McKinsey’s ‘up or out’culture. At TNT, we benefited from recruiting those who had often confronted some failure and had already tuned their expectations accordingly.
GENERATION Y LEADING CSR
For TNT’s CSR activities, I decided to appoint Annie as the company’s spokesperson, together with me. In reaching this decision, I bet on the fact that other Gen Y employees would love to see a peer in that role; yet I also realized Annie would stand little chance of really being taken seriously if I did not visibly support her CSR projects. So for a number of internal and external events, Annie and I showed up and delivered our messages together.
My direct support and involvement encouraged Annie to propose some really fresh ideas to engage people with CSR, especially the ‘Planet Me’ environmental program. She launched a supporting project called “Me at Home.”By participating with their families and friends, employees could implement a number of energy-saving initiatives at home. For each implemented activity, they could collect some eco-friendly buttons. Though simple, these buttons were very nicely designed and executed. All I did to support her was approve the costs - only a few thousand dollars. A few weeks after the launch, Annie told me the results disappointed her: only 1700 people had signed up to participate. I laughed out loud, then assured her that 1700 0ut of 2700 people participating in a voluntary energy-saving program at home was a brilliant result, far surpassing my wildest expectations.
Another nice idea Annie developed was to design computer bags from old TNT uniforms. She collected the uniforms and had a foundation in Shanghai design and produce the bags. The foundation hired members of underprivileged families for the project - an additional benefit. These bags became such a hit that the global team in Amsterdam ordered a few thousand!
HEIPING GENERATION Y TO MAKE CONNECTIONS
In this spirit of involving the members of Gen Y in activities they cared about, we also tried to create opportunities for them to connect with each other. We knew that young people communicate a lot via social media (one research project indicated that Chinese youth spend six hours a day chatting over the Internet). We created an internal website called TNT Village that supported blog-spots; employees were free to create their own groups. We involved only members of Gen Y in the development of this site, knowing that older employees would probably not use it very much anyway.
We cancelled the restrictive policies banning office Internet use for anything not work-related, perhaps inspired by my own frustration that I could not use my gmail account, watch TED talks or read the New York Times. We communicated this policy change in writing, assuring everyone that we trusted them to use good judgment while‘surfing the web’in the office. In a written response, Max Sun thanked me for showing his generation trust and respect. Before we lifted this restriction, many people expressed concern that employees might waste time playing games or shopping online, but I never heard one complaint.
IMPACT OF OUR APPROACH
Within a year and a half, we had clear evidence that simply initiating a dialogue with TNT’s Gen Y employees and confronting the quite common belief that they needed to mature and adapt, was working. Staff engagement among these Ba Ling Hou’s improved by 10 percentage points between the end of 2008 and mid 2010; they became TNT’s most engaged group (Egon Zehnder consultants told me this was highly unusual). Voluntary turnover in this group also dropped significantly, to below l0%. Literally within a couple of years we became a really attractive employer for China’s young generation - with little financial investment. We simply began expressing an interest in them, offering them respect and understanding, and creating some professional space for them to grow and develop.
THE FUTURE OF CHINA
I believe Annie Ren and many others like her offer us hope for a wonderful future for China. She and her friends value strong connections between people, and they are truly concerned about the impact their actions have on other people and our planet. Annie also worries about the ‘spiritual void’ she observes in large parts of the Chinese population, due to their embrace of materialism as the definition of success. She once told me that she believes the gods take away happiness from those who accumulate too much wealth.
People like Annie prove that members of Gen Y should not be characterized as selfish. Considering that they were raised as single children, their social acumen very much impresses me; they’re so eager to learn and forge meaningful connections with others. I believe that far from being self-centered, members of China’s Generation Y will quickly aspire to Maslow’s pinnacle of growth - self-actualization - and beyond.
Based on the observations chronicled here, Annie’s generation keeps me optimistic that the future will be even brighter than the past. As they continue to become company leaders, filling more and more senior positions, their willingness to change and adapt will ensure that this better future can quickly be realized. These young, highly educated professionals bring a very holistic, responsible perspective to their careers; I’m certain their stars will shine brightly for many years to come. We just need to nurture their passion - and trust them.
(selected from ln China, We Trust by lman·Stratenus, published by China Intercontinental Press in 2018)