China s SOEs Expanding Overseas. He Jun Luo Xiqing

Transcription

1 Training the 21 st Century Workforce for China s SOEs Expanding Overseas He Jun Luo Xiqing Abstract Owning a qualified workforce to meet the challenges from expanding to the overseas markets has been a never-ending pursuit for Sinopec Group. Sinopec Group, a giant SOE in China, started its overseas operations in the late 20 th century, and its pace of overseas expansion has been accelerating. It now operates its upstream petroleum exploration and production, petroleum engineering service, chemical engineering service, trade of crude oil and petroleum products in over forty countries and regions globally. Doing businesses overseas successfully, it needs urgently a workforce who should have the right expertise in the oil and gas industry as well as good foreign language and cross-cultural communication competence. This is not an easy task for the company. This paper discusses the required foreign language and cross-cultural communication skills for this workforce. It analyzes the problems existing among these expatriate workforce in foreign language and cross-cultural communication skills. It introduces the training programs currently adopted in the company to develop and improve the language and cross-cultural skills. It also suggests possible solutions to how to better enhance the foreign language and cross-cultural communication skills for this workforce, which can guarantee the success of the company in the process of becoming a world-leading multinational corporation. Key words: globalization foreign language competence cross-cultural communication competence training of expatriate workforce

2 Introduction The past two decades, China has seen rapid economic growth in the wave of globalization, and an increasing number of its SOEs expanding their business operations in the overseas markets. More Chinese companies are now found operating in different regions of the world, Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Africa. While operating overseas, these SOEs always have to face challenges of all kinds, one of which is a qualified workforce. A qualified workforce is essential to the smooth operation of these overseas businesses, and in turn, will bring ultimate success to overseas investment. Globally speaking, the successful experience and practice of many multinational companies in managing their overseas human resources indicate that Executing a global business strategy requires having the right talent in the right places; it requires specialized leadership skills managing the work of people with different backgrounds and customs. For a Chinese SOE expanding overseas, managing its global business successfully requires more than that, training, as one of the priorities, is a mandatory task, which can help much with the building of a qualified international workforce. Such training refers to the training offered to both the expatriates sent from China to the overseas work posts and the local employees hired by these Chinese companies in the host countries. SINOPEC and its Overseas Operations Sinopec is one of China s giant SOEs with its core business covering a wide range in oil and gas industry, from petroleum and natural gas exploration and production, petrochemical production, petroleum refining, trade of crude oil and oil products, to petroleum and chemical engineering services. Since the Company implemented its international strategy in the early 2000s, to make it a world-leading multinational energy company, it has walked step after step to the overseas markets. In the early stage of this overseas development, its operation mainly focused on petroleum exploration and development in some African and the Middle Eastern countries. As the company grew, its overseas operations also increased,

3 covering businesses from exploration and production, crude oil trade, machinery procurement and trade, petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, and petroleum refining, and operating in much more countries and regions around the world. Recently, the company also made some big moves in merging and acquiring international oil companies and the businesses of these companies. Presently, the Company has overseas operations in more than thirty countries, has an expatriate staff of over 16,000 and hires about 35,000 international employees. An Overview of How SINOPEC Selected and Trained its Overseas Workforce To succeed in its overseas development, the Company must have a workforce who has a good command of their professional knowledge and a foreign language, English in particular. As almost all the projects need employees urgently at the very early stage of its overseas expansion, the Company sent most of the employees to these overseas projects from within China. While choosing these employees could be a daunting task. For one reason, these employees must have experience in one of the required job positions on these projects, from operation workers, engineers, managerial positions etc. to project managers and senior executives. However, the biggest challenge was the foreign language (English) competence these employees had. As is known, English is not popularly used in China, though it is a compulsory course in all secondary and higher education institutions, many college graduates still could not use the English language fluently, not to mention those people who have worked in the oil fields, chemical plants or engineering companies for five years or longer. Without good English or foreign language competence, these expatriates sent to the overseas projects could not work well with their foreign co-workers at different levels, particularly those holding important positions, like those with managerial positions, project managers and senior executives. The worst case scenarios could be failures in the projects management or even huge financial losses.

4 Therefore, to complete this urgent task, the Company started its ten-year training program named as the Training of International Talent Pool, managed and supervised by the Company s Human Resources Department. This is how it worked: first, the H.R. Department released Training Enrollment (Recruitment) Notice to branch companies with specific requirements for potential candidates for each training program. The branch companies would then choose candidates according to the requirements and submit the list of candidates to the H.R. Department. These candidates would later be given a comprehensive English exam (covering all four areas, including listening, reading, writing and speaking) which was designed to test whether the candidates were qualified to join the training program. After the candidates are chosen, they will receive a two-session training i.e., four-to-five months English training in the training facilities in SINOPEC and three-to-four-month specialty training abroad (mainly in the United States and Britain). The four-to-five-month English training is very much intensive training of the four-skill areas: listening, reading, speaking and writing, with different courses developed and compiled to meet the specific requirements, which are to make the candidates able to understand and use English in an English speaking environment both in everyday life situation and work place context. When the training ends, the candidates take a national exam on English competence and another SINOPEC English Test, those who pass the exams are given the opportunities to receive the specialty training abroad. One other target of the English training is to prep the candidates for the training they ll receive in either the United States or Britain, because all training abroad is conducted in English by native speakers. The specialty training is mostly a tailored program designed by an education institution based in the U.S. or the U.K. Depending on the complexity of the specialty, the training is designed from three months to four months long. Training courses are mainly closely connected with the candidates specialty and are supposed to be highly practical. Training is conducted by professors at universities or experts in that special field of

5 study. One of the other purposes of sending these candidates to receive training abroad is to allow the candidates to be exposed to an all-english-speaking environment. The followings are two samples of the curriculum of the English training and specialty training. English Training Specialty Training (for Upstream Business Accountants) Courses offered Weekly Courses offered hours Listening Comprehension 10 USA GAAP Reading Comprehension 8 Advanced Accounting Speaking Workshop (conducted by native 8 Oil and Gas Accounting English speakers) Speaking Workshop (conducted by Chinese 4 Finance English teachers) English Writing 4 Auditing When both training sessions are completed, the candidates will be offered opportunities to work in an overseas project. Since 2003, over 3000 candidates have received trainings mentioned above and over 80% of these candidates are now working on the Company s overseas projects. Qualifications and Competence of Expatriates Working Overseas Since about five or six years ago, as more people who had received the above-mentioned training were being sent to work on overseas projects, some negative voices were heard, complaining that some of these people do not qualify for the jobs overseas, with the biggest problem being their incompetence in effective communication with their foreign co-workers or counterparts. Problems emerged and the Company s H.R. Department and training practitioners began to realize that changes need to be made to

6 improve the quality of the English training programs. To make changes, they must first analyze where problems exist. From the feedbacks they received, the biggest complaint from employers was these employees incapability to communicate in good-quality English. To be more specific, they were not able to well understand their foreign co-workers or to clearly and accurately articulate what they think in a business (work) context, for example, in negotiations, these Chinese employees might misunderstand the clauses in a contract, and when it came to negotiating terms, they sometimes failed to fight for their rights. Consequently, some major projects were lost and how much financial loss this may have caused is very much obvious. Digging deeper, the root cause of this communication failures are spotted: this expatriate workforce is not a qualified intercultural workforce. What is a qualified intercultural workforce then? Intercultural workforce, apparently, refers to a workforce being sent to a work environment with a different cultural background or a workforce who have to be working with people from other cultures. This involves the concept of intercultural communication, or in other words, cross-cultural communication, which, by definition, in its more general sense, means the communication between people from different cultural backgrounds. It occurs when a member of one culture produced a message from consumption by a member of another culture. It is a communication between people whose cultural perceptions and symbol system are distinct enough to alter the communication event. (Samovar, 2003) Effective intercultural communication is critical to the establishment and maintenance of favorable intergroup relations. Factors that have been identified as central to intercultural communication competence are cultural knowledge and awareness, and communication skills, etc. (Julie S., Timothy M.) To stress how important intercultural competence and language competence are in our communication, it is worth mentioning the five models of communicative competence that Dell Hymes proposed in 1960s, as illustrated in the graph below:

7 Hymes: the Five Models of Communicative Competence Here, Hymes put linguistic competence and cultural competence as two major components in the model, suggesting that without linguistic and cultural competence, one could not achieve effective communication. As for the problems existing in SINOPEC s expatriate workforce, not having a good command of the English language and the shortage of effective intercultural communication competence seems to be the biggest barriers to the success of the Company s overseas operations. All needs to be done is to, first, improve the effectiveness of the English training programs; and second, to develop intercultural communication competence for these expatriates who are about to be sent to work overseas. All these can be achieved through training and learning. New Changes Made to the Training Programs To improve the quality and effectiveness of the English training programs, the curriculum was revised based on results from surveys conducted to the expatriates working on overseas projects. The revised curriculum targets more at the English used in real-life and real-work situations. And the courses were designed to stress more on how the trainees could

8 convert the language input they received from the listening and reading courses into language output. In the new curriculum, instead of being separately taught, the listening and speaking courses, reading and writing courses are more integrated. The contents for each are also designed to be as closely linked as possible to the real-life and real-work situations to fit the needs of different groups of trainees from E & P engineers, to people with managerial positions, project managers and even to executives. Besides, cross-cultural communication content is also added to the course syllabus. The following is an example of the newly-revised curriculum. Courses Listening and Speaking English in Everyday Situation English in the Workplace Speaking Workshop (Conducted by Native Speakers of English) English in Everyday Situation English in the Workplace One-on-Two Conversation Workshop (Conducted by Native Speakers of English) Reading and Writing English in Everyday Situation English in the Workplace Writing Workshop (Conducted by Native Speakers of English) Weekly hours In the new curriculum, more hours are allocated to the output, where trainees are able to practice what they received in the input classes with a native speaker of English. This new curriculum has been in use for two years, and it s turned out to be more effective than the old one. As trainees have much more opportunities to actually use the English language in a simulated real-life and real-work situation, they are

9 better prepared for life and work in a foreign country. And because they can use the English language more often during the training session, the language quality has also been enhanced. All in all, the linguistic competence and cultural competence are both improved through training. As the Company s overseas business grows and matures, the Company s international strategy has to be modified. Because of the expansion of its overseas markets, more workforces are needed. The Company s overseas projects started to hire more employees from the host countries or even started to hire nationals from many other different countries. As mentioned earlier, presently, there are about 35,000 foreign employees hired by SINOPEC s overseas companies, and this number is increasing. Localizing workforce during the internationalization of a company has become a trend and common practice by large multinationals. However, such an increase of local employees brings a new challenge managing them and reaching mutual understanding. Needless to point out, SINOPEC is a state-owned super-large company in China. Its management, operation, corporate culture, and even Chinese culture are all new to those foreign employees, most of whom knew little about Chinese management styles. Consequently, misunderstandings and sometimes even contradictions and conflicts appear. The Company s spent many years effort to train its expatriates who are sent to foreign countries, but somehow unaware of the necessity of offering training to its foreign employees. Realizing such a need, in 2010, the Company started a yearly training program offered to the Company s foreign employees who work on its international projects. Each of these two-week training sessions takes in 25 to 30 trainees, and courses offered include Chinese Culture, SINOPEC Operation and Management, SINOPEC Corporate Culture, SINOPEC Development Strategies, Cross-culture Management and Communication, and Visits to SINOPEC Headquarters Office and other Branch Companies. This training program aims at offering the Company s foreign employees an opportunity to see and feel for themselves what SINOPEC is really like, what China is like, so that they ll reach a better understanding of their Chinese managers,

10 colleagues and the policies being carried out which they formerly felt hard to accept. Such training has been proved to be a success, and more of the foreign employees make requests to take part in the training. To meet their requests, the Company s H.R. Department has decided to send the training overseas so that more people will be able to benefit from it. And new courses will also be added to the current curriculum. Conclusion SINOPEC s overseas development will not end, and training of its expatriates and foreign employees will still play a vital role in the success of its overseas development. In the future, besides improved off-job training programs offered to expatriates and the foreign employees, more training courses could be accessed on the Company s e-learning website. Plans have been made to compile and design good-quality online courses on English learning, cross-cultural communication, and even special courses in English. Once these courses are compiled, they will be posted on SINOPEC s e-learning website and mobile learning site, which will benefit to a much broader population of the Company s employees. And such training will definitely construct a qualified workforce for SINOPEC s development in the 21 st century. References Larry M. Samovar, Richard, E. Porter, Communication between Cultures, D. Hymes, Two types of linguistic relativity, 1966 Julie S., Timothy M., The Role of Intercultural Communication Barriers, Affective Responses, Consensual Stereotypes, and Perceived Threat, Intercultural Business Communication, 2010.