Picture from: 365jia.cn
Last week, while watching the video about the Zappos’ company, its novel organizational culture kept reminding me of the other Chinese restaurant, which is “Haidilao”, a legendary hotpot chain restaurant in China.
As learned from Com 101, an organizational culture is “a pattern of shared values, beliefs, and assumptions considered to be the appropriate way to think and act within an organization.” Haidilao’s company culture is best demonstrated by its three core values: “equality, effort, and expansion”. In accordance to its unique corporate culture, Haidilao creates following novel human resource policies and practices.
First, it employs a large number of people from underdeveloped suburban areas and also graduates since 2006. This initiative helps the poor and students to get a job, where their abilities can be fully applied because being nice and friendly does not require a high level of education or work experience, which are what these two groups of people lack of.
picture from: goods.jc001.cn
Once workers are hired, a general coach is given to equip them with basic knowledge or common sense, followed by a more specific and personalized one-one-one training to cultivate workers’ skills and explore their full potential. To motivate employees to perform better, the company decides to give “salary” to its workers parents. That is, the better its workers do, the larger amount of money will their parents receive. To improve its working conditions, the company gives its workers great employee welfare like dormitories with free cleaning, and it empowers all of its employees to make decisions.
All of these distinguish Haidilao from other normal restaurants. To make it more clear, Haidilao has a horizontal organizational culture, while others have vertical ones. Zhang Yong, the founder of Haidilao, once said that in a normal company, the company-founder is the only owner and employees work for the owner; but here in Haidilao, everyone is the owner of the company and everyone works for their own companies. Obviously, Haidilao’s commitment to build a family-like environment creates a sense of belonging for its workers, which reinforces employees’ loyalty and their work enthusiasm.
Picture from Class 17 slides: PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AND BTM
Long story short, Haidilao’s corporate culture is the pivot that leads to its special HR management, which can also be called as a disruptive innovation because it works totally different from other hierarchical companies. This whole distinct human resource management explains why its customer service is always so high quality and considerate, and also shows companies high social responsibility (in helping weak group people).
References:
Case study: The Haidilao Company(04 November, 2011)[online]. Available at: https://hbr.org/product/the-haidilao-company/an/TU0021-PDF-ENG [Accessed 09 November 2014]