Adapting to a Chinese office can require ducking a few ping pong balls
By Helena Iveson
On my first day at my new job in Beijing, I was hit on the head with a stray ping pong ball. Though a little dazed, it suddenly occurred to me that working in London and Beijing were going to be very different experiences.
I was awarded a four-month internship last year at China Daily, the country"s national English language newspaper. Though I had lived in China before, I hadn"t worked in an ordinary office environment and was intrigued to find out how similar it would be to the year I had spent working for a publishing company in London. Two capital cities, two equally sized organizations in the same industry. "How different could it be?" I thought as my plane began its descent into Beijing International Airport. How naive I was.
I was picked up and taken to a company flat, where I was informed that almost everyone who worked at China Daily lived on my apartment block. Horrified, I imagined a situation where I"d have to live next to someone like Gary, the office jerk who had made my existence a misery in London. Though I was very lucky to have my own apartment (all the local staff had to share), my long-held belief in keeping work and outside life separate was going to have to change - and fast.
The next day, I was taken to the office for a tour of where I would be spending the next four months. The lift opened on the fourth floor - right in front of a heated ping pong match on a makeshift table set up in the corridor - it was a lunchtime tournament. "What a good way to get rid of pent-up office tension," I thought. "So much more civilized than in London, where they go to the local pub for a quick beer!" I was absolutely thrilled - right up until I was whacked by a particularly aggressive forehand by the person I soon found out would be my new boss. After many embarrassed apologies and much nervous laughter, I wondered with a certain degree of paranoia if this was some odd initiation test.
My office contained 20 young people, all recruited from local universities to work at the paper. Everyone was eager to meet the new girl and lined up to clap as I walked in. But after 20 different introductions, the entire staff returned to work and the noise ceased. The office was filled with silence, broken only by the odd telephone ring and whispered conversation. It was incredibly quiet. The focus was work - or at least the appearance of it.
It wasn"t long before the younger members of the staff began complaining to me that they never had time to meet anyone because of the hours they worked. The complaints were justified: My British friends quickly learned not to whine to me about their long days. My colleagues may not have been working constantly (one young co-worker in particular seemed to be sending instant messages to most of China), but they sure put in long hours: When it came to time put in at the office, it was clear quantity was much, much more important than quality. When I turned my PC off at 6:30pm - thinking I had already put in an hour beyond our 9:30am-5:30pm expected workday - I felt a few disapproving stares bounce off my back as I headed to the door. No matter how often I attempted to be the last person in the office at the end of the day, there were always a few who were left to wave me goodbye.
I once joked, "Don"t you have homes to go to?" and was told in all seriousness that they all preferred to do a good job than go home. "What would I do at home?" one girl replied, looking baffled. Unlike in England, there was no clear acceptance that home time was also important to morale and productivity - work came first every time.
Every time but lunchtime, that is. In England, lunch was about 10 minutes long: just enough time to scan the newspapers and sprint to the local sandwich shop. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I now had two whole hours. I enjoyed office lunches in China, as it seemed to be the only time that people really relaxed. Outside of the confines of the office and away from the senior staff, the younger workers were free to speak their minds.
My time in the office served as an interesting case study into the communal nature of Chinese culture. Everyone in my department worked together, ate together and lived in the same apartment block. This was, I suppose, the fundamental difference between working here and in England; I could not imagine the editorial director in London and her lowly editorial assistant (er, me) regularly sharing the same table at lunch, let alone living next door to each other. There were much stronger bonds here than those that existed in my London office, though this also meant that there were no secrets. As the male journalist who was spotted have clandestine rendezvous with the office secretary was to find out, nothing was kept quiet for long.
On my last evening at the newspaper, there was a rope jumping competition to see who could do the most repetitions without stopping. Everyone from the printing staff to the chief executive put off going home and lined up to have their go with the rope. I looked at the line and hesitated. Four months earlier, I probably would have dismissed it as silly or worried I would look like an idiot. Now, I realized how these activities build morale and team spirit. I"d never really felt like part of a true office community back at home, and in Beijing, I really enjoyed it. But more importantly, I found out I"m a pretty mean rope skipper too.
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