Infamous Tea & Honey show
When is using MSN Office appropriate? Is it okay to put emoticons in a business email? And more importantly – what constitutes a bribe?
The answers seem obvious, but these are issues that exasperate managers and executives in Shanghai’s multicultural workplaces, where Western expectations seem obvious to those issuing them, but opaque to local employees.
Enter cultural mediator Rory Cobar, a self-employed consultant who helps companies overcome cultural barriers and miscommunications that hinder work flow, incite conflict or – in the most serious situations – cause legal trouble. Cobar cheekily admits she made up her job; she isn’t aware of anyone else in town doing it. Nevertheless, she has a roster of multinational corporate clients, most of whom found her through word of mouth.
“Initially everyone thinks it’s a language barrier – it’s not. You wouldn’t have hired them if they couldn’t speak English,” Cobar says. “It’s that they don’t know how to act in a Western business environment because it’s really quite different.”
The first thing Cobar does is ask managers to identify the problem. In one instance, managers at a company (Cobar has non-disclosure agreements with clients) were fed up with what they saw as a bribe-taking problem in their procurement department. They pointed to their company handbook and showed Cobar where it stated, “Bribery is not permitted.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s the least specific thing you could write,” she says.
Cobar asked managers what they thought a bribe was. They said an expensive meal or a present, like a pair of concert tickets. But when she asked employees they told her a bribe was accepting large stacks of cash.
The company had multi-million dollar deals with its providers, so as per Chinese business custom, it was standard for employees to receive big gifts – like an antique vase – when a contract was signed. Employees complained that it didn’t matter what they said, that providers would always give gifts, even if they said they couldn’t accept them.
“OK, then you say, ‘I can’t accept this, but I can accept a box of oranges,’” Cobar instructed in a training seminar.
Cobar mediated an agreement where employees could accept meals up to RMB600 and that the only allowable gifts would be food – a resolution that relieved management, but also let employees keep custom with their business relations.
To an outsider, the problems Cobar handles might appear basic, but they’re fraught with mistrust. It helps to have someone outside the company step in. When Cobar meets employees she drafts a confidentiality agreement so they know she isn’t a spy for management. She’ll also throw in a remark about “weird laowai bosses” which is most often met with knowing laughter. It helps build trust, which in turn makes people listen when she tells them how to adjust their behavior.
Cobar received her masters in cultural studies at Goldsmiths University of London, but her life has been one big case study in overcoming cultural barriers. The daughter of diplomats, Cobar’s longest stretch in her native Honduras was two years during her late teens. She spent her early childhood bouncing around the Caribbean, went to high school in Washington, D.C. and did her undergrad in Australia.
She’s been working in Shanghai for two years. Most companies hire her to solve existing problems, but recently she’s started signing clients that are just entering China (managers see where they can avoid problems with training up front). In these courses, Cobar goes over dress code and proper business trip behavior. She emphasizes to employees that losing face by reporting a problem is much better than losing their jobs for failure to do so.
“Sometimes it seems very simple,” she says. “But somebody needs to do it.”
