Chinese Lawyers Take up Blogging
My sister is a manager and attorney in the litigation department of a major law firm in Guangzhou, China, which is trying to adapt a more western style of managing and marketing. One of the things they’ve recently tried is having every attorney keep a blog on MSN.
At first, my sister loved to share her thoughts on her blog space. She thought it was fun and interesting for colleagues to know personal things about each other and even for the boss to learn some personal things about her that made her feel uncomfortable mentioning directly (like I am not performing well this week because I had a huge fight with my mom). I saw it as a great external marketing and recruiting tool, because it made the firm sound quite interesting. However, things started to get out of hand. Younger associates and legal assistants, knowing their bosses would read the blogs, frequently bragged about how they put their work before anything else in their life. One girl even wrote that she broke up with her boyfriend so she could spend more time at work. As a manager who was caught in the middle with her bosses and associates watching, my sister always felt the pressure to update her blog with strictly positive comments, no matter what she was really thinking. Soon she stopped writing altogether. It turned out she wasn’t the only one feeling this way; after awhile, more and more of her colleagues began shutting off their MSN blogs or just stopped writing on them completely. Soon, no one was blogging at all. So the firm came up with something new to keep up morale, which turned out to be much more effective and well received. They started an internal newsletter which notes harmless gossip and news circulating inside the firm—silly jokes, pictures of employee’s new-born babies, short reports about company outings, and a calendar of upcoming events.
Many other law firms in China are doing the same thing; working hard to change the company culture and improve company morale. When I was working in China for a New Zealand immigration consulting company in 2001, we had “annual meetings” at the nearby Hot Spring or on a vacation beach. At the time, outings like that were rare among my friends who worked at Chinese companies. My cousin was constantly complaining to me how uptight his Chinese colleagues were and how somebody who joined the office a couple months earlier now had enough seniority to order him to do office chores like making tea or picking up the newspaper. Very traditional stuff.
Like many people, I enjoy my work more when I like the company I work for and the people that I am working with. My sister is now planning an offsite training program for her litigation department. Nothing too formal, but another legitimate excuse to gather everybody to spend a Friday afternoon in a huge conference room with tea and cakes. In America, this would be a normal event, but in China, it’s still be considered a novelty.
Jackie Zhao
USA China Law Group
