Tencent and its Management

 

 

 

 

Proactive and Collaborative

 

Proactive and Collaborative are two key principles of Tencent work culture. They are not just slogans printed on T-shirts, but very well planted in their employees' mind by:

1. big scale bonus

Each year Tencent gives out a bonus up to many months of salaries to each employee, based on their contribution. Salary as temptation makes all of the employees try to work as hard as possible and being proactive as much as possible.

2. self-growth evaluation

Each year's evaluation has a 12 directions chart. 12 directions include for example communication skills, professional skills and knowledge sharing. So from different angles to analyse how much he or she has progressed. 

Also in this way, each person is competing with themselves, not with each other. That avoids much office politics I have seen other companies. 

3. finger-pointing-free

when a mistake happened, or a goal was failed to achieve, nobody got a threatening email saying that it is his fault. Instead, every month we had a team sum up meeting and talked about what could be improved.

 

I would also like to share two stories.

 

Zhang, a senior product manager continuously created quite a few troubles. So the project he was in charge of was not moving forward for months. 

Instead of threatening him, his team leader gathered a small group of people (I was also there) to discuss solutions to HELP Zhang. His team leader said to us, we needed to find out a way, helping him to work better with the team and NOT to destroy his confidence. 

 

A finger-pointing email was sent by a product manager. In 20 minutes, our big boss answered his email and CC to all of us, telling us finger-pointing is not the right way. Try and try harder to solve problems and be a team player.

 

 

 

Giant Company, Small Teams

 

A company that has more than 40,000 employees (2017) is divided into different business groups. And a business group is divided into different product departments and then in function teams. In this way, each employee was related to a team that has 20-30 person. 

It is a very smart way to maintain a culture of start-up companies. Each person knows his responsibilities. 

 

For example for our App that has millions of users, our team has only 4 designers (2 UX+2 UI), in a company that has more than a thousand designers.

 

 

 

User-centered as A Core Value

 

Each new employee in Tencent is obligated for a 3-5 days new employee training. That includes learning about Tencent's culture, core values and also internet security training (anti-hacker). In this way, each Tencent employee learns why user-centered design is important, and how to implement it in daily work. In this training, Tencent's user research department is introduced. It is an individual department with user research experts and it provides help for each department. 

 

As a UX designer, I benefited a lot from ：

1. existing Tencent survey website (super well designed) and I could easily edit, sent out a survey and receive results that are analyzed in graphs. 

 

2. monthly user research reports, like for which age group in which type of online behavior there was a new trend. 

 

3. UR equipment: user interview room, observation room.

 

4. professional support and budget for certain topics (these topics need to be complicated enough evaluated by UR center).

 

Even though Tencent has made great effort to promote user-centered principles I had been through a difficult time by convincing our team to add usability testing into the regular development process. I had no budget for usability testing, so I paid for the tests.

 

 

 

Strong Hierarchy 

 

I expected an internet company would be flat hierarchy I was definitely wrong about it. In Tencent, as all the leaders (including a team leader) has the power of annual evaluation (and that decides how much bonus this person earns).

 

That leads to Tencent people obey very much their leaders. Whatever leaders say are right. However, I have faced very often situations that leaders have different opinions, A thinks our App should go this way, B thinks another way. They never discuss and make a final decision face to face. So for me, according to the strategic direction from A, I have provided design solutions but B told me that is not what he wanted. 

 

This kind of absolute-personal-influence culture is not wrong, it only requires an extremely intelligent leader. Wechat is a good example. But sadly not all the leaders are Xiaolong Zhang (head of Wechat).

 

 

And when leaders don't have time, we wait. We observed his office whether he is back yet or not because the design needs his approval and then pass to the next phase. Sometimes this waiting is a couple of hours, sometimes half a day, sometimes a day. They never wanted to make an appointment. Appointments are only available when their bosses want to see them.

 

The strong hierarchy also refers to doing anything to please the leaders.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The People

 

 

 

 

My colleagues in Tencent are very young, most of them are born the 1990s, not so long graduated from universities. They are active, ambitious and very optimistic. 

 

Optimist

 

Being optimistic is built in genes for Chinese. To live in polluted cities, baring very high price for apartments, intensive stressful work and very little holiday, Chinese people don't complain much. This spirit is a treasure when it combines with work culture. 

 

When a new idea comes, it had problems and disadvantages. For Tencent people, they would say 'let's do it!! We will solve the problems step by step'. Yes, I have seen situations like this many times in Tencent, they focus on the chance instead of getting scared by the risk. 

 

 

Cantonese

 

The headquarter of Tencent is located in Shenzhen, a neighboring city of Hong Kong. Wechat and Internet Security (the department I worked for) are located in Guangzhou, which is a neighboring city of Shenzhen and the capital city of Guangdong province. 

 

Guangzhou is called Canton. So the people there and their language are called Cantonese. Cantonese people have quite a special character: they are very humorous and relaxed, they don't talk about politics but they like to talk about money (investments, stocks), and they have a great passion for food.

 

In our department, there were many Cantonese colleagues. We had fun every day! We mocked each other for fun, we photoshopped each other for fun. In meetings and presentations could also be very relaxed. 

 

 

Supervisor

 

Each new employee from Tencent gets a supervisor. Supervisors are normally the people that are senior in the same profession. They provide guidance for the newcomers in almost every sense. From professional skills to where the toilet is and where the printers are. 

 

My supervisor was a senior UX designer. On my first day of work, she introduced me to all the colleagues in the design team, to the project team and to all others I might have task collaboration. 

 

This introduction also passed the message that 'She is my student, I take care of her'. And she did take care of me, especially at the beginning of my job.