Building "Listen and Understand" Culture

The Vietnam's labour market has the advantages of low costs; however, this will not last long. With the strong impacts of the requirements of economic development and labour productivity, the demands for skilled workers will increase. In near future, this will become a serious problem when the employer fails to recruit workers with the required skills. Some of the strengths of Vietnamese workers, which the foreign investors appreciate, are hard work and craftsmanship but the actual labour productivity in Vietnam is lower than that of other regional countries such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Japan.

 

Currently, foreign investors in Vietnam are now focusing on some key areas such as industrial parks where there exists a tough competition for high skill labour, professional and technical workers and unskilled employees.

 

Foreign companies investing in Vietnam need to recognize the difficulties in managing people, some of which include language barriers, cultural differences, non-transparent legal system.

 

For the labour at low levels (the unskilled): Due to the labour shortage, some companies accept to hire farmers to do the factory works and pay for the vocational training courses to improve their skills as well as support them with meals, transportation fees, and rent during the apprenticeship period or other rewards to reference new competent employees to work.

 

For personnel or senior personnel with technical expertise, companies need to invest in additional training courses to improve their employees’ professional skills and management skills as well as provide good labour welfare policies for long-term work.

 

For the key personnel, the company should pay more efforts to work directly with the leading experts in the human resource to get the best advices and recommendations for right employees. For the positions with requirements of the specialized skills, the company needs to provide professional training courses for workers.

 

For low-level positions such as unskilled workers, the company should outsource labour in order to reduce the load of paperwork and focus more on the manufacturing operations and improvement of the productivity and product quality.

 

It should be highlighted that the company should focus on the policies of salary, rewards, and social welfare, comparable with those of other companies, as well as apply the salary management model as a leverage to push the employees to work hard. The company should also pay more attention to training courses for employees and prepare for an inherited team after that.

 

For the company with factories far from the neighbourhoods, the company needs to create favourable conditions for employees, which include accommodation, amusement parks to help the workers balance their lives and reduce stress. Besides, the company needs to build the "listen and understand" culture, there should be the activities to connect the businesses and employees. The corporate culture is the invisible thread to retain the workers at the company as well as the motivation for the employees to work more efficiently.