An open letter to my senior management

I wrote an as of today sent this letter to the upper echelons of Pearson Asia Pacific.  Time will tell if I get anything but dead-air and/or platitudes with absolutely no followup.  Still, it felt good to write, and my coworkers are all in agreement... and some even think I don't go far enough.  So yeah.

Should I get no response, my next option will be to find the general company listserv and go populist with the message.

And so, without further ado...

To whom it may concern,

I’d like to pose my concerns regarding the efficacy of the current makeup and revenue-target model. While this has been an annual headache for myself and my coworkers, as we all scramble to account for the hours supposedly “missed” during national holiday leave, I’ve long since stopped beating that dead horse and grudgingly accepted that any and every “holiday” is more or less one extended scheduling aneurysm of 25%-filled makeups, and makeups of makeups, etc. I am not questioning this policy in itself at this time.

Rather, this year seems to have added yet another layer of needless complexity in the form of the “revenue-target” and its incentive structure, as is currently implemented. Let me lay out my own situation, and that of my campus: I am about to go into an 8-day “makeup marathon” which will compile two entire weeks worth of classes into a single stretch of time. At its worst, I’ll be actively teaching – without anything but a lunch break – from 9am until 8:30 at night. My fellow teachers face similar, if not worse, schedules.

We proposed that the makeups, rather than having to be lumped together as previously mentioned, instead be allowed to be spaced out into the first week or two of February, as both a quality of life, and direct quality of teaching issue. This has been what has worked in the past over my 3-plus year tenure here at Pearson, and I didn’t expect there to be much resistance to the same solution this year. Much to my surprise, the idea was deemed unworkable due to the revenue-target system that has been implemented. Under this structure, the local Senior Teacher, Center Manager, and apparently even the Regional Manager would all be directly financially punished if this so-called “target” were not met. This target is, to my knowledge, developed by the financial dept. and senior management, and is continually raised if met – and again, financially punished if a given school underperforms in a given month.

Given this model, for a small, slow-growth school like Chunshen, there is absolutely no room to space classes out over the next month, or for any schedule irregularities whatsoever. Virtually any discrepancy would result in the school falling “under target,” and thereby punishing the local management.

There is, therefore, active pressure on the management to meet this goal. That is understandable. However, there is no such incentive for the teaching staff to do the same.  Consequentially, there is a considerable degree of resentment at being made to compress half a month of classes into a single week.

This is doubly aggravating on a holiday like the upcoming Spring Festival… this is a holiday that happens annually; that is to say, every year. This could have been planned for, this could have been planned around; the monthly target could have (and quite frankly, should have) been adjusted to reflect the fact that the entire country is taking a week off.

And yet here we stand again, my 4^th Spring Festival at this company, now more stressed and overworked that any of the prior three, due to the shortsighted implementation of this policy, and its disregard for an annual, completely foreseeable schedule break on its teaching staff. Meanwhile, senior management will be enjoying extended vacations, with no compulsory makeups, or near-unattainable revenue targets hanging over their heads and paychecks.

Again, I’ve come to tolerate the policy of holidays merely being deferred classes, with little more than grumbles and a resigned shrug. That makes a level of financial sense, even if it is unorthodox. What I am perplexed and frustrated by, rather, is the myopic implementation of this revenue-target system, and the unnecessary additional level of stress it puts on teachers and center managers to not only make up all holiday classes – but to also do so by the 27^th of that given month. For a school like Xinzhuang or Xuhui, with their large number of classes and staff, and therefore relative flexibility with scheduling, the stress may be less. I cannot speak for them, but for a small, slow-growth school like Chunshen, it adds a completely arbitrary and unjustifiable deadline to complete these makeups.

While I hope that my words might find a receptive pair of eyes, my experience with the managerial structure of the company tells me I’m far more likely to get a nicely-worded brush-off and be promptly forgotten in the name of slightly better returns on paper, and positions above my own receiving congratulatory bonuses for effectively manipulating my and others’ schedules to make the returns looks nicer.  I hope this is not the case, and that there might be a real and serious look into the value vs. cost ratio of this policy from an HR standpoint, rather than merely a bottom line view. I simply wish to make clear my concerns and frustrations regarding this policy, and the unwarranted additional stress it places on my coworkers and me. I do not question the financial sense of requiring makeups for even national holidays at this time… but I strenuously question the sense of mandating that it be done in the same financial month, especially for a holiday of the length of Spring Festival.

It is my sincere hope that, if nothing else, future holidays may be planned for in advance and have the arbitrary “revenue target” adjusted accordingly to reflect that schedule disruption, rather than forcing teachers and administrators alike to frantically compress a large number of classes into an extremely limited timeframe, or face the punitive action of a reduced paycheck.  It would not cost the company money, and it would certainly make many employees dread national holidays a little less.  They would still be rescheduling nightmares in the name of naked profit, but they would at least be on our – the teachers’ and local-level staff’s – terms time-wise, rather than that of an arbitrary monthly deadline.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

(CS) TAW Out.
LYRIC HERE

How Not to Blackmail your Company

Imagine you own a significant share in a major business venture – let’s say, oh, 30%.  Now let’s visualize the other 70% being held by an multinational conglomerate by the name of, oh, I don’t know… “Learson Pongman”… a publishing and education company which has its tentacles in over 70 countries and has had business dealings with my own country-of-residence for something on the order of half-a-century.

What do you do?

If your answer if to kick back, relax, and let the virtually assured dividends come rolling in… well congratulations.  Your brain is officially working normally.  Let me present you with this laurel, and hardy handshake.

If, however, your answer was to resist the 70% ownership at every turn (after, y’know, selling that 70%) over a period of 3 years, and then – and this is where it gets good - try (unsuccessfully) to fire those who disagreed/were not intimidated by you, and then unlawfully detain/imprison the president of the Asian branch of the parent company, his staff and lawyer in your office for a period of hours, under guard… well, then hello to my now former general manager and welcome to my page.  I do hope you enjoy it, given that you’re newly unemployed, and may soon be facing jail time for, well, basically going off the deep-end.

In my extended stay at – let’s drop the transparent euphemisms, shall we? – Pearson, I’ve been privy to quite a few power struggles, shifts, and complete reversals of direction.  I’ve seen promises broken, words revoked, ignored, and the supposed “values” of the company outright ignored in the interest of something called “guanxi,” which is to say, “face, relations, connections.”  I’ve become accustomed to a multinational company from the UK being run in a quintessentially – and I mean this in an entirely negatively fashion – Chinese way.  The semi-corrupt, completely opaque bureaucracy that governed my work environment had long-since become old hat.  I tolerated it because, by and large, I was able to ignore it, and the upper echelons largely ignored my backwater campus as being just too darned inconveniently located to actually come and enforce everything.

And yet, as of Tuesday, I bore witness to something completely new.  And found myself utterly dumbfounded at the machinations that unfurled quite literally before my eyes.  Nancy and Caelan had boarded their train for Wenzhou, and I’d returned home to wile away the remaining hours of the day with WoW, Skyrim, or whatever else might strike my fancy.  And so, there I was doing my best not to become food for a frost troll, when my cell phone began thrumming away with a series of texts.  It was a series of messages resembling something the Enigma Machine might churn out than an official company SMS.  It came in 4 parts, crudely cut apart at random places, and then delivered in reverse order.  Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued.  I had, along with the rest of the staff, been “invited” to a meeting at the headquarters with the aforementioned President of Pearson Asia Pacific.  Now, to explain, this was very strange because I had until now never been “invited” to any function other than the annual party.  Meeting times and places were simply sent out via email and through the local center managers that “there will be a meeting at…” and sometimes that we were “required” to attend.  Further, I had never before received a text message from the company.  It was a degree of sophistication upper management had simply lacked.  And finally, the invitation was for that very day… and while I’ve long since grown used to the Chinese vagaries regarding future-planning, this level of immediacy was again unprecedented.

So I bid my dark elf goodbye and trekked out to People’s Square out of little more than sheer curiosity.  Arriving at the building, I was greeted by a few of my coworkers hailing others down with directions.  The meeting at HQ, they relayed to me, had been cancelled and the center closed entirely.  The Asia Pacific President, Mr. Dugie Cameron and his entourage had relocated to a 3^rd floor restaurant of the nearby shopping mall, where they awaited anyone who might show up.

Once assembled, he relayed the tale of sorrow and woe to us all: he had flown in from Hong Kong to try to solve a rather grave crisis of leadership at the managerial level, one which put the entire operation in Shanghai at risk.  It seemed that somewhere in the byzantine bureaucracy of the Ministry of Education, there was some mid-level official who had taken a rather intense dislike to the fact that Pearson was operating in Shanghai/China.  So much so that when the school had to renew its license to operate in the city, this person had stipulated they would not authorize any renewal if the name “Pearson” was still attached to the company.  Now of course, the “whys” of it is sheer speculation – perhaps he’d been bribed to do exactly that, perhaps he was a jaded former customer hell-bent on revenge, perhaps an alien parasite invaded his brain and turned him into a drone for the hive cluster.  Regardless, on the last day of the year the renewal had finally gone through – with the Pearson brand stripped from it.  The general managers/minority shareholders/husband-wife pair in change of negotiations had essentially promised that Pearson was going to be removed entirely from its operation in Shanghai.

Obviously, that didn’t sit too well with the company as a whole.  And thus Mr. Cameron flew in to deal with the rogue duo face-to-face, lawyer in tow.  I’m sure expected a fair amount of static, posturing, and heated negotiation.  What they certainly had not expected was to be locked away in the office building, and placed under guard for a period of hours, and denied access to communication devices.  Yeah, that’s a no-no.  I’m not sure what the Chinese word for “false imprisonment” and “kidnapping” are, but they’re definitely on the books as a general “bad idea.”  After the cleaning lady finally came along and unlocked the door from the outside, they relocated to said restaurant.

As for the mysterious text message, apparently the normal company email system had been taken over by the duo, who had managed to acquire sole administrator-level access of the system.  There were able then to monitor, and block, any mail they so chose.  Thus, they’d been able to effectively close down the primary means of intercompany communication.  Mr. Cameron had been forced to reroute the messages about the meeting through his Hong Kong office using available cellphone contact info.

But that wasn’t the end of the paranoid craziness that had seized the GMs.  After the negotiations broke down into kidnapping, they had tried to terminate several of the upper-level staff for being “pro-Pearson” and attempted with some success to intimidate the center managers into not attending the meeting.  Several had been cowed into coming out on the side of the GMs.  Talk about backing the wrong horse.  As for the “firings,” well it turns out it’s rather difficult to fire someone who doesn’t work for you.  The employees had been hired and brought in by Pearson, thus nullifying the monomaniacal purge it seems the GMs had envisioned.

From the sounds of it, the ex-GMs had been blackmailing the company, hoping for a big payday – to the turn of $50,000,000 (yes, that’s in USD) – to make them go away.  Well, now they’re more likely to be going away for quite a while… to prison.

The open question at this point is, what becomes of the company?  The license to operate was procured under false pretenses – no, the 70% multinational shareholder did not simply raise anchor and disappear over the horizon.  So there is the possibility that the Ministry of Education may follow the letter of the law and begin proceedings to close the school down.  That, however, is relatively unlikely.  For one, it seems there is only one MoE official who took issue with Pearson’s ownership in the country.  Everyone else they’ve contacted in the Ministry seems to think there shouldn’t be a problem… so it may be as simple as just resubmitting the application to someone else.  For another, Pearson is not simply the owner of Longman Schools; they own at least two other school chains throughout the country, including the giant Wall Street English.  They create tens of thousands of jobs – most of which are for local staff, rather than foreign experts such as myself.  The company’s ability to generate currency is rather substantial, and to jeopardize that would be unwise for an economy in a precarious position.  On a related point, the last thing the Chinese government needs at the moment is yet more bad press, especially when it comes to foreign investment.  With competing entities like Disney and English First having equal stakes in the ESL industry, rocking that boat could have a significant ripple effect.  Suffice it to say, methinks this will all pan out in the end.

Still, it’s been a very interesting few days – especially since the company annual party was held the day after this all went down, including the two GMs in question.  Believe me, there were quite a few people waiting for that ball to drop (alas, it never did).  In my wildest dreams, I see there being a substantive shift in company policy away from the profit-at-all-cost mentality of the former head.  But hey, I’m not fool, and I know that it’s just as likely (in fact, much moreso) that barring a new name at the top of the billing, the status quo is likely to remain firmly intact.

Time will tell.

(CS) TAW Out.
LYRIC HERE