Going From Strength to Strength
Pros
Pro 1: International, diverse cultures, in general lovely peers, great office environment, hybrid working options. Pro 2: Exciting potential to become something really important in Europe for travel on par with Expedia, Booking, Skyscanner in the next 3 to 5 years. Dynamic, start-up feel if you get past entry level. Pro 3: Lots of possibility to learn and develop new skills at all levels - the company puts a lot into L&D, including a huge in-house database of courses, plus LinkedIn learning access from time to time which is absolutely fab if you're a self-starter into developing yourself. Pro 4: Great entry level salary. Good benefits overall, including annual travel bonus and other bonuses, awards etc. Access to a private GP online anytime. Discounts on gym membership, glasses, dental, wellbeing treatment etc. Pro 5: I've seen a lot of local cultural and managerial improvement in last 12 to 18 months. Recent waves of management brought in from external have brought excellent skill and management knowledge which had been lacking in the internally promoted managers. Current line manager is excellent re: empowerment, trust, employee focus, business focus and KPI focus that balances being flexible, supportive but serious/strict on development and improvement of both the work and our team. TIPS FOR ANYONE JOINING THE BUSINESS: 1) You'll need a high level of positivity & resilience. 2) Be prepared to be agile, adaptable, willing to learn and move around to support different functions. 3) Be solution and delivery focused. 4) Sooner or later you'll need to use large datasets and have solid data analysis/excel skills - better to develop them before joining.
Cons
Con 1: For the EU/UK the salary has improved and busines shoes willingness to make adjustments! still some work to do in terms of accurate reflection of the workload, overtime or responsibilities of L2+. In EU the business will need to protect its talent and developed staff population with salary. Con 2: The underlying reason is a great one, but as the business is in the process of globalizing and changing culture to become an international and modern minded company, with such a strong vision and rapid development there is a lot of change, new initiatives, bottlenecks, unclear priority, or steamroller/command level decision making from HQ with lack of transparency and consideration of local capacity/complexity. I'd expect this to last for a couple more years. But if you love change and new initiatives and not having chance to be bored (like me!) you'll thrive! On the positive side, I've met numerous smart, polite, well educated, dynamic and engaging senior leaders from HQ, who are passionate for change, willing to teach and willing to learn. TIPS FOR ANYONE JOINING THE BUSINESS: Tip 1) Keep in mind if joining from EU/English speaking native countries, the Americas that western sensibilities are often about the way things are said and communicated, our tone, word choice, sentence structure - this is a skill that, while HQ colleagues may be very proficient in their native environment, can be hard to master for people using English as a second or third language, so if you join the business, accept that you'll need to make allowances and raise your tolerance/understanding for these gaps. Fill these gaps with active listening, curiosity, kindness and patience and you'll do fine. Tip 2) In the west, hard work, industriousness and diligence in employees is something that implies a person is talented, passionate, going above and beyond, living the company values, and is to be praised and appreciated as valuable, as well as rewarded. In this part of the world, the absence of direct recognition for the above implies ungratefulness and often be misunderstood that a person is under suspicion. However, for this business culture (whether specifically Chinese culture or not, I'm not able to say, as I've never lived or worked there), the above virtues are considered standard behaviours/requirements from the first layer of the business to the very top (Jane Sun is an inspiration!!!), so don't be upset or have self-doubt if HQ do not often say "thank you for your hard work", or specify that a reward is for "hard work" - it doesn't mean your hard work is not appreciated nor necessarily implies your ability, talent or intelligence is under suspicion. Gratitude at Trip.com often comes in different forms, such as development opportunities, peer to peer evaluation, awards (including cash) recognition for ingenuity, efficiency, altruism and demonstrably with provable fact and data, living up to company values, in addition to being a hard worker; for these there are ample internal reward mechanisms and incentives. Con 3: Workload only seems to grow - at times highly disrupted workflow and productivity due to "urgent" needs of HQ that without good communication, makes them appear to be whim-based, dictatorial or poorly planned/lack of forward thinking! (this is especially accute/disruptive around performance evaluation periods, and lead up to Chinese New Year/Chinese holiday periods). This is where agility and adaptability/resilience is needed. Classic example: expect to get an email (or several from different managers in HQ for the same issue) followed a few minutes later by an instant message telling you they sent you an email... I've observed this behaviour tends to exist across employees in HQ departments/roles. FOR EDI: Very few local cons!!! One would be: Turnover of managers especially L3+ results in instability for workflow and productivity, mostly due to the issues mentioned above as some L3+ have more connection or have been directly managed by HQ but I think we have turned a major corner coming into Q1 2023!!!
