Joerg Buchheim：HELLA's way of talent cultivation under the multiculture

       “Virtuous person,a national treasure.” The emperor Taizu of min compared the talent to the national treasure, that express the eager for talent and the significance of talent. HELLA China CEO Joerg Buchheim said talent is also one of the most important treasure of HELLA.

      “We know, HELLA can’t succeed without every employee efforts and supports .HELLA will provide the further develop and improve skill opportunities for every employee, which can help their work, achieve their own development goals, and meet our requirements.”

      There is no doubt talent importance for enterprises. Talent is priceless resources, how to attract talent, how to cultivate talent, how use talent, that are important topics for every company.

      As a global leading auto parts suppliers, how will HELLA do? At this issue interview, our editor is going to know this family owned company with more than 100 years history. This time we have deep conversation with HELLA China CEO Joerg Buchheim about HELLA’s culture of how to select and keep the talent.

      Talent selection: Follow “7 HELLA Value Leadership model”

      Mr Buchheim introduced that there are two main standards during talent selection process

      Firstly, applicant weather suitable for the applied vacancy.

      Secondly, applicant weather can integrate HELLA’s culture. HELLA culture has 7 values (Cooperation, Example, Entrepreneur, Sustainability, Innovation, Integrity, Performance );

And leadership model (Lead Business, Lead People, Lead Self and Live Hella Values).

      “We recruit hundreds of excellent talent every year; We focus on the person who are strong competency, commitment and self-motivation. If they have these personality, ambitions and eager to pursue own goals, HELLA can help achieve your carrier goal ”

      Talent Attraction : Cooperate with universities

      Mr Buchheim highlight the cooperation with universities, include the traditional channels. HELLA has network with 8 universities, such as scholarship, project cooperation, sponsorship on campus activity, student exchange program, campus recruitment ect.

      “This way can help us to build HELLA philosophy, select the talent we needed and also can help the students know HELLA culture previous.” As Mr Buchheim introduced that about 18% HELLA R&D talent are recruited from campus. “We cooperate with the universities regularly ,like plan some automotive industry develop trend classes to achieve orient cultivation. After they join HEELA we will evaluate them to find the shortage, and tailored a personal development plan to improve them.”

      What’s more, HEELA encourage employee to recommend the qualified talent by their personal social network.” Because they are familiar with HELLA, and can recommend the potential applicant. If for some high level management vacancy, we will promote local internal talent or select from HELLA global talent pool, and recruit externally.”

Talent cultivation: Enhance “individual development plan” (IDP) and dedicate to raise local talents

      Mr. Buchheim stated that to meet the market requirement and also HELLA’s target on technology innovation, HELLA will make a complete and systematized talent cultivation plan based on the market needs, and design an exclusive training plan for each employee. The training will cover working skills, personal advantages and career path with detailed milestones and timeline settled. HR dept. will cooperate with trainee’s line manager and also trainer to work on the program. After the training and tests, employees will be able to start working in a more efficient way. Till now HELLA has owned development programs on hundreds of different skills, those will assist HELLA to have a more precise evaluation on their own employees and help them to improve continuously.

      “Our next step will be to enhance “individual development plan” (IDP) and discussions on employees’ development. During the training of HELLA global high potential (HiPo) program, we will ask all participants to have a discussion with their line manager regards of individual development plan and regularly track and update the plan in future.”

With the growth of China automotive market, localization has become the essential strategy for all foreign companies. Based on Mr. Buchheim’s introduction, besides the localization of production, HELLA also focus on developing local talents, Chinese employee share in HELLA China exceeds 98%.

      “Compare with foreign employees, native employees can understand the customer’s requests more precisely. During the past 10 years, HELLA’s dedicating on cultivating local talents.” HELLA has successfully built a powerful local leadership, most mid-level management and several high-level management are coming from China.

      With the global resource sharing background, to cultivate local talents, besides sending them abroad for learning and discussion, HELLA will also invite global technical experts to China and work with our local engineers for developing new solutions for Chinese customers.

      “For conclusion, HELLA will create an innovation supreme working environment for all employees and encourage them towards innovation and development via different rewarding programs.”

      Talent retaining: Viewing employees participation as core aspect

      Though the development of Chinese economy slows down, its vast amount of population and consumers still attract the investment from global enterprises. Therefore, currently brain drain rate still reaches up to double digits with the keen talent competition.

      “Under the broad background full of challenges, HELLA concentrates on internal optimization, structure streamlining, and high potential talent cultivation. HELLA meanwhile initiates a series of projects, more novel and more time-advancing, to retain employees and increase participation, which provides more career opportunities and support for high potential talent. ” HELLA enjoys strong brand image and reputation in worldwide automotive industry. In hope of having Chinese people better understanding of HELLA, and having HELLA company culture ingrained in the heart of Chinese people, employer branding activities will be actively organized.”

      Mr. Buchheim confidently tells journalist from Gasgoo, brain drain rate of HELLA far below that of local market. “We adhere continuously to taking employees’ participation as the key factor of company development. And therefore large amount of man power and material resources has been put into corporate culture fostering, corporate branding, leadership cultivating, and employees caring. In this ‘big family’ keeping learning and progressing, HELLA employees have clear career development path; what’s more, HELLA employees’ welfare is quite competitive.”

      Nurturing an excellent team: corporate culture is of vital importance

      “Being a family owned enterprise, we are fully aware that it is of vital importance and has profound influence to make every effort to build up the most outstanding team in different business areas.”

      However, there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes. As HELLA talent team is constructed by employees coming from all over the world, in which way could HELLA make those people with diverse cultural backgrounds harmoniously hold together?

      Frankly indicated by Mr. Buchheim, communication and collaboration is the most influential aspect. To enhance the cultural sense and sensitivity, HELLA takes many effective measures.

      To begin with, HELLA does evaluation on employees’ adaptation and support to different cultures, and their performances in team work in accordance with annual performance assessment and 360° evaluation. It is the responsibility for every person in HELLA to be adaptive to HELLA multicultural environment, and be supportive to each other in hope of facilitating better adaptation with continuous remarkable achievement.

      On the one hand, HELLA provides employees with necessary training of multicultural communication and teamwork. “Kinds of activities focus on culture and teamwork are proactively organized, aiming at nurturing employee’s teamwork spirit, enhancing mutual affectional ties, and consolidating the attachment to the whole team.”

      Besides, as a global family enterprise, HELLA owns as well a series of globally standard processes and procedures, which have been uniformly implemented worldwide. “In this way, a uniform platform is constructed. All employees should abide to the same guidelines, which lays a good foundation for mutual communication and cooperation. ”

      In the end, HELLA has internal small-sized survey with related feedback coming out for each other’s teamwork cooperation and support. “The survey helps us well see the quo status, have better decision on improvement with feasible actions based on the feedbacks. Apart from it, teamwork spirit and cooperation are important elements of HELLA seven core values. The core values are enthusiastically disseminated among all employees, and been practiced in daily work. ”

      Talent strategic planning under new trends

      HELLA talent strategies can be summarized: clarifying business opportunities and challenges, promoting HELLA continuous progress through suitable talent recruitment and cultivation. Meanwhile, dedication is made for boosting employees’ morale and reinforcing their participation, with the purpose to improve as high as possible the return of capital investment on human resource.