By Robert Parkinson, CEO and Founder of RMG Selection   Expats starting work in China are often surprised by how “complicated” Chinese public holidays are. When I first started working in Beijing in 2005, I was quite impressed by the number of public holidays Chinese workers had in February, May and October. Back in UK, people only get 10 days off in total for public holidays. So at first blush, a lot of expats might be inclined to envy how many days Chinese workers seem to have off. I soon discovered that these seemingly long holidays are actually exchanged with weekends. In 2007, the number of public holidays was ramped up another notch, as traditional festivals like Tomb Sweeping Day, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Day were made official holidays which would allow workers a day off work. Chinese employees, of course, were delighted. But from the point of view of an employer, it created a huge headache. How was I to motivate workers who had already started daydreaming about what they would do with their precious free day, a week before the public holiday actually arrived? To exacerbate the problem, every employment wants to take their annual leave to coincide with a public holiday. More days off so they can actually travel – I get it. But no employer in the world can handle half their office taking time off at the same time. So how could I find a way to make both parties happy? My solution was holiday incentives. Instead of asking employees to come in on weekends after a public holiday, I gave them an incentive not to have to come in. As long as they hit a certain target I had set for them before the weekend came, they did not need to come in on the Saturday. Let us take last Spring Festival as an example. Spring Festival last year officially began on January 31 and it ended on February 6. However, to reap the benefits of this 7-day holiday, employees were required to work the overlapping weekends around the dates. Considering that Spring Festival is one of the most important holidays for Chinese, I thought that it would be great if I could remove the burden of working those weekend days from them, especially for those who wanted to return to their hometowns for the festival. So, I sent out an email to the whole office in middle of January, saying that if employees could complete four deals by the end of the month, they wouldn’t have to work the weekend days to “make up” for the holiday. Instantly, I received 20 emails from my staff expressing their enthusiasm and confidence that they could reach the target. And lo and behold, we had a happy ending, with the employees even exceeding the target I had set them. (Source:Global Times Published: 2014-8-14)   Read the original link, please click: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/876197.shtml