Blood Drive

The other day, one of the new hires (the first one) came to me to say that she is going for blood donation and that as a company incentive, she gets one day off on top of not coming to work on the blood donation day.

I didn’t think much of it as I thought blood donation was a good thing after all. I was even contemplating giving blood except for the fact that I wasn’t sure of China’s hygiene standards.

Then the office manager came to me to inform me about my new hire’s off day. I asked her about the genesis on this off day thing and she said this was a company incentive because every company in Shanghai needs to send at least one representative for blood donation, else if there’s an emergency, our company will have lower priority.

That was shocking!

Plus it raised another question for me in whether my new hire was pressured to go to this because she was the newest in the company. Office manager assured me that she wasn’t.

I didn’t believe her and went to check with new hire. Ok, no pressure. Voluntary and got off day some more.

Ahhh, the hassle of managing people. Still have to care whether they’re bullied at work or not.