Jia-Wei CPAs

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go back on what to improve, change, “look at the big picture”. James made also several references to improving such as: “always do better today than yesterday” and “looking at how we can fix problems and work better, work smarter”. Some noticeable aspect of the culture are also the transparency and openness and tolerance towards others.

THE WORK CONTENT: Even thought, they are not the only company to choose the work content as one of the most Employer Value Proposition in question 1, it is the interview where the work content had the most mention (13). What is most noticeable is the flexibility at work, flexibility of working hours, but also work from home (one employee is even working from France for one month), or to change job function (secretariat to translation). The other equally important work content is the decision-making power of employees, as well in short term and long term. From all the companies interviewed Winkler Partners is the one evolving the most its employees on long term decision (for instance during a firm retreat they decided together on the values of the company).

4.1.2. Jia-Wei CPAs

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Company introduction:

Jia-Wei Co., CPAs is a Taiwanese accounting firm. It was established in 1986. The company has several offices in the major cities of Taiwan and is today located in New Taipei City. Jia-Wei employs more than 200 professionals. Jia-Jia-Wei is in the B-to-B business; therefore, their clients are on majority Taiwanese companies. Mostly Jia-Wei is helping their clients on tax and financial issues and helps them to grow. At Jia-Wei I have interviewed Kenny Chang, which is in the Executive Assistant to the President and in charge of business development. Kenny is also the son of the founder of Jia-Wei and will be the director of the company after his father steps down. He is also the current vice-chairman of B Lab Taiwan and is the one whom learned about B Corp and stared the certification process. The interview lasted 1 h and 15 minutes. Jia-Wei was certified B Corp in September 2015.

Primary analysis:

First of all, what we can say is that during the interview, for the first question, asking what Jia-Wei believe is the most important to the employees, Kenny told me it was the work environment. Indeed, after analyzing the first part of the interview I can already notice some of the values of the company, such as caring for others and trying to improve. We had a long discussion about the goal of Jia-Wei to help its employees and that the next step would childcare, with more and more employees becoming parents for the first time. When we use the Word Frequency tool of the software the most used word (and synonyms) is “people” and the third is

“employee”. This gives a clue that at Jia-Wei we care about others, people around us, society and especially the employees. This is confirmed by the hierarchy of the categories at Jia-Wei:

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From this figure we can see that the two most important EVP are once again work environment and content, however here it is clear that the work environment is dominating. We also see that one important aspect is the discussion surrounding B Corp. One of the reason is because they are quite involved in the B Corp community, they will refer client to other B Corps and accept client because they are B Corp. Jia-Wei is also one of the company that had made the most use of B Corp tools to improve. For instance, when talking about checking suppliers for sustainable behavior Kenny answered, “this topic is because of B Corp that we thought about it”. Finally, another interesting aspect of the B Corp discussion was that applicants had a positive knowledge about B Corp and this is one of the reason they applied: “Maybe 20% of

Figure 10: Hierarchy Categories Jia-Wei

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them will know us because we are B Corp”. And we notice at the same time that Jia-Wei is really good at attracting talent. They have 4 positive mentions of attracting talent (the highest of all interviews, equal with Greenvines). During the interview Kenny explains that they receive 50% of applications through their partnership with 3 universities and another 50% from outside (networking and spontaneous applications). But when you apply from outside “you only have a 5% chance” to be hired. This is because they receive too many applications and their needs are already filled by their partnerships. Once again, we see on the figure that communication at Jia-Wei is also important. They have monthly employee meetings (one afternoon) and monthly team meetings to talk about improvements, as well as one-on-one leader-employee meetings.

The most significant EVP:

THE WORK ENVIRONMENT: we can see that the work environment, especially the culture and values, are the core of Jia-Wei. During the interview the mentions of the culture and values appeared in three manners. The first is of course when a question on this subject was directly asked.

The second was one we were talking about another subject but Kenny brought it back to the values. And finally, the last one was in the attitude, the choice of word, the phrases of Kenny. When we look at the hierarchy of codes of the work environment (on the left) we can see that one important aspect is the communication of culture and values. They think this is very important for the employees. To work according to their values they must know them, Figure 11: Coding hierarchy for work environment

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understand them, be part of their inner-self. For instance, they regularly choose a book or movie around a value (integrity for instance) and then discuss what those values means to them, how it applies to Jia-Wei. Thereafter, when looking at what values were expressed during the interview we see that the team spirit (“we will try to become a family”) and caring (“our partners want to make sure employees can get enough support”) are the most important ones!