4. Analysis of Interviews Process
4.1. Independent analysis of interviews
4.1.1. Winkler Partners:
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4. Analysis of Interviews Process
In this section we will describe the analysis of our interviews and the results of this analysis compared to our research questions and topic. We will first conduct an independent analysis of each interview, by introducing the company and explaining the important results for this company (according to the NVivo analysis). We will introduce the company in the order the interviews were conducted. Later on, we will conduct a cross-analysis of the interviews to reveal similar patterns and obtain the results for our research questions and our research topic.
4.1. Independent analysis of interviews
4.1.1. Winkler Partners:
Company introduction:
In 2002 when Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization, Winkler Partners was founded by Robin Winkler. Nowadays the company has 55 employees. Winkler Partners is a full-service Garden rooftop during offices tour
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law firm based in Taipei. It is the first law firm approved to operate as a partnership between Taiwanese and foreign attorneys Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice. They provide a full range of legal services: corporate services such as business registration, merger and acquisitions, anti-trust, translation services such as legal contract for instance, and trademark services. As one can imagine they are highly committed to their community. Indeed, by being part of the “1% for the planet” they support organization that are working to create a healthy planet. They also provide pro-bono legal services to the foundation wild at heart, to protect Taiwan’s environment.
They also support a local, organic, community- supported farm located in Tucheng6. And last but not least they received their B Corp certification in February 2017. The interview at Winkler Partner is the one that lasted longest (1 hour and 42 minutes). My interviewee was James Hill, he oversees the communication of Winkler Partner. He is also the one that was the most involved in getting the B Corporation certification through the B impact assessment.
Primary analysis:
First of all, we can say that during the interview, for the first question, asking what Winkler Partners believes is the most important to the firm James told me it was the work environment and the work content. And this is confirmed by the analysis because after going over the first part of the interview, (first section with 9 general questions) this was already obvious. Indeed, in the first section of the interview, we don’t especially ask about any of the Employer Value Proposition categories. However, James had already mentioned 10 times the work environment, 4 times the remuneration and 3 times the work content. Moreover, after analyzing the first part of the interview I noticed that the firm was very transparent and communicated a lot with their employees. Indeed, when I started asking questions about the values, the first one James
6 Information from: http://www.winklerpartners.com/
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mentioned was transparency. The best example of transparency at Winkler Partners is that all the meetings are open to anyone, even the interviews and the minutes of the partner’s meeting.
Here is the hierarchy of the categories at Winkler Partner extracted with NVivo:
From figure 9 we see that the number one priority for Winkler partners appears to be the work environment. On second hand the work content. We will look further into those sections later on. We can see that the discussion about their involvement in NGO was quite important because it represents a significant category for this interview. This shows that Winkler Partners is engage and support what they believe in. As for many of the other interviews, they are engaged in
Figure 9: Hierarchy Categories Winkler Partners
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extremely engaged in the LGBT community, supporting their rights. What is interesting about the B Corp category is that the knowledge about B Corp is negative and positive. Meaning that few people knew Winkler Partners was B Corp certified before applying. However, while doing research for their interview the applicants learned about B Corp and see it as positive, sometimes as a new reason to join the company. This will reveal to be the case for most of the other companies interviewed. Even though, Winkler Partner is quite involved in the B Corp community, they do not use B Corp tools extensively to improve, only for incremental change.Moreover, we can add that Winkler Partners has quite engaged employees that “because they agreed with the firm's values and the firm's culture when they join the firm, they are more willing to do extra”. They also quite impressively retain talent, indeed there is only a 2 to 2.5%
employee turnover, meaning that maybe only 1 employee leave the company every year, and most of the time it is for external reason that the company cannot really change. They also have, on average, employees staying on the company for 9 years! Which is more than half of the 16 years life time of the company. The reason for this might be that the company organizes a lot of events, team meeting, firm trip, which engage team spirit. They also communicate extensively, have high transparency that makes the employees feel including.
Regarding the two most significant EVP:
THE WORK ENVIRONMENT: The 2 most important values (or behavior) at Winkler Partners appear to be the team spirit and the need to be better, improve and evolve. A good example of the team spirit is that when discussing an employee whom left the company for childcare reasons James said, “this is something that we, the firm could have done better”.
Regarding improving we can mention the firm retreat, where everybody participates and they
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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).