A bit of China that looks like Paris

Photo / Supplied.

Hits radio star Stacey Morrison visits Huawei HQ to see what makes the mobile phone co tick.

Imagine your workplace spanning the same area as an Auckland suburb – so big, you need a train to get around.

In fact, there is a free train which departs from a beautifully modelled train station that looks a lot like Paris, complete with marble. There are lakes, inhabited by black swans, green park spaces, restaurants, gyms, and accommodation; you can even live on site.

Each department is styled on a city in Europe but you're not in Europe, you're at the Chinese headquarters of Huawei in Dongguan, an hour north of Shenzhen. It's a world away from the Silicon Valley approach of futuristic architecture housing tech giants and the aesthetic is unexpected, even confusing, but undoubtedly creates an impressive and beautiful workplace environment for 40,000 people.

The founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, has an interest in architecture – as well as the means and will to create an oasis of a headquarters in a city that has sprung up from being a fishing village in 1980 to an economic centre of 20 million people.

That sort of growth and scale is hard for New Zealanders to comprehend and cultural difference is definitely part of the challenges Huawei have faced in recent times. "We realised we needed to open up a bit," we're told as we visit one of the research and development laboratories of the company.

We're shown the testing laboratories where phones are dropped from a metre high, constantly, to check their durability. It's wince-inducing but it replicates what many of us do in everyday 'product testing'.

There's what looks like a tumble dryer, throwing phones inside it constantly, alongside a robotic arm that inserts and removes power chords to verify if the phone can be guaranteed for three years of use. We're also shown the 120 metre production line that produces a phone every 28 seconds.

What stands out, though, is the low-tech innovation sitting in the middle of the production line. Suggested by an employee as part of Huawei's 'reasonable suggestion' programme, a basic pulley system, using string and a metal frame as a ramp, utilises gravity to take a phone from a highly technical production machine gently down to a human quality controller checking each phone.

This simple pulley replaced an approach that was less efficient in terms of time and power, so the employee who made this 'reasonable suggestion' was rewarded for coming up with the idea. There's a team which picks up the suggestions, follows through to test if the idea will work, brings the employee who suggested the idea into the process and then actions it if the idea is validated.

Simple stuff, but we all know that doesn't happen in many workplaces, let alone huge corporates. 'Fendo' is a way of working they aspire to – to be service-focused and solution- and innovation-focused.

Where Google rewards employees' 'googliness' as a mark of work ethic, Huawei has 'Fendo'.There are many people in lab suits, one who casually tells us he created a new type of alloy to house modems – which we decipher to mean he is probably housing one of the most wanted brains in tech.

Perhaps it shows that brains that rest during the day work better; the Huawei campuses pretty much shut down during lunch-times, shades come down and sleeping areas are available so employees can take power naps to reset for the rest of their working day, which actually seems as long as the average Kiwi work day.

Yes, as media visitors we were given special treatment, fed and watered amazingly on site but the commitment to what we call manaakitanga in New Zealand, beats us at our own game.