Why Knowing Your Employee’s Hometown Matters in China

China is enormous. That sounds obvious, but it’s easy for overseas managers to underestimate what it means in practice.

A team of 15 people sitting in the same Guangzhou office might include someone from Harbin (3,000 km away), someone from Chengdu (1,500 km), someone from a village in Guizhou with no direct train link, and someone who grew up 20 minutes down the road.

If you manage a team in China, do you know where your staff are actually from? Not just which city they work in now, but where they grew up? Where their families still live? Where they go back to for Spring Festival?

If the answer’s no, you’re missing out on key information that affects how you handle major holidays like Spring Festival and how well you engage your team. Here’s why.

Quick note on compliance: Hiring someone from a different city affects their social insurance setup because of hukou (household registration). That’s mostly an onboarding issue — we cover it in another blog.

Spring Festival: When Distance Really Matters

The biggest practical reason to know where people are from is Spring Festival planning.

People who need to travel far to return to their hometowns will often save up all their annual leave and take it in one block around Chinese New Year.

For many, it’s the only chance all year to see close family. And they’re also trying to avoid the absolute chaos of peak travel. This year’s travel rush expects 9.5 billion passenger trips between Feb. 2 and March 13. Yes, billion!

Now, this is where some managers get nervous. We’ve had employers say to us, “I can’t have staff taking the nine-day holiday plus a bunch of annual leave on top — that’s too long away from the business.”

We’d push back on that for two reasons.

1. First, your suppliers and partners are probably closed anyway. Most Chinese businesses shut down during Spring Festival, and even if they don’t, a lot of their employees will be on extended breaks.
2. Second, fighting it damages retention. If you block people from going home to see their families during the one time of year it’s possible, they’ll remember. For employees far from home, that could be the thing that makes them quit. Replacing someone costs far more than a few extra days of leave.

However, if granting extra annual leave around an already long break is tricky, remote work can be a practical middle ground.

Some Chinese companies offer flexible remote work around Spring Festival: travel booking platform Ctrip Group lets eligible customer service staff work remotely for up to 60 days between mid-January and mid-March. Think about that. They’re a travel booking company offering remote work during the biggest travel period of the year — their absolute peak season. And they’re still making it work.

If they can be that flexible during their crunch time, it’s worth considering what might be possible in your own business.

Employee Engagement

A less obvious application is engagement.

Gallup lists “caring managers — feeling supported by someone who genuinely cares” as one of the main drivers of employee engagement. Finding out where your employees are from and showing genuine interest is a free, practical way to demonstrate that you care.

Every region in China has its own food, dialect and customs. Taking 10 minutes in a one-to-one to ask “What’s a dish from your hometown I should try?” costs nothing and lands surprisingly well, especially from an overseas manager who actually remembers the answer next time.

Other conversation starters that work:

• “What’s the biggest difference between here and your hometown?”
• “Is there a festival or tradition from your region that you miss?”
• “When you go home, what’s the first thing you eat?”

These questions show that you see someone as more than just their job title, which is exactly what engagement research tells us matters. And for employees far from home, feeling seen and valued by their manager can be the difference between staying and leaving.

A manager who remembers that someone is from Guizhou and asks how their family’s sour fish soup turned out over the holiday is doing more for retention than most formal engagement initiatives.

The Bottom Line

Asking where someone is from is a five-second question. But the information it gives you — about Spring Festival planning, engagement opportunities and retention risks — can genuinely improve how you run your team in China.

And unlike most HR initiatives, it costs absolutely nothing.