Alumni Story : Ester ZHENG: People-oriented and Foresighted

Ester ZHENG has been working in the field of human resources for many years. From high-end hotels to beauty retail and then to the luxury industry, Ester insists on improving HR professionalism while trying out new business scopes. As HRVP of Bvlgari Greater China, she practices the corporate value of putting people first, giving full protection and care to employees’ rights and interests in both daily work and response to the pandemic. Looking ahead, she is actively innovating at the strategic level, launching several targeted training and management programmes to help companies improve their abilities to cope with risks and achieve sustainable growth.

In 2010, Ester left high-end hotel industry where she had worked for more than 10 years to join Sephora, under the LVMH Group, as Senior Vice President of Human Resources. Unlike hotel industry, the market-oriented retail industry is more fast-paced, and human resources are always supporting to maximize profits. As a result, Ester’s work has moved from the on-the-ground people management level to the strategic planning level. With the increase of management experience, Ester began to realize the limitations of her comprehensive ability and business vision, and then came up with the idea of systematically learning management.

Coincidentally, the SJTU-KEDGE EMBA programme offered her an invitation at this time. After learning about the programme, Ester found that it was a good fit for her (international curriculum, professors with rich experience in management, and a reasonable 4-day monthly lecture schedule). So, with the support of her boss at the time, Ester became a participant in the 2014 intake of the EMBA programme. This learning experience is closely related to her working progress. First of all, the comprehensive curriculum helped her to make up a lot of essential economics knowledge for managers (accounting, auditing, finance, etc.). The professor used a lot of case studies and group exercises to make the otherwise boring content interesting and the knowledge easier to learn.

Moreover, the participants in the class come from all walks of life, and many of them start their own businesses or come from private enterprises. When Ester used Sephora as a case study in class, she often received inspiring suggestions from the participants, which helped the broaden the thinking. The ideas she got from discussing with them were reported back to the company’s management, and she was able to get positive feedback to drive changes in the business model. Talking with the participants also helped Ester to understand the role of HR in different companies. Many companies have incentives, talent development systems and change tools that are worth learning from.

Finally, after 2 years of study, the participants developed a deep friendship with each other. To this day, they all meet occasionally to share information about their lives and work and provide resources and opportunities to each other.

In 2016, Ester successfully graduated from the SJTU-KEDGE EMBA programme as the outstanding participant of the year. Like many of her fellow participants who are eager to try, she is looking forward to applying her learning and making new career breakthroughs.

After graduating from EMBA, Ester began to seek changes within the group. At the end of 2016, she started to approach Louis Vuitton with a recommendation of the group top management and became an official member of the brand as China HRVP in 2017 as a start of her journey in the luxury industry. Over two years, Ester gradually adapted to the working model of the luxury industry. And at the same time, she also hoped to make most of her years of HR experience to take initiatives that could give more space for management innovations. As a result, Ester applied for adjustment and joined Bvlgari as HRVP for Greater China.

At Bvlgari, Ester was given a lot to play with on her own initiative. On the one hand, she adheres to Bvlgari’s people-oriented corporate culture, driving the management team to establish communication with front-line employees. During the first half of the year after on boarding, Ester had almost visited all the stores in Greater China to understand the needs of employees on the ground. For employees in different regions (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan), she also developed appropriate management and incentive measurements according to the regional culture. In 2019, when an employee in the northeast store suddenly suffered kidney failure, Ester immediately led the team to make an internal donation to raise a considerable amount of donation to allow the employee to focus on treatment and to ensure that his salary would not be affected. Later in 2020 when the pandemic was severe in Italy, this employee collected 500 masks under the global shortage circumstances and wanted to send them to his colleagues in Italy to repay the company’s help to his. As a result of this corporate culture and human resource management, Bvlgari’s employees are far more stable than the industry average and identify strongly with the brand’s culture and values.

On the other hand, Ester has actively innovated at the strategic level, launching management training programmes to reserve talents for the brand in advance to match future business needs. At the sales level, she launched a Retail Management Trainee programme for fresh graduates students to ensure that they can quickly take over the management of the store business after graduation. At the executive level, Early Career Professionals programme was launched to recruit people highly educated and newcomers with oversea study experience and provide suitable positions with targeted skills training according to their abilities. At the management level, Group Future A fast tracking programme was launched to train talents with some relevant work experience and help them to enter the Senior Executive management team within 2 years.

Ester’s work at Bvlgari is progressing steadily, but the sudden outbreak of the pandemic at the end of 2019 has brought new challenges.

The outbreak of the pandemic was unexpected by everyone, but the HR department, as a reassuring team within the company, had to be at the forefront.” Ester said when recalling the tremendous pressure that she faced at the beginning of the outbreak.

For the offline stores, which bore the brunt of the outbreak, Ester immediately adjusted the salary structure and made emergency plans to ensure that employees’ salaries would not be affected by the sudden drop in sales. Ester also led the department to purchase masks and other prevention materials in time to make frontline employees feel at ease and ensure their safety and health before the offline stores resumed work. In July 2020, Bvlgari participated in an internal survey organized within LVMH group, the results of which showed that after the pandemic, employees trusted the brand more and were proud to be part of Bvlgari.

By mid-2020, the pandemic in mainland China was well under control and business in Bvlgari’s stores rebounded significantly. However, the Hong Kong business was hit hard and slow to recover, therefore had to be restructured. Ester and the team, in keeping with the corporate value of putting people first, offered relevant compensation along with adequate career counseling for re-employment and psychological counseling for the transition period. This allowed the brand to successfully complete the restructuring.

After a global hiring freeze in 2020 (one of the measures to protect employees’ rights), Bvlgari’s hiring volume was suddenly concentrated in the first half of 2021, which put pressure on the HR department. Employee turnover, which had been well below the industry average, also reached a record high in 2021. The dramatic change made Ester think about the layout of the business in a new way and started to reflect on the impact of the transformative changes on the company, planning to discuss with Greater China President of the brand for the implementation of the change management.

Ester, who is deeply involved in human resources, said she likes to deal with people and will focus on HR in the future to help the company make the next strategic development. The year of 2022 will not be easy because the headquarters has high expectations for the Greater China region, and the market will face the impact of losing customers after the open of the borders when the pandemic gets stabilized. Therefore, she will keep working on launching change management programmes to help the whole management team to “make foresighted plans for today” and improve their resilience management skills in order to face the more and more competitive business world.

On the personal side, Ester says she is learning number psychology, which will help her identify talents in different fields at work and help her family and friends understand their strengths in life. After gaining some experience, she will move into the direction of Executive Coach. Ester also runs marathons (a habit she picked up after studying for her EMBA in 2014) and works out to release stress, gain energy, maintain her work pace, and keep a good mental state.

For those who are wondering whether to enroll in MBA, Ester’s advice is that it will be more efficient and valuable to go to school with confusion on work or personal development after a certain social accumulation rather than just for a degree. When choosing a programme, it is the best to study a programme that can be combined with your career, and focus on the combination of study and practice.