Below is the list of interview questions I used to guide each one of my factory interviews. As much as possible, I tried to conduct the interviews in the spirit of inquisitive, friendly conversation, as opposed to detached observation.
Thus, the interview questions were not asked in a scientifically rigorous manner: at times I did not ask certain questions depending on my rapport with the interviewee and the sensitivity of the question. I took liberty to reword questions as I saw fit.
I tried to use the interview questions more as a point of discussion than a survey.
Warmup personal questions |
Personal background |
What were your childhood influences, goals, aspirations? |
Did you go to college or receive any post-secondary education? |
What jobs did you have in the past before the current one? |
How long have you worked at your current job? |
What was your career path to your current job? |
Warmup factory questions |
Some non environmental-related questions |
What is the unique selling point of your factory? Why is better than others in the same industry? |
Why is your factory located in <current city>? |
Relationship with government |
How does the local environmental protection bureau manage your factory? |
Do you interact with the central or provincial government at all? |
Relationship with customers |
Do customers care about the environmental impact of your factory and manufacturing process? If so, what do they care about? |
Do customers care about environmental and health/safety aspects of your product? If so, what do they care about? |
Relationship with suppliers |
What factors do you care about when you look for suppliers? |
How do environmental factors rank in that list? |
Relationship with other factories |
Does your factory interact with other factories in your vicinity or industry? If so, how so? |
how do other companies in your industry work? How are they different than you? How are they similar to you? |
Motivations, try 1 (ask in hypothetical way) |
Say your factory is deciding between buying machine A and machine B for a new production line. Machine A costs x% more, but saves y% money in the long term of z years and is less polluting than machine B. At what point do you buy machine A over machine B? |
Circular economy questions |
Have you heard of the circular economy concept? How about the circular economy law? |
Do you think your factory implements some aspect of circular economy? |
Deeper personal questions |
Personal views on environmental protection |
What are your views on environmental protection? |
In China right now, what is the relationship environmental protection vs economy development? |
What is your viewpoint on what the relationship should be? |
How do you think the Chinese government is doing on environmental protection? |
In what ways can the government do a better job on this? |
Do you think environmental problems are reversible? That is, with sufficient money, can they be mitigated and fixed in the future? |
How did you arrive at your viewpoint on environmental question? |
How do you think other Chinese would answer the question "What are your views on environmental protection"? |
Deeper factory questions |
Motivations, try 2 (ask in direct way) |
What's your motivating factors for being Huanbao? |
Self assessment of their own factory |
Overall, how do you think your factory is doing with respect to environmental impact? |