About Timeline

Timeline’s vision

Each enterprise is empowered to enjoy good employee relations.

Timeline’s mission

To focus on in-depth study of employee relations in the enterprises, and enhance their core competencies and rapid response capabilities by driving them to reflect on their current situation of employee relations with the entry point of corporate social responsibility, and improving their employee relations as well as worker-management cooperation with the tools of human resources management, sociology, psychology and economy

Timeline’s pursuit: to be the most professional consultancy in the field of employee relations management practice in China

In 2002, Timeline was established in response to the changes in the international trade environment and the development needs of Chinese enterprises at that time. As China just joined the WTO, the supply chain enterprises were in a stage of vigorous development, and corporate social responsibility was emerging and flourishing. Meanwhile, there was still great room for improvement for Chinese enterprises overall in employee relations management (ERM), and tremendous demand in this regard: the ERM of most enterprises was still in the traditional personnel management stage, with only a few enterprises establishing a relatively sound human resources management (HRM) system; in those companies with a relatively sound HRM system, many of them took ERM simply as employee care, employee promotion and employee activities. Timeline firmly believes that good employee relations are not only the most important social responsibility of an enterprise, but also one of the key factors in improving the level of labor productivity of an enterprise. Therefore, Timeline has been dedicated to providing enterprises with professional consulting services in ERM since its inception.

The over 20 years of development has shaped Timeline’s characteristic: becoming the most professional consultancy in the field of employee relations management practice in China.

•        Timeline team has been working on the front line of the enterprises. In the process of delivering professional services to over one thousand enterprises, it has accumulated rich first-line training experience and consulting experience in corporate management practice, and developed good understanding of the pain points and difficulties of the enterprise in ERM.

•        The Timeline team pursues deep and thorough study as well as product excellence in this field, applying professional theories to product development and practice activities: at least 30% of its time at work is spent on ERM research; Timeline keeps interacting and cooperating with the seasoned experts in the same field during practice. Timeline's products have become more mature, with its own insights in ERM developed.

Timeline has witnessed the enterprises’ substantial progress and growth during the process of service delivery, which further strengthens Timeline’s confidence in dedicating itself to ERM:

•        The enterprises are more energetic, with more harmonious team atmosphere;

•        The enterprises can ride out crisis and even achieve better performance;

•        The employees are happier and more confident, and gain better personal development;

•        The interaction and mutual trust between enterprises and their customers have increased, accompanied by their greater market competitiveness;

•        An increasing number of enterprises recognize the importance of ERM and changed their management concept.

So far, Timeline has a good reputation in the field of ERM practices in China. It has served dozens of internationally renowned brands that are CSR pioneers and thousands of enterprises. Timeline has formed strategic partnerships with many brands and enterprises, and has cooperated with many enterprises for five consecutive years or more. Timeline's services have left an impression of pragmatism, practicability, customer-oriented thinking, professionalism and flexibility on its customers, which is also the service concept that Timeline has always upheld.

Timeline firmly believes that as long as enterprises exist, ERM is a topic that will never go out of fashion. With the transformation in the industrial age, especially the continuous changes in the labor market and external environment in the recent years, enterprises have paid increasing attention to the topic of how to promote cooperation and harmony within the enterprise to achieve sustainable development. Although enterprises have taken many measures ranging from introduction to technology and upgrading hardware facilities, Timeline has seen that many companies which have introduced lean production fail in transformation and upgrading. Timeline always believes that ERM will be an important economic growth point for enterprises to keep long-term competitiveness and that the iteration of production mode is accompanied by that of employee relations of enterprises.

Timeline is one of the few companies in China that has been consistently carrying out capacity building and no traditional audits in the ESG/CSR field.

This seems "niche" and very challenging because capacity building is "invisible", "intangible", and not easily replicable or scalable. Although the traditional audit is relatively simple and reproducible, it pays more attention to meeting the standards, which makes enterprises easy to put the resources and focus of the enterprise merely on how to pass the audit. Meanwhile, the one-size-fits-all approach inhibits the enterprise’s inner drives of continuous progress to a certain extent.

Timeline believes that beyond-audit capacity building is more valuable to corporate sustainability enhancement:

•        Change is not accomplished overnight. It is necessary to give enterprises more time and space to help reduce their resistance.

•        Limited resources of enterprises can be used on their own improvement rather than audit fatigue;

•        Capacity building pays more attention to long-term results and improvement process, while audits focus on short-term results. The former can more fully mobilize the inner drive and ownership of enterprises to seek improvement instead of simply implementing the standards;

•        Capacity building can help to promote corporate strategic thinking on social responsibility.

Capacity building goes beyond audit. For the problems that audit cannot solve, capacity building is needed:

•        The solution to structural and in-depth problems of the enterprise requires a deep understanding of the enterprise, changes in the concepts and consciousness of the enterprise's senior management and their support;

•        Capacity building is conductive to a good consulting relationship with the enterprise. Based on mutual understanding and trust, and combined with the characteristics of enterprises, Timeline can provide them with more targeted and constructive improvement suggestions.

Timeline is convinced that the changes brought by capacity building will be fundamental, lasting, and all-win for stakeholders.

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