“Respect Vietnam” Brings Conflict Resolution To Vietnam

Respect Vietnam is a Vietnam based consulting firm that is making important contributions on both a workplace and governmental level in her country.  Ha Dang is the founder and an alumna of the ILR School; her advisor was retired Professor Lance Compa. Respect Vietnam focuses in organizational development and conflict management. Specifically, the company specializes in offering guidance on how to resolve interorganizational conflicts. 

Ha became a colleague of Richard Fincher, a well-known arbitrator/mediator who is a member of the Scheinman Institute’s Advisory Board and founded the ILR engaged learning program in Vietnam. She annually meets with the ILR students studying at a public university in Saigon over winter break and engaged several ILR students as summer interns at Respect Vietnam. Ha is also the Founder & President of the Cornell Club of Vietnam and conducted a number of events bringing Cornellians in Vietnam, their friends and families close in the past years. Starting in 2010, Ha worked with several United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded labor projects in Hanoi. 

Founded in 2013, Respect Vietnam has successfully developed a number of public-private projects in organizational transformation and workforce transformation in Vietnam and other countries. One of its key goals is to create aligned minds among the various layers of manpower with each organization.

According to Ha, conflict resolution is culturally avoided in Vietnam – no one wants their problems to be known publicly. In fact, the term “conflict resolution” is not welcome in Vietnam; instead, alternatives such as “innovation enhancement”, “goal alignment”, or “organizational/workplace learning” are preferred. 

The firm has worked to ease the tension surrounding conflict resolution by relying on comics to shed a positive light on what is going on in the workplace. A common and successful educational method, comics make complicated matters simple to understand and in many cases bring the conflicting parties closer to terms of agreement.

The firm also utilizes something called “lean thinking” – a term for less waste & more value in making decisions. For example, Respect Vietnam spearheaded the task of rewriting the Vietnamese Labor Code  into infographics, with key legal terms color-coded for readers to quickly differentiate what they can do and what they are banned from doing.

The core belief is that language needs to be simplified depending on the target audience, such as children, young adults or blue collar workers with low level of education. A large problem Respect Vietnam has observed is that often, people breaking the laws do not know or understand fully what the laws are, so the strategy of lean thinking aims to reduce this gap.

In the past ten years, Ha has met with various congressional leaders during their visits to her country, sharing Vietnam’s progress with regard to sustainable workplace solutions, conflict resolutions, and other achievements. 

Recently, the organization cohosted a series of roundtable across Vietnam, examining how the Vietnam workplace must change and adapt in the face of unpredictable changes in both social and economic terms post Covid. This conference addressed how workers and management need to find new ways of working and operating together to create more resilient organizations, leaders, and workforces.

Ha sums up her philosophy and approach to her work as follows: “There are no great organizations, there are only great people with aligned minds that make great organizations.” Learn more about Ha and Respect Vietnam by visiting the firm’s website.