Pernille Rudlin - Rudlin Consulting

About Pernille Rudlin

Pernille Rudlin was brought up partly in Japan and partly in the UK. She is fluent in Japanese, and lived in Japan for 9 years.

She spent nearly a decade at Mitsubishi Corporation working in their London operations and Tokyo headquarters in sales and marketing and corporate planning and also including a stint in their International Human Resource Development Office.

More recently she had a global senior role as Director of External Relations, International Business, at Fujitsu, the leading Japanese information and communication technology company and the biggest Japanese employer in the UK, focusing on ensuring the company’s corporate messages in Japan reach the world outside.

Pernille Rudlin holds a B.A. with honours from Oxford University in Modern History and Economics and an M.B.A. from INSEAD and she is the author of several books and articles on cross cultural communications and business.

Since starting Japan Intercultural Consulting’s operations in Europe in 2004, Pernille has conducted seminars for Japanese and European companies in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, UAE, the UK and the USA, on Japanese cultural topics, post merger integration and on working with different European cultures.

Pernille is a non-executive director of Japan House London, an Associate of the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia and she is also a trustee of the Japan Society of the UK.

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Here are my most recent posts

Japanese companies in Ireland

I have been visiting Ireland about once a year recently for business, but also for family reasons. The business side is to provide training for companies there that have been acquired by a Japanese company, or in one case, had acquired a company in Japan via its US parent.

My parents also now live in Ireland. After 25 years’ working in Japan, they initially retired to France but never felt completely at home there. My stepfather’s father was Irish, so he has family in Ireland. It was also easy for my stepfather to get an Irish passport, as an insurance against Brexit so that he can continue to receive free healthcare and a state pension. My mother has become Danish for the same reason – and was able to do so because her father was Danish.

They now live close to my cousins, near the city of Cork, which has become a hotspot for technology companies, particularly American ones. Trend Micro and Alps have factories there, with the latter employing around 850 people making electronic components.

Cork also has a pharmaceuticals and biotech cluster, as does the capital of Ireland, Dublin, which is where Astellas and Takeda* have plants. Astellas employs over 400 people manufacturing raw materials and immunosuppressants and Takeda employs around 300 people making cancer therapies and active ingredients for various drugs. Ireland is the biggest net exporter of pharmaceuticals to the EU.

Multinationals are attracted to Ireland because of the young, well-educated, English speaking workforce, and also the very low corporate tax rate of 12.5%.

Aircraft leasing in particular has benefitted from Ireland’s low tax policies. Nine out of the ten top aircraft lessors are based in Ireland, and over half the world’s airplanes are owned and managed there. Japanese companies such as Orix Aviation and SMBC Aviation Capital have substantial operations in Dublin.

Locating operations in Ireland purely for tax reasons may turn out to be unsustainable in the long term however, as the EU, the OECD and Japan are all taking steps towards international tax cooperation and clamping down on tax avoidance.

The other risk to consider is of course Brexit. The UK forms a “land bridge” to the EU for Ireland. Around 85% of Ireland’s freight trade goes to British ports, and about 40% (around 190,000 freight containers a year) of that is re-exported to elsewhere in the EU.

Pharmaceuticals and electronic components are often shipped by air and various EU shipping companies have started up new routes connecting Ireland to the EU recently. So the main concern is any friction caused to trade that is only between the UK and Ireland.

This is partly why the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has become the key issue for resolving Brexit. But the most important concern has nothing to do with business – there are many more families like mine, living in both countries, who do not want to lose the peaceful coexistence that the open border has brought with it.

This article by Pernille Rudlin was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on November 13 2019

*Takeda acquired Shire for $62bn in 2019, who relocated their HQ from the UK to Ireland in 2008 for tax reason. Takeda is now liquidating Shire Holdings in Ireland and transferring the assets to Takeda Ireland, to make repatriation of dividends to Japan easier – presumably avoiding Japan’s tax haven laws.

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Video: the Brexit agreement one month on

Pernille Rudlin, Managing Director of Rudlin Consulting and David Henig, Director, UK Trade Policy Project at European Centre for International Political Economy participated in a Japan Society webinar on February 4th 2021, talking and answering questions about the Brexit agreement one month on, the impact on Japanese companies in the UK so far and what the future might hold. A video of the whole session is available below:

Finding a balance in employee development

At a meeting I facilitated of Japanese and non-Japanese board directors of a financial services company in London, the Japanese directors had many questions about employee development in the UK. They wanted to know how the highly specialized professionals in the firm gained the management knowledge needed to reach senior management positions. The answer was that in the UK this is largely through attending externally provided courses, in contrast to Japan where this knowledge has traditionally been gained “on the job” through job rotation.

This then led to a further question – what is the incentive for employers to invest in externally provided training if employees just use this as a springboard to go to another company?

The answer to this was that British financial services companies are under increasing pressure from the regulatory authorities for managers to be accountable for not only their own conduct and behaviour but also that of their team. This means that the annual performance appraisal is not just about whether performance targets have been met but also behavioural goals. Any gaps between expectations and achievement in terms of performance and behaviour should then lead to a development conversation about what kind of training and resources the employee needs to do their job better.

With the introduction of “job type” (job kei) HR systems, this kind of approach will be needed in Japan too. It is different from seika shugi/performance based systems because seika shugi was more focused on performance targets and the impact on bonuses, whereas job type appraisals are both on performance and behaviours and what this means for the person’s future development.

Managers cannot just leave it up to HR departments to take their usual approach to training each cohort simultaneously because the training has to fit the job descriptions and personal development plans. Similarly pay and bonuses cannot be set at a “one size fits all” basis across every department either.

It may take a while for a graduate recruit to grow into the job, however, depending on the function or business they are allocated to, so it would be unfair if there was too much disparity in the way the graduate intake was treated, early on.

This is why major employers in Europe such as Unilever have multiple graduate training programmes. Unilever offers 7 different tracks for its Future Leaders Programme for new graduates: marketing, HR, finance, R&D, supply chain and engineering, technology management and customer development (sales).

I nearly joined the Unilever marketing track (more than 30 years’ ago) but rejected the offer because I felt overwhelmed by the huge binder they placed in front of me, mapping out my first three years in minute detail. Instead, I joined a PR company as one of their first graduate recruits. I later came to regret this choice, as the training programme was entirely in-house, poorly executed and graduate trainees were treated inconsistently. Japanese companies need to find a balance between these two extremes and the Japanese one cohort model, both overseas and in Japan.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 11th November 2020

Visualizing brands

I collect English language publications by Japanese companies dating as far back as 1910 to see how they represented themselves in the past, when they were trying to project a global image. These include books published by Mitsui and Mitsubishi, which feature many photographs of their impressive office buildings, ships, mines and founding families. The message is one of scale, solidity and history.

In the 21^st century Japanese companies don’t need to impress so much and prefer to put a human face on what they do. But there is a lack of appealing photos that show both Japanese and non-Japanese people working together in a natural way. Many such photos feature models who are impossibly glamorous, or have distracting hairdos or beards. They are also usually doing things which I have never seen people do in an office such as all gathering around one laptop and pointing at it, or writing on glass walls.

Using photos of your own employees is one way around this. I featured in several annual reports and brochures for a Japanese trading company I worked for, as I usefully represented two types of diversity at once – being both female and not Japanese. But even then I did things which I would never do in my normal working life such as pointing at a clipboard and wearing a helmet.

We wanted to use employees in our marketing at a Japanese ICT company I worked for, to communicate our corporate brand value of genuineness. Most employees are not good actors however, so looked very awkward in the photos and videos.

Japanese corporate websites tend to be bland and abstract in design, still focusing on solidity and history and look much like the websites of other multinationals. It seems that if a company tries to be globally appealing, it loses what makes it distinctive.

British brands had similar issues in the past. British Airways tried to drop the “British” and be BA, “the world’s favourite airline”, removing the British flag from the airplane tailfins. Mrs Thatcher, who was Prime Minister at the time, objected strongly to this so the plan was dropped. Similarly, Royal Mail tried to sound more global by rebranding itself Consignia, but reverted to Royal Mail after much criticism.

Arguments also break out over the words used for the brand values and mission statement. British and American native speakers can have very different reactions to words like “ambitious”, and non-native English speakers feel left out of a linguistic battle they cannot win.

Japanese companies should not be afraid to use visuals with a distinctively Japanese appeal to their global stakeholders – customers, employees and communities. Which is why the Osaka Expo mascot Inochi no Kagayaki-kun is very clever – it is clearly Japanese, but also has the quirky personality of a living thing. I hope more Japanese organisations work with designers to come up with such humanised representations of their corporate culture, which do not have to rely on English words or fake-seeming photographs.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on October 14th 2020

Are there 10% or 1% fewer Japanese companies in the UK than five years’ ago? And why?

We covered in a previous post how Japan originated companies continued to increase their presence in Europe – apart from in the UK and Switzerland – over the past 5 years. We used the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs annual data, which showed an 11% decline from 1,064 Japan originated companies in the UK to 951 in 2019.

The other source of data on Japanese investment overseas is the Toyo Keizai annual directory. This shows a 1% decline in Japanese companies in the UK from 2018-9, from 972 to 966. It’s the first drop since at least 2015, numbers having risen 11% 2015-2018, according to the Toyo Keizai totals for the UK. We analysed this further in this post, noting that it’s hard to work out where Toyo Keizai derives the net drop of 6 Japanese companies in the UK from. Their list of the 7 companies which have closed down in the UK 2019 shows that this was mainly due to reorganization of holding companies or merging of companies rather than full withdrawal from the UK. Of the 8 new Japanese companies in the UK in 2019, 5 were indirect investments into energy companies by Nippon Koei, a civil engineering company and 2 were indirect investments by WDI, a Hong Kong originated Dim Sum chain which is registered in Japan.

Subsidiaries turning into branches

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs only breaks down its figures by organisational type and sector, but this does provide further clues. The biggest absolute decrease in numbers is amongst those categorized as a subsidiary incorporated in the UK. There were 480 such companies in the UK in 2014 – this fell 16% to 404 in 2019. Conversely branches of local subsidiaries rose 31% from 179 to 226. This seems to indicate that a fair number of UK incorporated subsidiaries unincorporated and became branches over this period, particularly over 2018-9. This tallies with what we have observed empirically – most famously with Sony Europe and Panasonic Europe becoming branches of EU subsidiaries but also a dozen or so others such as Takeda, Shionogi, Sanden, Fujitsu General, Murata and Alps becoming EU branches.

It looks like Brexit also provided an excuse to do a bit of tidying up, – consolidating multiple subsidiaries into one, for example. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs data also include companies established by a Japanese national with over 10% share in equity in its figures. This number has shrunk by 68 since 2014 to 96. We suspect this may be in part to do with those Japanese nationals becoming permanent residents in the UK or British citizens (other MoFA figures show this group has grown considerably) and therefore no longer included.

Manufacturing turning into wholesaling

Breaking the number down by sector also provides some insights. Japanese companies in the UK who are manufacturers are the biggest group, despite the UK’s heavily services oriented economy. Their numbers have dropped 22% from 2014 to 2019, from 417 to 326. Conversely, the number in the wholesale and retail sector has increased 44% from 112 to 161. The changes in the two sectors may be related, as Oki, Sony DADC, Tamura, Keihin, Nicera, Zeon Chemicals and Maruwa stopped production in the UK during this period but remained as wholesalers in the UK. Financial services companies, traditionally a UK strength, fell by a third from from 114 to 75, which is surprising considering they were active pre-Brexit in acquisitions, but perhaps again reflects some Brexit-related consolidation and divestment. Closures we are aware of include MC Asset Management, Speedloan Finance, Okasan Securities, Nomura Alternative Investment Management, Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management.

The sectors where there have been significant jumps in investors show where Japanese corporate interest in the UK now is. The number of Japanese utilities companies investing in the UK rose 120% from 10 to 22 and in the lifestyle and leisure sector by 289% from 9 to 35 – some new entrants we have been aware of the past couple of years in these two categories have been Hakutsuru Sake, MTG, Asahi Premium Brands, JERA Power, Nippon LP Resources, DTM Renewables and Sojitz Energy. The majority of “new” Japanese companies in the UK over the past five years were the result of acquisitions.

An end to one size fits all training in Japan

This then led to a further question – what is the incentive for employers to invest in externally provided training if employees just use this as a springboard to go to another company?

With the introduction of “job type” (known as “job kei” in Japanese) HR systems, this kind of approach will be needed in Japan too. It is different from seika shugi (literally “results based system”, introduced in many Japanese companies in the 1990s and 2000s) because seika shugi was more focused on performance targets and the impact on bonuses, whereas job type appraisals are both on performance and behaviours and what this means for the person’s future development.

Managers cannot just leave it up to HR departments to take the “yoko narabi” (one size fits all) approach to training each cohort simultaneously because the training has to fit the job descriptions and personal development plans. Similarly pay and bonuses cannot be set at a “one size fits all” basis across every department either.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in Japanese in the 11th November 2020 edition of Teikoku Databank News

Hitachi in the UK – from TVs to trains (part 1)

Hitachi’s first foray into manufacturing the UK in the 1970s was extremely fraught. Undeterred, 10 years later, it established its European headquarters in the UK, where it has been located since. It has kept faith with the UK through turbulent times, establishing the global headquarters for its rail business in the UK in 2014.

Hitachi had a sales arm in the UK since 1970, marketing “portable monochrome television receivers, radios and record-players”. This was heralded in The Times as “another challenge on the home market from a Japanese rival” (1) noting that this was the third Japanese group to enter the UK home market in recent months (the other two being Sony and Matsushita).

The enemy within the walls

As with much of Japanese manufacturing investment overseas at the time, setting up production within the European Community (EC) was done to avoid accusations of dumping, and to ensure there was enough local content to satisfy the European Commission. Hitachi initially considered a greenfield site in Washington in the North East of England for manufacturing TVs in 1975, shortly after Sony and Matsushita had established manufacturing in the UK. This attracted such hostility from UK domestic competitors worried about overcapacity that Hitachi shelved the idea.

Hitachi was hoping to source cathode ray tubes from British firm Mullard, the only UK manufacturer of colour TV tubes, who were initially very reluctant. They maintained in 1977 that they were not ready to accept a Hitachi offer to buy 25,000 of its tubes a year from 1980. Jack Akerman, Mullard’s managing director, sounded positively sniffy about Hitachi’s technology. “We must be absolutely satisfied that our merchandise is going to be used in a technical environment where it will perform well and live well. If all the technical points are answered and we are satisfied, then it would be acceptable for Mullard and Hitachi to trade together in the event that Hitachi’s new factory were welcomed to this country by the Government.”(2)

The Times ran an opinion piece by the commercial editor Derek Harris asking if Hitachi was going to become “the enemy within the walls”. (3) It detailed a rumour that Finnish made TV tubes (from a partly Hitachi owned company) might supply Hitachi in the UK instead, in return for British fighter aircraft exports to Finland, in an offset deal between governments. It described how Mullard’s real concern was not technological compatibility so much that the British TV industry had substantial overcapacity, so Mullard supplying Hitachi would simply result in damage to existing UK customers of Mullard such as Rank, Thorn and Mullard’s sister company Pye (both were owned by the Dutch company Philips).

Harris quotes Akerman as saying “those first few years will be as smooth as silk. But then – watch out. In Japan they are planning for the year 2000, They want to dominate the electronic equipment business and, as we have said consistently, we don’t blame them.”

“Critically endangered” by tube imports from Japan

Derek Harris wrote a further piece in The Times in October 1978 (4) noting the warning from the European Electronic Component Manufacturers’ Association that the European electronics industry was being critically endangered by cheap imports from Japanese TV component makers. The tubes represented a third of the value of a TV set, and out of every 100 colour sets sold in the EEC, 33 contained tubes made in Japan. This was to intensify in the early 1980s when licensing agreements expired, opening the EEC to the larger colour TV sets made in Japan. UK TV manufacturers had an informal agreement with the Japanese industry on import restraint, but nonetheless, it was estimated that Britain’s TV and audio industry was operating at only 50% capacity.

The UK government then introduced Hitachi to the General Electric Company (the UK company that eventually became Marconi, not the US company General Electric) and the two companies formed a joint venture, GEC-Hitachi Television Ltd, in December 1978 and adopted an existing GEC television factory in Aberdare, Wales, along with a workforce of over 2,000.

Hitachi takes over GEC factory

The British continued to manage the plant, and Hitachi invested nearly £3m in new plant and equipment, and provided technical support. At first sales were good, building up a 10% UK market share. By the early 1980s, overmanning and industrial strife led to losses. GEC sold its half of the company to Hitachi in March 1984 and it became Hitachi Consumer Products Ltd. Hitachi instituted a one union policy and reduced the workforce to 800. The plant also began to manufacture hi-fi equipment. Mullard was a supplier to Hitachi, along with Tabuchi Electric who had set up production in the UK in 1985. Philips changed the Mullard name to Philips Components in 1988.

Hitachi also started a video cassette recorder plant in Germany and eventually the German plant also manufactured TVs and the Wales plant also manufacturered VCRs, with German made cylinder heads and chassis being shipped to the UK and British made PCBs being exported to Germany. This meant the local content for both TVs and VCRs were around 80-90%.(5)

The bubble bursts

In the 1990s competition from cheaper TVs and VCRs made in developing countries made it difficult for Hitachi and other UK based Japanese manufacturers to compete. The Aberdare plant was closed in 2001, with the loss of 700 jobs. Hitachi said it would focus on higher value added products in Europe such as plasma screens, projectors for home cinema, DVD camcorders and in-car navigation systems. After several years of losses, Hitachi Consumer Products UK Ltd was wound up in 1995-1997 and the business transferred to Hitachi Home Electronics, until it too was liquidated in 2003, with remaining assets and business transferred to Hitachi Europe.

(1) The Times, 21 August 1970, p 20

(2) The Times, 10 November 1977, p 20

(3) The Times, 18 November 1977, p 21

(4) The Times, 4 October 1978, p 22

(5) Much of this post is based on pages 304-9 of Japanese Manufacturing Investment in Europe, Its impact on the UK Economy, Roger Strange, Routledge 1993

Takiron – first Japanese company in Wales

Takiron was one of the first Japanese manufacturers to set up in the UK, in 1972. It was the first Japanese company to come to Wales and the third to start production in the UK, in 1974, after YKK and Nittan. It manufactured PVC corrugated sheeting after acquiring an existing factory in Bedwas, Gwent, mostly for export to Europe and America.

The Times in 1972 saw this investment as Japanese chemical and trading companies (Itochu and Chugai Boeki were also investors) “launching a big attack” on the European PVC sheet market through a UK subsidiary. (1) Just before it started operations, a spokesman for Takiron said they had been able to hire British workers at 10%-30% lower rates than they would in Japan, thanks to the current exchange rate, so even with the high cost of raw materials in the UK, it would be possible to export to Europe and America at a competitive price. The president of Takiron at the time, Matsui Yanosuke, even thought exports to Japan from the UK would be a possibility. (2)

One of the first employees was also one of the first Japanese people to be “locally hired” in the UK by a Japanese company – Midori Matsui. She had been visiting the UK on a break from teaching English at junior high school in Japan when a childhood friend at Takiron called her to offer her a job at the new company, teaching English to the new expatriates and helping them to set up the business.

She ended up staying at Takiron for 29 years, becoming a director of the company, until retiring in 2000. According to an interview with her in the Japan Times in 2001, she was thinking of returning to Japan, but was expecting to keep visiting Wales, as she said she would miss the warmth of the Welsh people, and the green fields and open skies. Clearly their appeal was too strong, and she continued to live in Wales, until her death in 2016 at the age of 80. She helped to organise the Japan 2001 celebrations and other local Japan related activities, and was awarded an MBE and a Japanese Foreign Minister’s commendation.

Although she says in the interview that the British lack of commitment to deadlines and work was “different now”, it’s a comment still heard regularly from Japanese working in the UK. But so is her point that the British are forgiving of mistakes and differences, unlike in Japan.

Former Wales rugby player Ken Jones was managing director and then chairman in the 1980s and 1990s. When the pound began to strengthen so that by January 1980 it was around Y550 compared to Y350 in 1979, and the UK went into recession, Jones was upbeat in a Daily Mirror interview: “we have invested £120,000 in new machinery” and added that the staff identified themselves closely with the company – “there’s a high degree of participation here. ” (3)

By 1991 Takiron UK employed 68 people (3) but from the mid 1990s it began to lose money and had shrunk to 57 employees by 2001. Takiron blamed the strong pound and continued high price of raw materials for its difficulties and decided to close in 2001.

The plant was supposed to be taken over by a manufacturer of roller doors in 2006 but was still empty in 2007, when it was taken over for the “biggest rave in South Wales.”

Takiron started as Takigawa in 1919, changing its name to Takiron in 1959. It is owned by the Japanese trading house Itochu and in 2017 it merged with C.I. Kasei (itself a merger between Hama Kasei and Kobe Resin) to form C.I. Takiron. C.I. Kasei had invested 32m euros in setting up a factory in Treviso, Italy in 2007, under the name of Bonlex Europe. The local vocational school was one of the key factors for choosing the location, providing courses in woodworking and automotive, relevant to the plastic films to decorate wood panels and car interiors that the factory produces.

Bonlex is the only subsidiary C.I. Takiron now has in Europe.

(1) The Times, October 4 1972 p 20

(2) The Times, June 7 1973 p 25

(3) The Daily Mirror, 27 November 1980 p 6

(3) Japanese Manufacturing Investment in Europe: Its impact on the UK economy, Roger Strange, Routledge, 1993

Mitsubishi Electric in the UK – 1979 to present

In January 1979 Mitsubishi Electric UK took over a colour TV plant in Haddington, East Lothian from bankrupt Norwegian company Tandberg, saving 120 jobs. Exports of colour TVs from Japan to the EU and particularly the UK had risen rapidly in the early 1970s, even though they were restricted to small screen sets. Then demand in the UK came to a sudden end and TV manufacturing in the UK had excess capacity. So the British government encouraged Japanese companies to take over existing plants. Japanese companies also chose the UK for manufacturing in Europe because there were no domestic manufacturers with government connections as there were in France (Thomson-Brandt) and the Netherlands (Philips). (1)

Mitsubishi Electric already had a representative office in London from 1969 and had turned it into subsidiary in 1972. This then became a branch of Mitsubishi Electric BV in the Netherlands in 1996. It has continued as a branch of the Netherlands based European regional HQ since.

By 1987 Mitsubishi Electric had established video recorder production facilities in Livingston, along with many other Japanese manufacturers starting production in Europe, in response to pressure and anti dumping proceedings from the European Commission. (2)

It acquired Britain’s Apricot Computers in April 1990, with a plant in Glenrothes and R&D in Birmingham, employing 442 in 1991. PC production was scheduled to treble to 100,000 per annum in 1993, with exports accounting for 25% of production, half to Japan. (3) Glenrothes was shut in 1999, blaming cheap competition in Asia.

The Haddington plant continued to make colour TVs and also microwave ovens, but when the price of TVs dropped, it was no longer profitable. In 1998 production ended, with 500 jobs lost. Production was transferred to Turkey.

Alister Jack, the then Scottish Tory spokesman on economic affairs, who later became Secretary of State for Scotland, attacked the Labour government on the closure: “There is little point of introducing a New Deal programme if they cannot hold on to existing jobs.”

Mitsubishi Electric hoped to focus on video recorder production and air conditioning at their Livingston plants. However, in 1999 it announced it would cut 6.100 jobs overseas and 8,400 jobs in Japan due to losses caused by falling semi-conductor prices and weak demand for consumer products.

The Livingston operation entirely focused on air conditioning and R&D for Europe moved there in 2013, with Mitsubishi Electric investing £20 million into the operation.

In 2017 air conditioner production started at Mitsubishi Electric’s new factory in Turkey. Thanks to the customs union with the EU, air conditioning exports from Turkey to the EU are tariff free.

Mitsubishi Electric Air Conditioning UK employed over 1000 people In 2019. 77% of its sales of £200m were to non-UK EU countries, 20% to the UK. The plant was profitable despite a large increase in gas and transportation costs.

The UK is seen as a growing market, despite any Brexit impact, because of the need for green, affordable public sector housing. Mitsubishi Electric is dependent on imported components, but it is standard industry practice to hold 2.5 months of inventory, so it is hoping to weather any post Brexit logistics impact.

(1) Japanese Manufacturing Investment in Europe: Its impact on the UK economy” Roger Strange, Routledge, 1993 p 196

(2) ibid p 201

(2) ibid p 264

Photograph of Campbell Gill ~ Personnel Manager and Eric Murray the General Manager with the joint Managing Director Yoshio Noguchi 1984, credit: Angus N Bathgate https://www.facebook.com/groups/oldeastlothain/permalink/2402751853280700

Bringing the company into the home

Under normal circumstances, British companies would be welcoming their new graduate recruits in September. This year (2020), many big employers have cancelled or delayed their recruitment schemes and internships because of the coronavirus pandemic. More than a quarter of British companies will be hiring fewer graduates, according to a survey in March 2020 by the Institute of Student Employers.

Nonetheless, some companies are still hiring or making plans on how to welcome new staff. There is a high likelihood many of the new employees will have to work from home, so companies are having to think creatively about how to make them feel like a member of the team.

A new employee at a British law firm was delighted that her employer sent her not only a laptop and other equipment for working from home, but also a welcome pack that contained items such as a company branded water bottle and backpack. She said it made her feel part of the team when she saw other employees drinking from the same bottle or pulling files out of the same backpack on a conference call. Another company sent a new recruit branded face masks, a home baking kit and a pot plant.

Companies are also being creative about the content of the induction for new staff. They show videos of the office or send employees lunch vouchers so they can have an informal lunch with their new boss over a video call.

This could be a great opportunity to make employees across the world feel part of their Japanese company. Japanese headquarters could show new hires videos of their offices in Japan or aspects of Japanese culture.

The lunch with colleagues could be bought with a voucher for a delivery bento box. Maybe there could be some global virtual karaoke sessions – although with the different time zones this could be an uncomfortable experience if some are joining in early in the morning and others late at night after a few drinks.

It’s also a business opportunity for Japanese manufacturers. Some of the best designed and made pens, diaries and notebooks I have owned during my career have been Japanese corporate ones. Japanese mascots and plushies are loved worldwide – so this could be the time to design a friendly company mascot that employees can place on top of their desk. Some employees might even welcome company uniform items like shirts, T shirts, ties and scarves. It could help them draw a clearer boundary between their work lives and their private lives, even when they are working from home.

Virtual designs for use on the computer would be good too – not just screensavers and wallpaper but also virtual backgrounds for conference calls. However, this means the technology welcome kit will also have to include a green screen for placing behind the head, otherwise employees’ hairstyles will merge into the corporate branding, which might be going a step too far in making new recruits feel part of the company.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 9th September 2020

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