Category: Reputation

Does having more women managers help Japanese companies globalise?

The question of whether having more women managers would help Japanese companies to globalise was raised, but not discussed in depth due to time constraints, at a dinner I attended, hosted by a delegation to the UK from Japan Women’s Innovative Network – a Japanese non profit organisation.  An impressively large number of younger women (70) had been sponsored by their companies to come to the UK for a week, visiting various UK companies such as British Telecom and AON, to study global leadership and diversity.

My view is yes, it does help Japanese companies to globalise if they have more (Japanese) women managers, for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, it helps Japanese companies and corporate culture seem less “alien” to Western companies if there are more women in management positions in the headquarters, and secondly, because the adjustments Japanese companies will have to make in order to incorporate a more diverse Japanese workforce (gender or other diversity) will help them be more inclusive of “non-Japanese” diverse groups.  Attitudes to overtime and working from home would be a couple of areas needing adjustment I would suggest.

On the first point, the question of the role of women in Japanese companies is frequently raised in the cultural awareness sessions we conduct in Europe for Japanese companies.  Japan never does well in surveys of the position of women in society – see the most recent World Economic Forum Gender Gap report, placing Japan 114th out of 144 countries (updated for 2017).  While you can question the methodology of such surveys, then along comes another one, conducted amongst Japanese women, showing that 1/3 of them want to be full time housewives.

Which leads me to point out in our training (and in the Advancing Gender Diversity day I spoke at for Hitachi’s European group companies – presentation on SlideShare here) that Confucian values remain strong in Japan – it’s not that women are seen as somehow less capable than men, more that there are expectations around the role they should fulfil in society.

Prime Minister Abe is trying to square a circle with Abenomics, by trying to raise the birthrate but at the same time encourage women to go back to work – aiming to have 30% of senior positions in all parts of society, by 2020, through improving childcare and parental leave.  But with the amount of pressure on women to be good housewives and stalwarts of the Parent Teachers Association, no amount of improved childcare and leave is going to counteract this or compensate for both parents doing overtime until late at night.

Although the Japanese government can directly change the economy with the first and second arrow of Abenomics, through fiscal and monetary actions, the third arrow of structural reform requires nudging, or even shaming Japanese companies into doing the right thing – legislation alone will be hard to push through and even harder to enforce.  So Abe launched in February the “Nadeshiko” * scheme, recognising firms which are making efforts to improve the working environment for women.

Firms given the Nadeshiko “brand” in February of this year include Kao, Nissan, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo) and Daikin.  The scheme is not the only initiative taking place – various other surveys have been done of best places for women to work and the Hitachi Gender Diversity Day was partly inspired by the President of Hitachi, Hiroaki Nakanishi, declaring recently that the company aims to more than double the number of women managers by 2020.

Other recent surveys have named Benesse (no coincidence that the founder of Benesse is also the founder of J-WIN) as the most career friendly for women and companies such as Toshiba, KDDI, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and NTT have all announced targets for women managers.  The Nikkei group has also jumped on the bandwagon, with a seminar series aimed at aspiring women managers (and even has a magazine “Nikkei Woman” ) and published its ranking last year of best places for women to work, which put foreign companies at the top (IBM Japan, Procter & Gamble) along with 2 life insurance companies, Takashimaya department store, Daiwa Securities, Sony, Panasonic, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, Fujitsu and Sharp.

* Nadeshiko is a type of pink danthius flower associated with women in Japan. It was adopted as a nickname by the women’s soccer team of Japan on its way to becoming the first Asian team to win the World Cup, in 2011.

The original version of this article was published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in 2014.  An English version of it appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” is available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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What it really means to lose your company laptop in Japan

Losing your company laptop can be a really big deal in corporate Japan.  In one company I know, depending on the seriousness (how it happened, what kind of data was lost), the punishment ranges from pay cuts to demotion. The errant employee’s line manager may receive a similar penalty.  And just to rub it in, the employee and the manager both get named and shamed in the HR bulletins circulated to all employees.

The information technology support team at this company’s UK subsidiary was approving of this policy, albeit half-jokingly.  While sympathetic to the occasional accident or lapse, they were appalled by how badly people looked after their company laptops in terms of hygiene and care.  They cited the case of one employee who had lost his laptop in a pub –  three times.

There is no penalty in the UK subsidiary, other than the damage to professional pride and the inconvenience caused.  Laptops are heavily encrypted, and as soon as a device is reported missing, the ability of the device to connect to the intranet is disabled.  In terms of monetary loss, most laptops are written off quickly from the balance sheets anyway.

Perhaps then the strict policy in Japan is not due solely to concrete concerns about security and financial loss, but more due to fears of reputational loss.   In Japan the laptop may well be handed in, but probably to the police, or directly to the company concerned, so quite a few people will get to hear about it, at worst even the media or a customer.

An employee of a famous Japanese company is like a member of a family.  If they do something wrong in public, the whole family looks bad for not having brought up their children properly.  Older brothers or sisters (the line managers) are scolded for not keeping a better eye on their younger siblings.  The symbolic punishment is to have pocket money taken away for a few weeks but the real punishment is the damage done to your reputation within the family – being known as the careless one, or the stupid one, who let the family down.

The UK IT support team and I speculated as to how the “bring your own device” trend might impact the way people treat their laptops.  If it is your own computer, tablet or mobile phone, paid for with your own money, then maybe you will treat it with more care.

But I get the impression that big-name brand companies in Japan are reluctant to accept flexible practices such as working from home, and “bring your own device” is not going to help.  Even with the best security and encryption, the reputational damage of an employee losing a laptop that might contain confidential customer data is too severe to risk.

To use the family analogy again, even if the son bought the football with his own money, and it only hit the neighbour’s window without breaking it, the neighbour is still going to complain.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly

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High brand recognition for Japanese companies does not necessarily mean they are well known

When it was first suggested to me that I join Mitsubishi Corporation in the UK, I have to admit I thought it was the car manufacturer, Mitsubishi Motors, despite the fact that I should have known better, having been brought up in Japan and spent a year at a Japanese university.

After a couple of years exporting British chinaware and shoes to Japan for the trading house, I was transferred to Tokyo to work in the building materials sales team.  The apartment that my employer found for me had no furniture, as is normal in Japan. So I decided I would buy what I needed at Marui department store, as I had heard they offered credit cards and I did not have enough savings to pay for the necessary bed, sofa and refrigerator.

When I approached the credit card application desk, a look of panic flitted across the clerk’s face – a young, foreign, female was presumably not going to be a good credit risk.  I reassured him I could speak Japanese, but he was very concerned whether I could write well enough to fill in the application form.

I took out my Mitsubishi Corporation business card in order to copy down the address, and as soon as he spotted the distinctive three diamond logo, his face lit up.  “Mitsubishi Corporation!  Can I phone your team leader to check your employment details?”  He returned from the call with a huge smile on his face, and tried to make me buy two televisions and a better refrigerator.

The Mitsubishi name worked magic for me once more in my career there.  I had stupidly forgotten my passport on a trip to Frankfurt from London.  The German border police were not impressed, particularly as I had no other form of ID, not even a driving license or credit card.  I suddenly remembered my Mitsubishi security pass.

Again, the atmosphere improved dramatically, and one policeman even tried to make a joke of it – “we will let you through, if you can get us a Shogun!” (as the Pajero sport utility vehicle was known in Europe at the time).

I decided this was not a good moment to explain that Mitsubishi Corporation was not the same company as Mitsubishi Motors, and ruefully remembered how I had made the same mistake myself a few years previously in the job interview.  In retrospect, it is intriguing that the Mitsubishi brand instantly evoked trust, even for a German policeman who did not really know what it stood for.

This was twenty years ago, but I suspect this paradox persists for Japanese companies when it comes to recruiting in Europe. There is a generally favourable view of Japanese companies, but nobody is quite sure what they do, and therefore there is a doubt as to whether becoming an employee of a Japanese company is a good career move.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that recently the larger Japanese employers in Europe are indeed putting more effort into broader corporate communications, rather than just product advertising.  This is presumably in order to attract the best quality employees.

This article by Pernille Rudlin first appeared in the 10th June 2013 edition of The Nikkei Weekly and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s book  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe”, available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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