Time for a logistics revolution in Europe

(This article was published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News18 months’ ago, but it seems even more relevant now)

Now I am back working in my home office, I have become much more conscious of the activities in the street in front of my office window. Once a week, a massive, noisy refrigerated lorry backs itself up against my house, to deliver food to the Italian restaurant three doors down from me. The lorry comes from a food wholesaler with depots the nearest of which is 300km away.

The reason the lorry parks right outside my house is that there are vehicles blocking the road outside the restaurant, caused by the building works which are converting offices into 50 student apartments.  Huge trucks reverse up our 16th century street, damaging the ancient buildings, in order to deliver 50 sets of kitchen or bathroom units. I realise it is cheaper to deliver 50 bathroom units at once in a big truck, but actually the builders did not need all those units at once, as they were fitting out the apartments in phased batches.

When I heard a loud howling noise just after I woke up at around 6:45 one morning I thought it was from the building site again, but it turned out to be from an even bigger refrigerated lorry making deliveries to a chain restaurant in the square at the end of our street.

Chain restaurants have had a bad year in the UK – shutting down a third of their outlets in some cases.  Many of these chains are owned by private equity firms, who saw a way to scale up a small chain of restaurants with a distinctive brand into a much bigger, national chain, and reduce costs through bulk purchasing.

The decline of these chain restaurants is partly to do with the economy, but also that the quality of food deteriorated as they expanded. The cooking had become reheating days’ old readymade ingredients.

The quality of the food and the impact on the environment could be improved by more frequent deliveries, in smaller, eco-friendly trucks. Most trucks in Europe run on diesel, and although diesel produces less CO2 than petrol, a huge concern now across Europe is the air pollution diesel causes. French and British governments are banning petrol and diesel cars (but not trucks) from 2040 as a consequence.

But this will require governments to invest much more in electric vehicle charging points and a revolution in logistics. Cities might need to set up hubs in their outskirts for consolidation of deliveries per customer into smaller electric trucks. Logistics companies will need to work with AI specialists like the British company Prowler, whose software is used in logistics to optimise decision making amongst multiple agents.

I realised Japanese companies could be part of this revolution when I saw in my neighbourhood a small electric truck (Isuzu – partly owned by Itochu) belonging to a British tyre wholesaler (owned by Itochu), quietly make a delivery to the city centre outlet of a UK-wide garage chain (also owned by Itochu).

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Are Japanese companies leaving the UK because of Brexit yet?

I asked this question just over a year ago and the answer is still yes and no. To which I would add, it’s more a case that Japanese companies aren’t investing in or coming to the UK as much as they used to, replacing the ones that are leaving or downsizing.

Asia continues to dominate as location for Japanese companies overseas

The number of Japanese companies overseas is, according to Toyo Keizai*, continuing to increase – up 65% from 2008, but the rate of increase has been slowing since 2013. The number of Japanese companies overseas grew 2% from 2018 to 2019, with growth in all regions –  higher growth in Africa/Oceania (from a small base) but only 1% growth in Europe compared to 3% in North America and Asia.

63% of Japanese companies overseas are in ex-Japan Asia – up from 62% in 2018 and 69% of the employees of Japanese companies abroad are in Asia. Around 15% of Japanese companies abroad are in Europe and 14% in North America, with both regions having around 11% of employees. As pointed out last year, the obvious factor in why there are proportionately more employees to number of companies in Asia compared to Europe and North America is the greater number of manufacturing operations in Asia, with larger workforces.

The number of UK employees of Japanese companies has fallen for the first time, by 9%

Within Europe, the number of people employed by Japanese companies rose 18% from 2015 to 2019. Those countries where the number of Japanese company employees has fallen are countries where there has been a rise in populism, civic unrest and political risk. UK employee numbers fell 9% 2018-9 (the first decline since at least 2015), Spanish employee numbers fell 19% 2018-9, Hungary’s fell 18%, Turkey’s 10%, Poland and Italy also showed small decreases in employee numbers.

Countries where Japanese employee numbers are growing are the Netherlands (up 11% 2018-9), France (10%), Germany (2%) and the Czech Republic (2%).  Employee numbers in Romania doubled from 2018-9 but this is largely due to Toyo Keizai recording employee numbers at Alcedo (acquired by Sumitomo Corporation in 2011) as being 20,284, having been 318 in 2018. The 2018 number is more in line with other available data.

Number of Japanese companies in UK has fallen for first time

The number of Japanese companies in the UK has fallen by 1% 2018-9, from 972 to 966, the first drop since at least 2015, having risen 11% 2015-2018. France also saw a 2% drop in the number of Japanese companies, even though employee numbers are up. Germany attracted a 4% increase in Japanese companies from 2018-9, having risen 13% 2015-8. Netherlands had a 1% increase 2018-9 (13.5% 2015-8) and Italy had a 2% rise in Japanese companies 2018-9, and an increase of 11.8% 2015-8.

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.

Germany now hosts more Japanese automotive companies than the UK

The Japanese automotive sector is of course the sector being most carefully watched for Brexit impact. Japanese automotive manufacturers are continuing to set up overseas – the total number globally has increased 10% in 2019 on 2015.  And “despite” the EU-Japan EPA, 15 more Japanese transportation equipment manufacturers set up in Europe in 2019, a 20% cumulative increase  on 2015.  Of the 15 new companies, 4 are in Germany, 3 in Poland, 2 in Spain, 2 in Portugal, 1 in France, 1 in Italy, 1 in Slovakia and 1 mystery one.  This means Germany now hosts more automotive/transportation equipment companies than the UK – 31 to the UK’s 30.

Japanese acquisitions of UK companies reduced in scale and number

Toyo Keizai’s data is reliant on companies filling in their surveys, so tends to underreport and often misses acquisitions. From my database, I estimate 20 British companies were acquired by Japanese companies in 2019-2020, although some of them were indirect acquisitions through acquiring a parent company with a subsidiary in the UK. Dentsu and Sony continued to acquire UK based companies, and other acquisitions were of British companies in software, gaming, hotels, seafood, recruitment, a manufacturer of drives for electric motors and paper wholesale.  The scale is far less than in previous years, both in terms of numbers of acquisitions and value of the deals.

Even adding these acquisitions in shows a 3% drop in the number of people employed by Japanese companies in the UK from 2018/9 to 2019/20 according to my database – the first drop since I started tracking these numbers in 2015.

* Toyo Keizai Data Bank: Directory of Japanese Companies Abroad 2020

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What Japanese customers want – new online coaching service

If you’re looking to expand your business in Japan, I’m offering online group coaching based on my book “Omoiyari – 6 steps to getting it right with Japanese customers” Group numbers are limited to 5 so we can be interactive, and learn from each other.

Over six 1 hour sessions I will take you through the six steps to getting it right with Japanese customers and the top 10 things Japanese customers want.

An assignment will be set at each session and the next session will review the assignment and give you a chance to interact with other people, swapping ideas and insights.

Please sign up here: https://japan-intercultural-emea.teachable.com/p/what-japanese-customers-want

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UK’s priority in Japan trade agreement is not increasing exports, it’s protecting Japan’s investments in UK

My view on Brexit was that it was accelerating trends that were already there for Japanese business in Europe, and gave them cover to do things they were already wanting to do.

The COVID-19 pandemic seems set to provide similar cover and if the UK is not careful, this will mean a further withdrawal of Japanese investment from the UK.

Japanese companies are still in search of growth outside the ageing, declining population of the Japanese market, and this includes in Europe. According to Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs data, the number of Japanese companies in Europe grew 16% from 2012-2018 and the number of Japanese nationals in Europe also grew over the same period by 12%.

At the same time Japanese companies are very risk averse.  Brexit was seen as a risk from around 2013 onwards, and this is reflected in the number of Japanese companies and nationals in UK falling by 11% and 7% respectively over 2012-2018 – the only country in Europe to show such significant decreases. Germany already hosts more Japanese companies than the UK and is catching up in terms of hosting Japanese nationals too.

Although Japan is still more of a manufacturing, exporting nation than the UK is, both the UK and Europe are just as – if not more – important to Japan as a destination for investment than as a market for exports of finished goods. As the DIT itself estimates, around 59% of Japanese exports to the UK are intermediate goods, used in supply chains.  So in other words, a large number of Japan’s investments in the UK and the Europe boost Japanese exports to the UK and Europe.

The trends in current Japanese trade and investment in Europe and the UK need to be examined for their impact in the four areas where Japan has influence over the UK economy

1. Existing UK jobs reliant on Japanese companies

The Japanese automotive sector is a key source of existing jobs for the UK as it accounts for around a quarter of the 163,000 people I estimate are employed in the UK by Japanese companies. There was a 3% decline from 2017/8 to 2018/9 in employment in the Japanese automotive sector in the UK, however, whereas employment in Japanese automotive companies grew elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe.

So while zero tariffs on automotive parts from Japan to the UK will help –  this might just be trying to hold back the tide. The possibility of tariffs on exports of cars made in the UK to the EU is obviously a concern for Japanese companies too. Maybe sterling will fall far enough or there will be sufficient government subsidies to mitigate this extra cost but ultimately Japanese companies will choose to manufacture where there they can access not just the lowest costs but also a market sufficiently large to ensure full production capacity.

Obviously there is a strong need to focus on electric vehicle development, and the UK has strength in automotive design, but Japanese car manufacturers will be wanting to develop EVs in line with EU regulations and to be able to influence EU regulations – which is easier done from inside the EU than outside.

    2. Where the new Japanese jobs are in the UK

Hitachi is the most significant recent contributor to organic job growth in Japanese companies in the UK  – largely due to Hitachi Rail. Hitachi has also invested in Horizon Nuclear Power, which is currently “on ice”. Hitachi’s focus is on social infrastructure, and various commitments by UK governments on investing in transportation and energy are key to this. Many other Japanese companies are also interested in social infrastructure business in Europe.

A UK Japan trade agreement can support further job growth by facilitating the export of parts for these industries from Japan. Hitachi has also invested in rail manufacturing in Italy so if there are any tariffs making exports from the UK to the EU uncompetitive, they have an alternative manufacturing location within the EU.

Other Japanese companies that are expanding in the UK include NTT, the ICT/telecommunications giant, who have put their non-Japan global HQ in London and SoftBank, who acquired ARM and committed to expand the workforce. Presumably this is why DIT is emphasizing free data flows between Japan and the UK, which would be welcomed by Japanese ICT companies and Japanese regional headquarter functions based in the UK.

I’m seeing some positive impacts of the EU-Japan EPA on investment elsewhere in Europe. There have been quite a few acquisitions by Japanese companies of food businesses in France for example.  Japanese trade statistics show that food and alcohol exports to Japan from Europe have risen after the EPA came into force. If a similar agreement on food, textiles and leather goods to the EU Japan EPA is reached between Japan and the UK as the DIT is asking, there may be similar acquisitions by Japanese companies in the UK – as well as the growth in exports for UK SMEs that the DIT seems to be focusing on. There already have been a few food related acquisitions by Japanese companies in the UK. This might see some increase in new jobs in the UK as a result. But this is marginal compared to the jobs that could be created by Japanese investment in the UK infrastructure sector.

    3. UK exports of services to Japan are M&A driven

It seems likely that Japanese companies will continue to use their piled-up cash to acquire – perhaps in Asia initially as it is opening up first after COVID-19. In the past, Japan established companies in the UK as gateway to EU but recent Japanese acquisitions in the UK have been increasingly pure domestic (recruitment, car parking, outsourcing, advertising) or pure global (SoftBank, financial services).

These acquisitions do not necessarily create more jobs, but financial, legal and other services around the acquisitions is, I would guess, a large component of UK services exports to Japan. Allowing UK professionals to operate in Japan is not a key driver – it is more that UK based professionals are supporting Japanese companies in Europe and globally. I even know of one UK based, American owned advertising agency that deals directly with the Japan HQ of a Japanese sports brand on their global campaigns, even though the advertising agency have a Japanese office.

Japanese companies may well buy up more British companies in the near future, as they will be cheap. However, there does seem to be a decline in big ticket acquisitions in the UK – the most recent major European acquisition by a Japanese company that I am aware of is Mitsubishi Corporation acquiring the Dutch Energy company ENECO – my understanding is that Netherlands based services companies mainly supported this.

    4. Export of services because of UK as European/EMEA hub

Another element in the UK’s export of services to Japan is that the UK subsidiaries of Japanese companies often perform a regional headquarters function for Japanese firms – and receive management fees for this. Brexit (but also changes in Japanese laws on treatment of offshore profits) has caused some Japanese companies to move their regional HQ from UK (Panasonic, Sony) in a legal and financial sense. But there is still a critical mass of people in the UK working for such companies, because the UK provides marketing, IT, design, engineering, legal, financial, accounting services that are of a high, globally accepted standard.

This is why, as the JETRO survey of 2019 of Japanese companies in Europe pointed out, the biggest regulatory concern of Japanese companies is that the UK or the EU might change regulations regarding the freedom of movement between the UK and EU for their employees. Continuing that regional coordination role requires regional employees to move around the region – or can this all now be done by web conferencing?

The UK is still seen by Japan as an attractive place to send students but also employees for education and development. Japanese students only want short term, under 1 year courses, however and many are looking at cheaper, nearer options. Both students and Japanese professionals would want ease of acquiring visas, including work visas and a safe, stable environment to live in.

UK offensive interests

Looking at the recent DIT paper on the UK-Japan FTA, clearly there are some non-tariff barriers to the UK accessing the Japanese market – as there have been for decades. But my overwhelming impression is that most British companies have not been very proactive in approaching the Japanese market – it’s a big commitment, opening an office in Japan is needed, not just exporting from afar. It’s relatively easy to set up a company in Japan but not so easy to hire the right people. There is a labour shortage, particularly of capable salespeople who are English speakers.  This is not something that can be solved in a trade agreement.

A final point regarding the DIT paper’s claim that the UK is a “technology superpower” – not in Japanese eyes I’m afraid – possibly in fintech and there have been some Japanese investments in that sector in the UK. But they’re fairly small scale. Japanese technology companies such as Panasonic are basing their innovation arms in Silicon Valley.  The US, China and the EU are more important to Japan than the UK – in many ways.

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Japanese shift to Germany continues

Germany has historically been the main rival to the UK in Europe for Japanese investment.  The UK absorbs about 40% of total Japanese investment into the EU but according to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there are actually 50% more Japan originated companies (703) in Germany compared to the UK (471).* 

The reason for this discrepancy in numbers may be to do with the difference in the sectors that are investing in Germany and the UK and also the scale of the companies that are being acquired. According to my own research there are more employees on average at Japan affiliated companies in the UK than there are for Japan affiliated companies in Germany.

More Japanese employers in Germany but fewer employees than UK

This may be because the big employers – Japanese car manufacturers – do not have production in Germany – unlike the UK with Nissan, Honda and Toyota. There are plenty of Japanese automotive component manufacturers in Germany, but they tend to be what is known in German as “Mittelstand” or medium sized companies.

Manufacturing represents around 20% of German GDP, similar to Japan. Germany has of course always had a strong reputation for engineering and German cultural values such as risk aversion and process orientation fit well with Japanese corporate mindsets.

Japanese expats in UK mostly in regional HQ and services roles

By contrast, only 11% of the UK’s GDP is derived from manufacturing and 80% of UK GDP is services, particularly financial services such as banking and insurance. This sector accounts for quite a few of the Japanese companies who have multiple subsidiaries in the UK, as well as trading companies, holding companies and services companies providing financing and other functions across Europe.

This might explain why UK has more Japanese residents than Germany – presumably acting as liaison and coordinators with Japan HQ for the region – around 63,000 compared to 46,000 in Germany.  However, this number is falling for the UK, and increasing for Germany.

A drop in Japanese students and intra company transferees in UK since 2015

Does this mean that the UK is losing its role as the services centre for the region to Germany? Looking at the detail, it seems the main factor behind the drop in the number of Japanese in the UK is that there are 3,000 fewer Japanese students and academics in the UK compared to a year ago.**

Intra company transferees to the UK fell by 1% from 2015 to 2017 whereas there are now many hundreds more Japanese transferees living in Germany, the Netherlands and Eastern Europe than three years’ ago.

As Japanese manufacturing shifts eastwards in Europe, sales hubs are moving with them

Looking at the recent investments into the UK and Germany, the trends of the past few years still seem to hold. Investments into the UK are in the form of establishing regional holding companies, or M&A in biotech, information technology and services for the UK market such as car parking.   Investments into Germany are mainly for the wholesale of electronic components and machinery.  Sometimes these are German sales offices for Japanese companies who already have sales or manufacturing in the UK.  As manufacturing shifts eastward in Europe, so the sales hubs are moving with them.

Update for 2019-2020

The above article was written for the Teikoku Databank News in October of 2018.  Since then, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published further data on Japanese nationals resident in Europe and Japanese companies operating in Europe, but unfortunately without the level of detail that was available previously.

The chart below summarises the data available for the UK and Germany – showing the continuing long term trend of  an increase in Japanese companies and nationals in Germany, and a decline in Japanese companies and nationals in the UK.  Overall across Europe, the number of Japanese companies and nationals has increased in the past five or so years, but more in Eastern Europe recently.

 

This is reinforced by the data collected by Toyo Keizai of Japanese expatriates working for Japanese companies, which also shows that the increase in Japanese nationals in Germany is primarily in non-manufacturing, with a corresponding decline in Japanese nationals working in non-manufacturing in the UK.

 

 

*This is the number of individual incorporated companies in 2018 – if you include all branches, and multiple subsidiaries, the figure is 966 Japanese entities in the UK compared to 1,839 in Germany as of Oct 2018 MOFA report

** Based on later conversations with the British Council, this steep drop in Japanese students coming to the UK may well be to do with changes in visa categories that are being monitored rather than an actual decline – most Japanese students prefer to study abroad for less than a year.

The original version of this article can be found in  “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on  Amazon.

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Historical roots of cultural differences in pandemic prevention

My husband is currently tanshin funin, (a Japanese term meaning living alone away from family for work reasons) working in a boarding school just too far away to commute home every day. His apartment is in a building which used to be a sanatorium, for isolating people with tuberculosis, before WWII. Before a pharmaceutical cure was discovered, the thinking was that fresh air and sleeping outdoors was the way to cure tuberculosis. Unfortunately, this means there are huge, drafty windows and doors in the apartment, so it is freezing cold, even though there is central heating.

Although fresh air and sleeping outside does not actually cure tuberculosis, it transpires that having well ventilated rooms was a very effective way of preventing other people from catching tuberculosis.  Similarly, sleeping outside was not a cure, but staying horizontal helped relieve the symptoms.

Europe’s public plagues, cholera and typhoid

This story of how tuberculosis was treated in Europe and now the spread of coronavirus around the world highlights how cultural differences might be rooted in each country’s history of disease.  It also means there are still cultural barriers to selling healthcare products worldwide.

Medieval bubonic plagues in Europe were spread by fleas* and were controlled by quarantining households, cities and even regions. The cholera and typhoid epidemics in the 19th century were mainly caused by contaminated food and water, and controlled in industrialising northern European countries by improved public hygiene and sanitation for food and water supplies, and cured by the invention of antibiotics.

Japan’s household smallpox

Japan suffered more from smallpox epidemics – since at least the 8th century.  These mostly affected children.  Smallpox is transmitted by prolonged physical proximity, particularly skin to skin contact. So smallpox epidemics in Japan were mostly managed at the family or village level.

I wonder whether this history explains why Japanese people to this day do not shake hands or hug and kiss as much as the Europeans do. It could also explain why Japanese people are still in the habit of carrying a handkerchief around for drying their own hands, rather than blowing their noses into it, as Europeans do.

In the UK, to prevent being infected by the coronavirus, we have been told to wash our hands with soap, or use hand sanitizers if water and soap are not available, and to blow our noses, sneeze or cough into paper tissues and then dispose of them immediately. We’ve also been told to avoid handshaking, which we do less than Germans do anyway, and we never kissed and hugged as much as the Italians do.

As a consequence of government advice, British shops have run out of hand sanitizers, but apparently the incidence of other flu varieties (which can kill 1000s a year in the UK) has dropped dramatically. Maybe we British had become too reliant on state healthcare and intervention and are now learning we have to take the initiative ourselves and go back to old methods – just as my husband did. He has bought an old-fashioned hot water bottle to keep himself warm.  Old familiar ways provide comfort in times of crisis.

*Although there has been some interesting research suggesting the Black Death may not have been bubonic but an Ebola type virus

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Learning from lockdown: What entertainment at a distance taught me about teaching at a distance

I’ve often felt that what I do as a trainer was similar to a stand-up comedy routine. Not so much that I try to make people laugh (although I do) but that I use the same tricks of the trade as a stand-up comedian – a core idea running through, the seemingly irrelevant anecdote that ends up making a key point, the call back at the end that reassures me and the audience they’ve been paying attention.  I know I’ve had a good session if I’ve hit my marks – not in the literal meaning of standing in the right spot, but getting the rhythm and timings right, covering all the material, sensing the key messages have chimed with participants.

Watching some of my favourite entertainers cope with social distancing has been illuminating.  It has shed light on the dirty secrets of how far entertaining or teaching at a distance can replace getting together in germ filled rooms.

The five dirty secrets of education and entertainment

I knew, but had not articulated, these dirty secrets to myself. I have struggled for around 20 years to make online learning and knowledge sharing work, believing it to be the future, but at the same time I kept having misgivings.

One of my favourite stand-up comedians, Stewart Lee, toured a show a couple of years ago called Content Provider – the brutal digital term for entertainers and teachers. As Lee pointed out in that show, the main way entertainers make money these days is by going on tour delivering the content in person, not from digital or hard copy sales. TV can be a steady earner of course, but Lee was never mainstream enough to attract consistently big bucks.  He even supplements the revenue from tickets by buying up second-hand copies of his CDs and DVDs from charity shops and eBay and selling them in person at a profit in the auditorium after the show.

But, as he acknowledged in his most recent show, touring is exhausting, particularly as you get older. My fellow trainer in Germany in a recent Zoom call said she felt more relaxed than she had in some time, despite the lockdown, because she no longer had to travel so much for work. It’s not just the physical but also the mental exhaustion – you wonder if the same old shtick is going to cut it anymore.

So our training team is now discussing what the best way is to deliver our content, without so much travel, resilient to any social distancing, but still make money and stay fresh.  Which is why we need to confront the dirty secrets head on.

My recent career has been in providing training to adult learners, but I come from a globally extensive, long line of teachers of all age groups. From talking with them about their experiences, I’m pretty sure that most of these dirty secrets apply to children’s education too.

The good news is that there are plenty of technologies when teaching or entertaining online that we are being forced to adopt which are worth continuing with even after we can all be in the same room again. The future is going to be a blend of online and offline presence.

The biggest dirty secret is that it actually costs quite a lot in terms of effort, time and therefore money to create good learning and entertainment that works at a distance. And yet the expectation is that it should be cheaper.

Why distance costs so much is due to the other dirty secrets:

1. We feed off an audience

This is why teachers are struggling to respond to the current crisis. They know that just slapping up slides online with your notes, or teaching a normal lesson via a webcam and providing a recording of it will not create effective learning experiences.  But they don’t have the time to do much else.

The issue is not just participant engagement, but that bouncing off an audience is where teachers and entertainers get their energy from. You can spot when an audience is not engaged when you are in a room with them, and adjust accordingly.

When TV entertainers like John Oliver or Stephen Colbert initially tried to do their shows without live audiences, the result was very flat. You could see the desperation in their eyes.  It was easier for team chat shows that transmitted live like Channel 4’s The Last Leg. They had already made use of Twitter in real time pre-COVID-19 to get audience suggestions and jokes from beyond the studio, so they made even more use of this to spark off their own interactions in the studio.

Even non-live shows are finding ways to use online tools to engage with their audiences – Graham Norton’s Red Chair stories are now delivered by audience members from their own homes, via their webcams.  Many comedy chat shows have found that doing short interviews via webconferencing with celebrities, in their pyjamas, with pets, kids and other props, showing human frailties, can recreate at least some of the warmth and humour they crave.

For teachers and trainers the most obvious online tool to create engagement is polling. Polls can make sure people are paying attention, but also create a connection between participants and give the host a flavour of the needs and views of the audience. Webcams, Q&A and chat functions all help put the life back in to webinars – and yes, why not bring in props and pets too.

If you are creating learning that people consume in their own time, it still needs to be interactive – I’ve incorporated polls, quizzes and self-assessments into our online learning modules.

2. But they’re not that into you

If you haven’t got a live audience you can interact with, you need to keep it short, and break it up. Graham Norton’s TV chat show used to be 45 minutes long pre-Covid, but is now a tightly edited 30 minutes of a monologue, a brief interview, some music, funny clips and the Red Chair.

I view the online equivalent of our 3-hour classroom-based training course as being a 1.5 hour webinar – and I put a break in half way just as I would for a classroom based session. Similarly, our 6 hour, one day course can be delivered as two 1.5 hour webinars on separate occasions. The online modules can be taken in the meantime, allowing the second webinar to be more of a review and discussion.

It’s generally considered that 45 minutes is the maximum you can expect an adult to pay attention.  I’d assume it’s even less for children and for those of us who are used to consuming social media in short videos and 280 character chunks.

But schools do seem very wedded to the idea that a lesson should take 35 to 45 minutes and that it’s an important life skill that children stay still and quiet for this time. I really resented being called into school to be told off for the fact that my son refused to sit nicely on the story mat for half an hour aged 5 or that he’d yell out the answer to a question without waiting until the teacher called on him. My suggestions that it was unreasonable to expect children of that age to stay still without some kind of interactivity, and that they would be better off asking open ended rather than factual questions did not go down well.  But then I regularly got thrown out of my Japanese school aged 7 for talking in class. Japanese schools are even more one-way information teaching machines than British schools.  Ironically, my son’s school reports now complain that he’s too quiet.

So 10-20 minutes for an online “class” is surely more realistic than expecting children to sit through a teacher talking on a webcam on Microsoft Teams for 40 minutes.  This seems to be what my husband and his fellow teachers are now doing – everyone logs in, the teacher asks how they are and has a chat, explains the assignment and then lets everyone log out again and do the assignment in their own time. Getting them to hand the assignment in seems to be a whole other problem, however.

Realising that my audience is not that into me either, I recently re-edited all our online e-learning content so no video/screencast that I have narrated is more than 10 minutes where possible.  The most popular YouTube video I have narrated is “Japanese Business Mysteries explained in 5 minutes”, so I will be doing more of those in the future.

3. They are paying for the certificate, not for the love of knowledge

But that brings me to the third dirty secret. Not only are they not that into you, they’re not that into your content either. They’re either learning because it’s compulsory or to impress their employers.  If they’re school children or students, the main motivator is passing the exam.

This is where the analogy with entertainment ends, I suppose – we consume entertainment for insights, emotions and to know we are not alone.  There is no certificate for this but therefore there is a limit to how much a person will pay to be entertained, and they are always looking for ways to get their kicks for free. Which is why I sympathised when Stewart Lee confiscated a mobile phone from an audience member trying to film his routine at the last gig of his I went to.

Teachers at my son’s school have been dutifully setting further reading, challenging maths problems and suggesting resources to prepare for university for the year group affected by the cancellation of the UK national A level exams. Only work before March 18th will count towards the final grade, to ensure that children who are not able to access online learning are not penalised.

Despite the teachers’ efforts, I believe most engagement from that year group is through an app that one of them developed which automates logging in to Microsoft Teams – and occasionally they edit the message so it looks personal.

The only pure online training courses that sell are the ones that relate to compliance and are compulsory, or certify that you have acquired IT skills. This is the kind of knowledge acquisition that can be proved through online multiple-choice tests or online exercises. These courses generate a certificate for the learner and lots of lovely data on the company’s Learning Management System, to show what percentage of staff have taken the courses, passed the tests or said their work efficiency has improved, and then they can generate some kind of Return on Investment on training budgets to keep the CFO happy.

Individual learners are willing to pay for a certificate they can add to their CVs but otherwise expect content to be free.  Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have a very high dropout rate. Coursera, an online learning platform mainly for university courses, has a business model based on exactly this understanding of the learner mentality. The University of Tokyo course on Japanese art and literature I took was free but they send you guilt provoking emails if you don’t complete each module within a certain time. If you want a certificate of passing and completion which you can load onto your LinkedIn profile, you have to pay. And so, although I took the course for the love of acquiring knowledge – reader, I paid.

4. It’s the stupid technology, stupid

Coursera have done a great job of making the user interface as easy as possible. This is where some of the benefits of being online come in. So long as firewalls and bandwidth do not intervene, it should mean greater accessibility to knowledge for people all around the world. Coursera videos are no more than 10 minutes long, each with a short quiz at the end to make sure you were paying attention. As well as the slides and a video of the professor giving the lecture, there is a transcript with a cursor indicating where the professor has got to in the lecture underneath the video. So if you haven’t quite understood, or your attention wandered, you can check back, rewind and pass the test.

Non-native speakers of English have been far more enthusiastic about e-learning and webinars than native speakers, in my experience. They like the multiple ways to absorb the information – slides, transcripts, aurally and offline. Native English speakers can help during live webinars by summarising key points in the chat function.  The host also has far more control over shutting up domineering fluent speakers and making sure the shyer people are brought into the conversation – including through private chat if they’d rather not speak out publicly.

But – not everyone has the technology, bandwidth or budget to participate equally. Teachers at my husband’s well-funded private school have apparently broken down in tears from spending hours marking work online, only to see it disappear into the ether.

Maybe it’s their fault for not backing up, maybe the school has terrible connectivity, who knows. But it brings it home that things must be a hundred times worse for schools and homes where good technology and connectivity is just not affordable or people don’t have the technological knowhow to find solutions.

I realise this article may attract a lot of snark from specialists who have been studying interactive learning design for years, and know way more than I do about how to design learning paths and interfaces. In my defence, I did actually manage a team of people with that knowledge and AI programming skills, way back in the day.  Our aim was to get away from directed learning and move towards self-directed learning. That is still my goal.

I attended various learning technology conferences too – where all too often a seminar entitled “making xml work in a corporate learning environment” or some such would end in a spectacular technology fail and blue screens all round. So yes, properly designed learning experiences are available online, but we are still a long way from the user or the technology being smart enough.

5. Fear of eating ourselves

This is the deepest darkest dirty secret. We worry that if we do too good a job with online content and the technology does improve enough, we will no longer be needed. Teachers and entertainers want to be needed, even loved – and this is what we get paid for.  This is known in business as self-cannibalization – making a cheaper version of your product or service, which then kills your lifeline.

But we should not despair, there are reasons why eating yourself doesn’t work.

The social experience

If audiences can get the same experience from a CD, DVD or book, why do they continue to go to gigs, concerts, shows?  Partly it’s the social experience – the thrill of being in a crowd of people who are going through the same emotions. The closest I have seen during lockdown to recreating the social experience of a concert is TimsTwitterListeningParty – where Tim Burgess of the 1990s group The Charlatans sets an album for everyone to listen to and tweet about in real time – but the real joy is that the original artist also tweets about the making of the record or photos of the band, in synchronicity to each track being listened to.

It’s also for the social experience that people still want to attend classes, despite moaning about being away from their real work. Even if children say they hate school, they want to be with their friends – and it’s usually because of a bad experience of being with others, such as bullying, that makes them hate school the most, rather than the teaching.  And of course the teacher can do a lot to set the tone and clamp down on bullying.

Squirrel!

Preferring to be in a room with others in order to learn is also an acknowledgement that if you’re not trapped in a class, you are very likely going to get distracted.

Also, in the corporate world, I have found that even when I was on the receiving end of poor-quality training, just being away from the desk and having time to reflect had a value in its own right.

The best concerts, exhibitions or plays are where you feel fully immersed – “lost in another world.” It’s not so easy to do that at home where daily chores and worries intrude.

Applicability

A close second to being bullied as a reason for hating school is that it’s “boring and pointless”. In other words, children cannot see how what they are learning applies to their own life.

Many of the TV shows that have done well in the UK during lockdown are ones which allow us to live vicariously (and maybe thereby learn about) cultural experiences – Race around the World, The Repair Shop, or Grayson Perry’s Art Club

But not all teachers or subjects translate well to video, and learners still need to be able to interact with the teacher so that they can understand how to apply the knowledge to their individual situation. You can give individual attention and co-create online, but again numbers need to be limited to about the same as a classroom size, to allow proper 1:1 interaction.

Authenticity

The audience or learner wants authenticity – they can spot a mile off when a teacher or entertainer is phoning it in. This is why a lot of e-learning is so dry – actors voicing narratives about how to be a leader just do not resonate. The most popular YouTube videos are where the person is narrating in real time as they play a game. The first video that came up when I was searching for help on how to cut my son’s hair was a hairdresser in a barber shop cutting hair while explaining his technique.

We insist at Japan Intercultural Consulting that all our facilitators have authentic experience of working in Japanese organisations and also have lived in the counterpart culture. We also encourage our facilitators to tell stories from their own experiences during the training. Our participants need to feel that we have “been in your shoes”.  But the only way we can be sure this happens is to interact with participants, to understand their experiences.

Apprenticeship

Parents are struggling trying to do home schooling and work at the same time.  Schools were invented partly so people could go to work. Before universal education, only rich people could afford home tutoring, which then perpetuated the professional elite path of going to university to become a lawyer or clergyman.

The only way to work from home and teach your children at the same time if you are not rich enough to afford a home tutor is to teach them through the work you are doing. This was how craftsmen in the past educated their children – they were apprenticed to their parent or to another “master”.  The modern-day equivalent would be getting your children to alphabetize your files, or helping you design a spreadsheet for your sales data – or in my case, getting them to edit and add subtitles to my videos.

Japanese companies are still resistant to classroom-based learning and even more so to working remotely, particularly for soft skills. The reason for this is that most Japanese companies are family style in mentality – learning is done through apprenticeship and on the job learning.

Extreme cleaning

I admit I already loved Tidying up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, but it wasn’t just because it added to my Japanese cultural expertise – my obsession with TV decluttering shows stretches back to House Doctor in the 1990s and lockdown has impelled me to binge watch Call the Cleaners. There is something very cathartic and inspiring about watching other people confront their fears and phobias, purge and then move on with their lives, and this is what I needed to do with online learning.

Although we may have a sick feeling in our stomachs about the threat of technology, teachers and trainers will never have to eat themselves. So long as we are authentic and know what we are talking about, then we can help the learner apply the knowledge for themselves, and recreate experiences. We can set scientific experiments, maths problems and history essays to be done away from the classroom, in the knowledge that they need a teacher to guide them and check the result.

If, like now, we can only teach online, then rather than trying to dump a mass of information online or learn how to build an interactive module, we should focus on creating good offline assignments that guide the learner as they explore, apply their new knowledge and recreate experiences for themselves. But learner numbers will be limited if this is to be supervised and checked properly.  Ultimately, the cost per learner in terms of time and salaries is not going to be much cheaper than a classroom-based experience if the assignment is well framed and resources are properly curated.

A teacher or entertainer in a germ-infested room full of people is still the most cost effective and emotionally impactful way of transmitting knowledge, insight and experience. Our enforced isolation as teachers and entertainers should be a time to declutter, focus on what sparks joy and maybe add one or two new gadgets into the freed-up space.

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Farewell egalitarianism – Sony introduces salary gaps for graduate hires

A 25 year old Sony employee, with a postgraduate degree in mechanical engineering and skilled in multiple programming languages was promoted to job grade I3 within three months of starting at the company. This meant his salary was increased by Y50,000 (US$460) a month and he can also qualify for higher bonuses. This would not have been possible until at least two years had been completed at the company previously.

This new system was introduced by Sony this year, whereby ability and work effectiveness are assessed and a grade from I1 to I9 is assigned. Sony had already restructured its management level from 2015. 40% of all employees were in management grades, due to the egalitarian, seniority based promotion system, but many were “name only” managers.  The “name only” managers were all demoted to non-management grades.

The mura mentality

Sony  has to compete with GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) for top talent, so the old Japanese mura (village) mentality where everyone is a member of the village, and treated equally regardless of their work content and where they work, with lifetime employment and seniority based promotion was not sufficiently attractive.

Now those who wish to join Sony can choose from 70 possible entry routes – those joining from university can choose 3 from the 70.  It is not all controlled by HR as in the past – individual business executives are also involved in the recruitment process. They proceed straight to the job they have applied for, rather than go through a general training period.

But not firing

The Nikkei wonders how this will impact firing, not just hiring. With the Japanese mura system, the ability to dismiss employees is severely restricted. Sony has said it can demote or refuse to promote people, but it will not fire them. Keidanren, the Japanese employers’ association, says that while it is generally in favour of  HR systems becoming more focused on role content and performance, it thinks the Japanese approach of reassigning people to other jobs if they are not performing in their current role is still preferable.

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