Japanese Business Blog - Rudlin Consulting

Subtle factors that motivate workers differ in Japan and the West

Every time a Japanese company acquires a Western company, there is a concern about how the Japanese organization will deal with the “high risk, high reward” culture that is prevalent not only in the financial industry but across many Western business sectors.

Actually, Japanese multinationals have been dealing with this issue for some years, and the solution has usually been to pay the local market rate. It does, of course, result in some anomalies. Presidents of Japanese blue-chip companies are paid only around 10-20 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, whereas at Fortune 500 CEO can earn anywhere from 300-500 times a junior employee’s salary.

So it may turn out that the Japanese president is earning significantly less than the foreign directors reporting to him from the acquired company. Lower down the ranks, more junior Japanese find that when they are posted overseas, they are having to manage locally hired hotshots who are earning salaries and bonuses that add up to the equivalent of an extra zero on the end of a normal Japanese expat salary.

Many Japanese working for foreign banks and consultancies in Japan have also been making 10 times the average salary in Japan. Of course, Japanese on traditional salary packages can comfort themselves with the thought that they have more secure jobs, especially given what has been happening recently. But I think there is a danger in oversimplifying this risk/reward trade-off.

Knowing that you won’t be laid off when times get tough, or conversely that you are being paid handsomely, is not sufficient for most people, Japanese or Western, to feel completely fulfilled and motivated in their work. These factors may ensure people stay in their jobs but not that they perform those jobs to the best of their abilities.

High salaries and bonuses are in some ways proxies for the things that really motivate people to work. Being paid well should indicate that an employee is doing something that has had a major impact on the company. It should also reflect the employee’s authority and responsibility to make an impact. Getting quick raises should show that one’s career is advancing and that one’s skills and capabilities are developing.

These are all drivers of engagement – pride and motivation in work – for people working in Western companies. Surveys show that the drivers of engagement for Japanese people working in Japanese companies are subtly different. Career advancement opportunities and ability to make an impact are important, but so are other factors – immediate personal relationships, having input to department decisions, and having a manager who understands what motivates each employee and who has good relationships with them.

All people, regardless of nationality, want to feel recognized for making a positive difference in the world through their work. For many Japanese, the traditional way to do this has been through becoming a longtime respected member of a major company. For many Westerners, this route does not exist, so impact on society has to be more visibly rewarded through pay or status.

Japanese and Western companies need to avoid two extremes when trying to combine corporate cultures. Paying people well but not giving them the authority to make an impact and advance their careers will eventually lead Westerners to leave a company. Offering lifetime employment but without good, enduring personal relationships and mutual respect may mean that although Japanese employees stay, their morale is low.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.

This article appears in Pernille Rudlin’s latest book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

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Humour easily crosses cultures but be careful with sarcasm

A British client attended some customer satisfaction survey interviews I conducted recently with Japanese companies. Later, I asked her if there was anything she had found surprising about the meetings. It was her first trip to Japan and she did not speak any Japanese. Her response was that the Japanese customers laughed a lot more than she was expecting.

British people who are not very familiar with Japanese people tend to assume that Japanese are formal, polite and very serious. Anyone who has spent some time working with Japanese people or living in Japan will know that in fact it is completely wrong to assert that Japanese do not have a sense of humour. Actually, Japanese people sometimes mention to me that they wish British people would relax and lighten up a bit more, especially “after five.”

I wasn’t cracking jokes during the customer interviews, nor am I fluent enough in Japanese to be able to pull off Japanese ‘share’ humour – word play and puns. I would like to think the laughter wasn’t embarrassed laughter, either. I was also not being sarcastic, ironic or teasing. These are types of humour the British use frequently, even in formal business settings, and they can cause misunderstandings in cross cultural situations.

A British marketing director working for a Japanese car company told me of a disastrous board meeting he once attended. The Dutch and German directors were arguing, vehemently putting their points of view forward and aggressively disagreeing with each other. The Japanese managing director became increasingly uncomfortable with this atmosphere and intervened, saying, “Perhaps now you would like to hear my comments.” The British sales director responded, “Oh, we don’t want to hear your comments.” The Japanese managing director then walked out of the meeting, presumably to avoid losing face as he was close to losing his temper.

The marketing director ran after the managing director to impress upon him that “Mike was just joking.” The Japanese managing director replied, “I realise that, but it was not appropriate.” Clearly Mike was trying to lighten the atmosphere with a bit of sarcasm, but it went badly wrong.

Most British wince when I tell them this story. I explain that Japanese are perfectly capable of being sarcastic and tease each other regularly, even in the workplace. But humour does not translate well if it transgresses cultural values too aggressively, particularly in formal business settings. In this case, the Japanese need for harmony – and also respect for hierarchy – was threatened by Mike’s remark.

So what did I say that was so funny in my meetings with Japanese clients? To be honest, I don’t really know. I suspect it was more about being witty, showing that I had a sense of the absurd and being self deprecating – humour traits the British like to pride themselves on and which the Japanese also enjoy. It seems wit, absurdity and self deprecation cross cultures much more successfully than sarcasm, jokes or puns.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as a paperback and an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

Japanese companies giving Office Ladies another look

About 15 years ago I wrote an article proclaiming the death of the Japanese “office lady,” or OL. The company I was working at, along with many other Japanese companies at the time, had stopped hiring new graduates and placing them on the so-called administrative track. They abolished the OL uniform and encouraged existing OLs to cross over to a management track.

Future administrative needs would be filled by temporary contract workers. I was quite pleased about these developments, as the OL system offended my feminist sensibilities. The companies themselves had ended the system more for financial reasons. OLs were meant to join companies when they were around 20-22 and only stay at the company until their mid-20s, when it was expected they would leave to get married.

In the meantime, they cleaned desks, emptied bins, made tea for the team, answered phones and processed the team’s paperwork. By the mid-1990s, however, it became clear that more and more OLs were staying in the company into their late 30s and, due to the seniority-based pay scale, were being paid well over the odds for such basic administrative tasks.

A tough decade followed, especially for young university graduates trying to find a job and even more so for Japanese women who did not want to join a temp agency. Many joined foreign companies and some braved the management track of mainstream Japanese companies.

The years were also tough for the women who had been on the administrative track. They often ended up being paid less, as the quasi-management track they had been forced onto was not as seniority-based as the administrative track they had been on. Almost all of them were working harder than ever before, as they were now having to manage teams of temporary staff. They had to train a constant stream of new temps, check their work and take the rap for any mistakes the temps made.

I was initially surprised to hear that the administrative track is now being reintroduced at my former company. Apparently the mistakes being made by temps and the strain on the remaining ex-OLs (many of whom have since taken early retirement) are having a significant impact on the business.

On reflection, it should not have been a surprise. When I conducted a series of customer satisfaction survey interviews with Japanese companies last month, more often than not, the female administrative staff had also been invited to meet with me, and their mostly male managers were very careful to ask for their opinions and comments.

The customers I interviewed expected their criticisms of the administrative capabilities of the supplier company to be taken seriously. Administrative mistakes are not trivial in Japan. Not only are they seen as an indication that there may be problems elsewhere, but there is a view that a small slip can have major consequences.

I was being snobbish in viewing administrative tasks as demeaning, and declaring that it is sexist if women are assigned to such tasks. I doubt I am alone in this prejudice. Indeed, I wonder how many Western companies would invite their secretaries to participate in customer satisfaction survey meetings?

This is the seventeenth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the 25th August 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.

Processes and rules – the emphasis on ‘kata’

Japan is usually presented as a highly process-oriented society. One example of this is the emphasis given to kata, form or way of doing something in Japanese martial arts, over the actual result. Martial arts training consists of repeating the same action over and over again until a desired body position and movement is achieved and has become second nature to the practitioner.

I have bitter memories of the weekly kanji tests I used to fail when I went to Japanese elementary school. I thought the characters I wrote looked the way they were supposed to, but the teacher would mark them as incorrect; somehow she knew I had drawn the strokes in the wrong order. There is one, and only one, right way of doing things in many areas of Japanese society.

Maybe this is why a Japanese acquaintance said that when he alights at Heathrow Airport, he breathes a sigh of relief that he is now in a country where he can relax. He was replying to a comment I had made that when I reach Narita International Airport, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I am now in a country where everything works.

Many British working for Japanese companies, while recognizing the attention to detail and highly disciplined work ethic of their Japanese colleagues, also complain that Japanese are often less respecting of British rules and processes. When I ask for more details of the situations in which British rules or processes are bypassed, it usually turns out that a customer or someone else inside the company has asked for an exception to be made. Deadlines that were supposedly set in stone suddenly become flexible.

As the customer is not just king in Japan but “god,” it is easy to understand why rules are easily broken for customers, but the exceptions made for colleagues are less excusable in the eyes of many British people. The British sense of fairness kicks in, and any attempt to ignore rules governing the treatment of people is seen as unfair or evidence of favoritism.

British people regularly flaunt work-related rules or crash processes, however – whether it be in customer service or on the factory floor – if they think the result is the same, or, less admirably, if it makes life easier and they can get away with it. They do not unquestioningly obey rules and processes the way Japanese workers are taught to.

One British manager with Japanese subordinates told me how delighted he was with his Japanese team. “You tell them, just once, about a process that needs to be done each day and they will do it, exactly how you told them, without fail,” he said. “There’s no need to check up on them all the time. In fact, I even forgot to tell them not to do it any more when it was no longer necessary and, of course, discovered they were still doing it months later.”

With his British team members, he not only has to regularly check that processes are being implemented but must ensure that the way he checks, and any ensuing discipline or reward dished out, is seen as transparent and fair.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as a paperback and e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

Giving a presentation in Japan? Think about sending it in advance

In previous articles in this series I have given a couple of tips regarding making presentations and proposals to Japanese customers or colleagues. One was on the usefulness of “visualisation” – trying to capture what you are saying in graphics. The other point I made was that presenting or pitching proposals in a Japanese context is like a maths exam – you have to show your working out, not just the conclusion, to get full marks.

The third piece of advice I have about presentations and pitches, especially if you are going to do them in English, is to send the documents in advance. You may think this detracts from the appeal of a presentation, but if your audience includes people who are not comfortable with English, prefer group based decision making and don’t like taking risks, then you are likely to be greeted by deafening silence when you ask for their go-ahead or if there are any questions. I’m not saying all Japanese corporate people fit this description but I have heard enough stories to suggest that it is worth making the effort to send your presentation ahead, if you can.

It may also be a good idea to send more than the slides. One group of British research scientists told me how when they first had a joint meeting with their Japanese counterparts, they presented their results using all the slideware tricks to make it as stimulating as possible. But when they asked for questions, their Japanese colleagues simply sat there – nodding, but silent.

The next time they met, the British scientists sent their Japanese colleagues not just the slides but also all the data, two weeks in advance. This time, when they asked for questions, everybody’s hand shot up. The Japanese scientists had not only been able to translate any of the English they did not understand, but probably also crunched the data themselves and, I suspect, had a discussion, maybe even allocating questions to each other.

I told this story to a rueful European marketing director of a Japanese electronics company the other day. He had told me that on his appointment, he was invited to Japan to meet with the President of the company. Being a marketing director he of course put together a slide presentation on his strategy for Europe. When he arrived at the Tokyo headquarters for his meeting, he was asked to wait, as the President was with a customer. Finally, 45 minutes late, he went in to see the President. The President apologized profusely for keeping him waiting and then said unfortunately another customer was coming in 15 minutes. “We ended up drinking tea and talking about the weather and I never showed my presentation” the marketing director told me. If he had sent the presentation in advance, it probably would have been picked up by the President’s executive assistant, who would have translated it, summarised it and even suggested questions for the President to ask. At least then they could have talked about more than the weather.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

Business presentations should be thought of like maths exams

Westerners who have sat through a presentation by a Japanese businessperson usually complain afterwards that it lacked punch and a logical progression, and seem to have had too many slides, crammed full of data and graphics, with a jumble of font sizes, typefaces and colours. More often than not, due to a discomfort with public speaking, especially in English, the Japanese presenter has had his head stuck in the script the whole way through or read out the bullet points on the slides, word for word.

This public speaking style is partly explained by the difference in Japanese and Western education. Whereas Western schools give plenty of opportunities for practising public speaking – drama classes, school plays, public speaking competitions and class debates – most Japanese schools are still focused on the teacher disseminating information, rather than classroom discussions. And, of course, English teaching in Japanese schools is still far more centred on written rather than spoken English.

Slideware took a long time to take off in Japanese corporations, but if you look at the shelves of business books in Japanese bookstores now, you can see that self help books on mastering slide presentations have become increasingly popular.

While I see more and more Japanese who know how to present in a way that appeals to Westerners, I sense that there is still a fundamental difference between Japan and Europe or North America in what a presentation is supposed to be about.

Last year, I was involved in helping German and Japanese senior managers make pitches to their board directors. The German managers were happy with our standard Western approach. We cut out some of the slide content, tried to get a clear line of logic and then rehearsed the presentation until it was slick and within the time limit. The Japanese managers looked increasingly unhappy, however. I thought it was just because of the stress of having to learn their lines in English, but they said they felt there was a fundamental cultural difference. “Our German team mates seem to believe presentations are all about style”, they said, “whereas for us, it is about showing our effort (doryoku). We need to explain the process of our thinking”.

This could be a difference in what constitutes “logic”. In the West we are told that when making a presentation or writing an essay you should “say what you are going to say, say it, then tell them what you just said”.

The Japanese philosophical model, ki-sho-ten-ketsu (introduction, follow-up,turn/change conclusion), may look similar, but the emphasis is on giving the context and often leaving the audience to figure out the conclusion. So, when presenting to Japanese customers, although I am not saying you should bore them into submission, you may need to give more details on the context and history, before reaching your conclusion. Rather like a maths exam, you have to show the working out, not just the answer, to get full points.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

Establishing credentials with Japanese business people

My company recently applied to join another of the Japanese Chambers of Commerce in Europe. As we are not a Japan-owned company, this is still quite an unusual thing to do.

Sure enough, a few days after submitting the application, I received a phone call from the head of the chamber, with lots of questions (in Japanese) about why we wanted to join, what our company did, were we OK with everything being done in Japanese, and so on.

All these questions were fair enough, but I knew what he was really trying to do -establish whether or not we were “appropriate” as members. Could we be trusted to behave according to the norms of the organisation? So, as soon as I could, I mentioned that we were already members of several other Japanese chambers of commerce in Europe. “Ah,” he said, audibly brightening, “do you know Mr Tanaka [head of one of the other chambers] then?” “Oh yes,” I said “and actually I also worked for nine years at the same Japanese company that he used to work for”.

Again, the relief was palpable. Not only could he now ring Mr Tanaka to check us out, but he was reassured that I had worked at a blue-chip Japanese company, so would almost certainly be well aware of how to behave in a Japanese corporate context.

It reminded me of the time when I first moved to Tokyo, and had to furnish my apartment. I went to a major furniture store, famous for its generous store card. As I approached the store card application desk with the list of items I needed, I could see a nervous look and beads of sweat appearing on the assistant’s face, as he realised he would have to deal with a foreigner.

He calmed down slightly when he realised I could at least speak Japanese. But then looked worried as he produced the application form – would I be able to read and write Japanese too? I assured him I would do my best. I then took out my business card, so I could copy the work address onto the form. The assistant suddenly leant forward as he caught sight of the well known corporate logo on my card.

“Can I call your team leader at the company, to confirm your salary details?” he asked. He scuttled off into a back office, and returned a few minutes later, beaming. “You can have a better fridge than that! And why not have two televisions?” He couldn’t have been more helpful.

So, whenever you sense a doubt or worry in a Japanese business person you are meeting for the first time, do not hesitate to introduce your credentials. This could be something to do with your company (well known name, long history, past clients) or you (education, Japan experience, past employers) or a mutual acquaintance – anything that establishes you as a trustworthy potential member of the “in-group”.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

Visualisation – I see what you mean

We’re just starting the process of selling our home and looking for a new house here in the UK, and I have been struck by how showing layouts of a house and listing its total floor space is still a relatively new trend in Britain. In Japan it would be unthinkable to give particulars of a house or flat without also providing a floor plan and an estimate of how many square meters or jo, number of tatami mats, the floor space is.

I don’t think this is just because land space is so precious in Japan. I think it is related to a general Japanese preference for visualisation over text. It’s well known that Toyota Motor Corp., for example, promotes problem visualisation in its factories. In other words, don’t just have an alarm that sounds or a printout that indicates a problem; make sure there is some visual control or graphic display of the problem.

Toyota also has a policy of using A3-size paper for its reports on problem solving or proposals, which have a visual storyline of interlinked boxes, that relieve people from having to read densely typed 20-page memos.

Visualisaton isn’t about oversimplifying problems; it is about condensing a problem and often conveying quite a lot of information or logic without spelling it all out in words. I think the ability to convey rich detail in a graphic form originates from the use of kanji, the Chinese ideograms that are sometimes obviously derived from the thing they are meant to represent – trees, mountains, rivers – or can be broken down into components which represent concepts from which a meaning can be deduced. For example “speech” plus “true” = “evidence”.

The preference for visualisation can lead to cross-cultural communication snafus. Japanese PowerPoint presentations have a tendency to be so densely packed with graphics full of tiny text that squinting Westerners start to yearn for white spaces and a maximum of five bullet points per slide. If you add an allergy to long paragraphs of English to a preference for visuals, it’s no wonder many lengthy English reports and emails are left unread by Japanese recipients.

It’s not just written communication where problems occur. Whilst Americans and the British may be happy to yak away in a teleconference, the chances are that Japanese person lost the thread way back, and is wondering what the canteen lunch special is.

So what to do? Obviously, when presenting an idea or showing a problem to Japanese people, try to use visuals – bar charts, pie charts and so on. Even trying to sketch your idea on a piece of paper or a whiteboard as you talk can be of help. I have heard that teleconferences that have a web based visual component – slides or a spreadsheet that can be pointed at – work much better when there are Japanese participants than pure voice or visuals of ‘talking heads’.

So, the next time you need to make a proposal to a Japanese person, see if you can draw it first.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

Bow, shake hands or poke someone in the eye?

When this month’s shinnenkai (New Year’s parties) started, I found I had to snap back into remembering to bow properly, whilst negotiating my wine and canapés, as I exchanged akemashite omedetou with Japanese business acquaintances. It felt awkward at first but thanks to my time in a Japanese school, where we bowed every morning to the teacher, and had twice weekly outdoor assemblies where we rehearsed standing at ease, then standing to attention, then bowing – the proper way to bow is somewhat instinctive for me.

Non-Japanese bowing will almost certainly get it wrong

For most non-Japanese people, bowing correctly is a challenge, and in my opinion, we worry too much about it. Most Japanese people, when meeting with a foreign person, will expect to shake hands. I usually advise that a slight nod of the head or bend at the waist is a good cultural compromise when shaking hands with a Japanese person. If you have not been brought up to bow, and also had it drilled into you again at an induction course in a Japanese company, when you do try to do a full bow, you will almost certainly get it wrong. Bowing too deeply or for too long a time will result in your Japanese counterpart feeling obliged to dip down again for a further round of needless bowing.

No bowing zones?!

You often see this happening in public in Japan, where neither party wants to stop bowing first, in order to show respect. In the mid-1990s, an English-language magazine targeting Tokyo’s expat community extrapolated on this phenomenon by publishing an April Fool’s article saying authorities were going to set up “no bowing” zones, near revolving doors and on station platforms as excessive bowing was causing a safety hazard. Plenty of people believed the article.

I do know of one case where bowing actually did lead to physical injury. A British employee of a Japanese company in Europe related the story to me: “Our new Japanese Managing Director for Europe was going round all the departments to introduce himself and as he turned to me I put out my hand to shake hands. He, however, had started to bow down low, and I caught him right in the eye. Fortunately it turned out he has a good sense of humour, and whenever I see him in the corridor now, he covers his eye with his hand!”

Bowing is deeply engrained in the Japanese psyche

Bowing is deeply engrained in the Japanese psyche, it would seem. One Japanese friend of mine, who has been living in the UK for 30 years, still bows whenever he meets a Japanese person, even in the streets of London. I asked another Japanese friend of mine, who has also been living for many years in London, if she would ever consider hugging her mother when she came to meet her at Narita airport each time she returns to Japan. “Ewww no!” she said, and then laughed, realising how years of kissing, hugging and shaking hands in the UK had made no impact on her instincts at all.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

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Attitudes to time

Whenever I run training sessions for mixed groups of Japanese and European managers, it is always fun to observe the nationalities of the participants who arrive first and of the people who arrive last. In a seminar last week, the Norwegian participant was precisely five minutes early. The last to arrive (more than an hour late) was a Frenchman, originally from the south of France. In Europe, it is reliably the case that the further south you travel, the more people have a ‘flexible’ view of time.

When I later picked up on this with the Norwegian participant, he looked worried for an instant and said “I was only five minutes early”. This attitude strikes me as very similar to the Japanese approach, which is to be early for appointments, but only by five minutes. Any earlier than that would inconvenience the other person. I have been in coffee shops in Japan, near clients’ offices, and realised that other salespeople, like me, who had arrived too early, were killing time with a quick cup of coffee. I realised this because at about ten minutes to the hour, we would all rush to the till to pay and go.

This behaviour seems to be in direct contradiction to Japanese schedule-keeping patterns when it comes to internal meetings, however. Unless there is a senior executive at one of these meetings, Japanese employees are frequently late. This also holds true, regrettably for me, for training sessions. If there is a senior person is coming, the five minute rule applies. I have even seen junior employees peer through the window, see that a senior person has already arrived, and run away rather than be late.

It would seem that when the meeting is of peers and is ‘in-group’, Japanese people revert to a more relaxed view of time. Not only are they frequently late, but they will answer e-mails via their laptops in the meeting, keep their mobile phones switched on to take calls and be hauled out of the meeting to talk to someone else, sometimes not returning for half an hour or more.

My explanation of this is that when it is an internal meeting, a Japanese worker does not feel the meeting excludes or has priority over all the other relationships that he or she is having to attend to at the time.

While this kind of behaviour drives North Europeans crazy, I also had a Japanese expatriate manager complain to me about the behaviour of a German purchasing manager he went to visit. Apparently the German left his mobile phone on, without even muting the ringtone, all the way through the meeting. Every time the phone rang, the German purchasing manager would look at who was calling, then put the phone back down and let it ring until it switched to voice mail.

I have talked to various Europeans, including Germans, about this, and have come to the conclusion that, for once, there is no national cultural tendency behind this behaviour, it is merely a customer playing status and power games with a supplier!

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”