Japan HR Leaders Discuss Leadership, Change and Engagement in the Japan Context

The Chapman Consulting Group today concluded a week of group meetings with Japan HR Leaders. We convened nine separate groups in this series, with between ten and twenty Japan HR Country Heads in attendance at each one. Thanks go to the Japan HR Leaders from each of the organisations that helped to co-host these group sessions: Linklaters, Syngenta, State Street, Nike, 3M, Fast Retailing, and Gap. Extra thanks must go to the Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo, who co-hosted an HR Leaders meeting in their historic Oak Room, and to Coca-Cola who offered the group of HR Leaders a very special extra tour of the Japan Coca-Cola R&D facility.

In a new venture for our Japan HR networking series, we collaborated in six of these Japan HR Leaders meetings with Dr. James Eyring, COO of Organisation Solutions. James led interactive presentations on the twin themes of successful change management and leadership, and in each case we found that the research conducted in other geographies around the world was also highly applicable to HR and business in the Japan context. The content of these meetings was very well received by the Japan HR community, and we hope to work together with Organisation Solutions on more tailor-made information for Japan HR Leaders in the future. For the remaining three meetings, the HR Leaders met to discuss performance and engagement in Japan, and inparticular how to increase employee loyalty even when harsh economic conditions are negatively affecting company performance.

Observations from all the groups in attendance included the following.

1. Employee Engagement

• Employee Engagement Surveys can work well in Japan just as in other markets, but there needs to be a strong track record of acting on them. If a company doesn’t communicate back to its employees about how it will act on the results of the survey, the process will very quickly lose its credibility.
• The process of acting upon Employment Engagement Surveys must therefore belong to the Business, and not the HR function. The HR function should only help to design and orchestrate the Survey, but it’s the business that needs to ‘own’ it and act upon it.
• The responsibility for Employee Engagement can often be given to top managers, but it can be more effective to give this to middle managers, who are closer to the general workforce. The companies that showed the best Employee Engagement were the ones where middle management felt true ownership of business decision and were able to effectively communicate the message down to the employee base.

2. Successful Change Management