HUMAN RELATIONS AT SONY In his biography, Made in Japan, Morita says: The most important mission for a Japanese manager is to develop a healthy relationship with his employees, to create a family-like feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate. Those companies that are most successful in Japan are those that have managed to create a shared sense of fate among all employees, what Americans call labor management. When Morita was chairman of Sony, he stressed to new employees that each employee had to seek happiness in his or her work and to decide personally whether to spend the rest of his or her working life at Sony. At Sony, there are few noticeable differences between management and labor. Although management writers sometimes paint a too-rosy picture of Japanese management-labor relations, Sony's management philosophy is that employees should be treated as colleagues and helpers, not merely as means to profits. Investors are important, Morita acknowledges, but they establish only a temporary relationship with the company. Employees are more important because they are a permanent part of the company, just as much as top management. In return for showing loyalty to employees, Morita expected loyalty from his employees, But he urged them not only to use their best efforts on the company's behalf but also to question management views. Ironically, Morita's emphasis on loyalty was partly inspired by his experience with American managers and employees. In its early days, Sony hired many employees in the United States in an effort to keep pace with the remarkable demand for its products. Morita was stunned by an American colleague's blunt advice about a problem employee: "Fire him." Morita was equally surprised when an American employee walked into his office one day and announced he was quitting to take a job with a competitor; who had offered him double his salary. Under Morita, the whole process of recruiting, selecting. training, and appraising employees was built on the premise that employees are the most valuable part of the company. Granted, Morita's policies—especially the idea of lifetime job security are some of the typical characteristics of Japanese companies which differentiated them from others. PEOPLE AS RESOURCES Sony has long been a leader in human resources Management in Japan. The company has adopted such American concepts as the five-day, 40-hour work week, even though Japanese law still sanctions a maximum of 48 hours, and the average in Japanese manufacturing remains 43 hours per week. Moreover, Sony was one of the first Japanese firms to close its factories for one week every summer to allow all its employees to be off work at the same time. In addition, the Japanese system enforces a different view of recruits. Morita urges managers to see recruits as rough stones and the managerial job as the task of building a strong and sturdy wall out of these rough stones. The Japanese ideal is to shape and smooth managerial recruits so that they become a cohesive part of the company. Japanese companies, at least the large ones, also have a humane attitude toward dealing with employees. In declining industries, most companies offer retraining and most workers eagerly accept it. At Sony; workers are retrained when their particular jobs become obsolete. Clearly, Akio Monta's motivational policies accommodate Sony's overall strategy. By focusing on the shared fate of management and employees, Sony develops among its workers a sense of commitment towards the attainment of the overall goals of the firm. Partly because of this employee commitment, Sony has been able to stay competitive in terms of wages and benefits and to motivate highly competent people to continue to innovate. By focusing on people as resources rather than as costs, companies like Sony are writing the book on future management theory and practice. On-Site for Dining For the Sony Family Sometimes human resource management can involve something as seemingly unrelated as providing an on-site corporate dining facility. As more and more companies consolidate their urban offices into single, low-rent, sub-urban developments, the benefits of on-site dining are becoming increasingly apparent. At Sony, on-site dining perceive as more than merely a pleasant eating experience. “When employees eat in, they tend to exchange work ideas,” explained Sony’s Gordon Casanova, director of facilities management, corporate services. “They continue the workday on a different level.” On-site dining has allowed Sony to confine lunch breaks to 45 minutes, since it eliminates the need for commuting lunch. Moreover, added Casanova, On-site dining sharply curtails lunch hour abuses.” In addition, on-site dining brings employees together in a more relaxed setting, outside the work environment so that they can have the opportunity to bond socially. This, in turn, can ease work relationships and enhance productivity. Also, the on-site dining encourages intra-company networking by bringing together people of different positions from different departments. Such networking can ultimately facilitate internal communication by giving people faces to attach to the names with whom they work. At Sony, on-site dining also helps to break down barriers between management and staff. “I have always made it a point to know our employees, to visit every facility of our company, and to try to meet and know every single employee,” said Morita. “This became more and more difficult as we grew, and it is impossible to really know the more than forty thousand people who work for us today, but I try. I encourage all of our managers to know everybody and not to sit behind a desk in the office all day.” The dining facility thus helps to strengthen work-related relationships. According to Morita, a company is a sort of family. When he was CEO, he considered socializing with employees an integral part of his day. “It was not just part of my job, I like those people. They are family...” By providing in-house dining, Sony was able to increase employee productivity and morale and promote its family oriented culture. “We have a policy that here we are in the world we deal with our employees as members of the Sony family, as valued colleagues,” explained Morita. “We brought management people, including engineers, to Tokyo and let them work with us and trained them and treated them just like members of our family, all of whom wear the same jackets and eat in our oneclass cafeteria. This way they got to understand that people should not be treated differently…We urged the management staff to sit down with their office people and share the facilities.” For Morita, it is not human resource management; it is respect for one’s family. Indeed, Morita's ideas are the basis for what management writer Tom Peters proposes as a new, more realistic pact between employer and employee: Employees will commit themselves to doing their best to help the company meet its goals, and in return, the company will give employees an opportunity to develop and hone their skills. Of course, they are free to leave and sell these skills to another employer but ideally, the opportunity to keep learning and to do good work will keep them with the company and-increase both their loyalty and their productivity.
