In Flanders a lot of attention is given to the Swedish way of working and living. Regularly you hear the press or politicians refer to as the Swedish dream, the Swedish “utopy” for our society and our companies.
As I work(ed) for approx. 20 years in Swedish companies (mainly Atlas Copco) and as during these years, I frequently visited Sweden, these articles always draw my attention… Do I understand the adoration?
During my years working in Atlas Copco, I learned a lot of working with and in international teams. At a certain moment, our team consisted out of more than 10 different nationalities, spread over more than 5 different locations. People from Belgium, Spain, France, Sweden, Czech, Bosnian… over Chinese and Indians. Most people not located in Sweden. What always impressed me is the respect and interest each of these different people showed to each other. When we met, people immediately felt home and empowered to express their own opinions. Definitely an important company value, an important people value. But typically Swedish? I don’t think so.
Since I am working as a freelancer, I had the opportunity to work for more than a year in the Japanese company culture.
Reading the media, the difference can’t be bigger: people vs processes, Asking ChatGPT, all media opinions got confirmed (For the interested readers, I added the complete ChatGPT article at the bottom of my blog article 😊):
Working at Toyota Motor Europe in an international team for more than a year, all prejudices off the table. No micro management, tons of freedom and responsibilities, pretty open and direct communication… But of course, still so many differences:
Decisions made in meetings were afterwards respected and accepted by all, independent of the level of the made decision
So what do I mean?
Is the Japanese company culture superior to the Swedish? No, not at all. Of course the Swedish culture is strong and valuable, but so as well the Japanese, and several others. We can learn from each, from the good and bad sides.
For me important is to stay critical and listen to your own opinion, don’t go out with blinders. Be critical to what you read and never forget to build your own opinion. There is always a better way as they say in Sweden, or Kaizen in Japan (change for the better).
Looking forward to experience more different company styles and cultures, as at the end, it’s all about the people 😊.
ChatGPT article about the Swedish and Japanese company culture
When it comes to company culture, every country has its own unique approach. Sweden and Japan are two countries that have vastly different cultural norms and values, and this is reflected in the way their companies operate. In this article, we will explore some of the key differences between Swedish and Japanese company culture.
1. Communication
One of the most noticeable differences between Swedish and Japanese company culture is the way they communicate. Swedes are known for their direct and open communication style, which is built on the principle of equality. Employees are encouraged to express their opinions freely, and there is a flat hierarchy where everyone is on equal footing. On the other hand, the Japanese tend to be more indirect in their communication style. They value politeness and formality, and employees are expected to show respect to their superiors at all times.
2. Decision-making
Swedish companies tend to have a more democratic approach to decision-making, where employees are involved in the process and decisions are made through consensus. In contrast, Japanese companies have a more hierarchical approach, where decisions are made by the senior management, and lower-level employees are expected to follow instructions without questioning them.
3. Work-life balance
Swedish companies place a high value on work-life balance, and it is not uncommon for employees to leave the office at a reasonable time to spend time with their families or pursue their hobbies. This is reflected in the country's labor laws, which guarantee a minimum of five weeks' vacation time for all employees. In Japan, however, the work culture is notorious for being intense and demanding. Long working hours and unpaid overtime are common, and many employees feel pressured to put work ahead of their personal lives.
4. Company loyalty
In Sweden, company loyalty is not as highly valued as it is in Japan. Employees are encouraged to develop their skills and experiences, and it is common for people to switch jobs every few years in order to gain new perspectives and challenge themselves. In Japan, on the other hand, there is a strong culture of lifetime employment, where employees are expected to stay with the same company for their entire career.
5. Management style
Swedish managers tend to adopt a more hands-off management style, where employees are trusted to work independently and take ownership of their tasks. In contrast, Japanese managers are more likely to micromanage their employees and provide detailed instructions on how to complete tasks. This reflects the cultural value of teamwork in Japan, where everyone is expected to work together and contribute to the overall success of the company.
In conclusion, there are many differences between Swedish and Japanese company culture, from communication style and decision-making to work-life balance and management style. Understanding these cultural differences is essential for companies looking to do business in either country, and it can help to build strong relationships with local employees and customers.
At the end of last year, I was asked to present on an online digital conference for several digital leaders in Belgium. The idea behind the presentation was to guide the participants via discussions into sharing experiences and best practices.
Before going into more details, even though I prefer to present in real life, these kind of presentations make my day, my week and probably even more. Despite the fact that my previous employer also offered me nice opportunities to present on conferences, I see it as one of the advantages of my newly freelancer profile to accept opportunities like this. The more the better 😉. But now, back to the topic of the blog…
Point of departure for the presentation were the key stages, resources and people required for digital transformation to succeed.
During the discussions it was again confirmed that despite each of our digital journeys is completely different, we all struggle with similar concerns and that we all have similar challenges. Not surprising, some of them are linked to funding!
Apparently each of us struggles with getting the funding for the digital initiatives, budget approval (Run, Grow, Transform). Despite the fact that your digital goals and objectives are focusing on customer experience, most companies still have the same approach as for the commodity programs and focus too much cost controlling / cost reduction.
This results in time consuming budget approvals, long discussions to even get the running part of the budget approved. Towards the transformation part of the budget, each year the digital teams have to extensively motivate the budgets for extra innovations as most companies believe that the cost for innovations stops after phase 1.
Of course, also the digital team needs to be cost conscious, and the requested budgets needs to be SMART. But some aspects should not have to be explained and defended every year all over again:
Second major challenge for digital teams is how to prove your ROI. How prove that all these “millions” really bring the extra revenues for your companies. The reason is simple and predictable: it’s complicated. It asked some creativity and flexibility to demonstrate your ROI as the benefits of your digital strategy cannot be simply deducted from your company performance.
Some suggestions:
During the meeting another interesting topic popped up: Speed over perfection.
Sacrifice code quality to deliver faster, the idea looks great. Only develop the important or critical functionality, of course! Stop working on your code when it is “good”, we can always make it better later. Doesn’t this look perfect?
During the discussions, but also based on my personal experience, the reality is a lot less interesting…
So, drop the idea of Speed over perfection? Maybe not, but be aware of the consequences on the long run. Do it to deliver faster, but accept that your actually delaying crucial work to a later phase. Don’t due it to deliver at lower cost, as then you will be pretty disappointed after all.
You want to know what other topics were discussed? Contact me for more information!
Happy to make my first podcast ever. Big thanks to Steven Hofmans for this great opportunity!
Marketing technology rollouts – especially when they involve multinational companies – are not always easy. You can choose the right technology for your organization and implement it in the right way, but if you don’t have your people on board, failure is an option.
In this episode of Reimagine Marketing, Steven Hofmans welcomes Geert Moens, former global digital program manager at Atlas Copco. Geert started in 1998 at Atlas Copco in the marketing department, gaining extensive experience as a program manager in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Steven and Geert discuss the importance of trust – and people – in global technology rollouts.
This podcast covers:
Link to the podcast
https://reimagine-marketing.transistor.fm/episodes
Also available on Spotify
The last weeks, several people asked my opinion about nearshoring for all kind of digital initiatives. Do I have experience? How do I feel about it? Is it a good idea? What to focus on?
An interesting topic and it has been on and off my professional agenda for the last few years. Definitely when I extend the question to a more wide focus: is it possible to work on an efficient way over multiple locations, and does it make sense to build up specialisations (competence centres) on one of your locations… Does a remote team works?
IT CAN WORK, but unfortunately there are much more pitfalls than people usually admit. And the pitfalls can be more difficult to handle than with a local team.
Let me first start with defining what I mean with “it can work”: a digital team has to be evaluated on the overall team results, being capable of tackling the current and future challenges, but as digital resources are rare and valuable, the happiness of the different team members (within the team, but also within their personal career ambitions) is probably even more crucial… Any digital team I know combines internal resources with a whole group of external resources. Reasons are simple: access to flexible resources and rare competencies for a reasonable cost.
During these past years, in the organisation I worked for, but also at the organisations of suppliers, there is a continuous pressure to find solutions for new and existing issues: resources, cost, quality… Wherever the team is build up, one of the 3 issues always pops up. Here in Belgium we all know that it can be cheaper somewhere else and that it is difficult to keep resources motivated for the less creative aspects of the digital teams workload. Result of this struggle, we go with the hypes to offshore, nearshore: India, Czech Republic, Spain, Morocco, Hungary … always with the argumentation: this time we know the pitfalls, this time we will do it better and it will be a great success.
And yes, on several locations we indeed see better results on all aspects, unfortunately these results are hardly ever really lasting. After the drop due to the handover, we see a steep increase in the delivered quality and the sky is the limit. Gradually you see on these remote locations the same problems appearing: cost of the resources is increasing as the local market pops up (or do you really think you were the only team that choose this location?), local resources looking for new career opportunities resulting in an increasing turnover, delays in new recruitments, increasing costs...
A team without stability immediately sees the quality dropping. Of course actions are taken to overcome these serious issues: more communication and interaction, closer follow up, increase awareness of each other’s culture and way of working, representation in each other’s location…
Gradually the initial motivators for the relocation are disappearing… definitely the local cost advantage is becoming smaller and smaller. What results most often in the most simple solution, but probably far from the best: switching to the new hype location. To see in a few years the same pattern reappearing.
So how to break this circle?
First question: do you want to break this circle? For service providers the focus on cost can be so demanding that they actually have not really a choice. Taking no action to keep the lower cost will push them out at customer side, replaced by a competitor with similar solutions but a more sunny selling story. Moving to a new location, shows dedication, shows your adaptation skills, shows you listen to your customer 😊.
To really break the circle, go back to your key drivers: is cost really more important than quality and finding the best resources? If cost is not your real main driver, do what you would do for any local team, and more!!!!
No rocket science, I agree, but I experienced that it is soo difficult to act accordingly in case of problems! But if you dare, the gratitude will be yours. People will do that extra mile for you, respect will be both ways. The remote teams will build up, and keep their knowledge and you will see increasing customer satisfaction for the delivered services!!!
Reading through the lines of this article, you can feel that whatever remote approach you chose, I still am in favour of no remote approach at all.
How good you are as a manager, how much you focus on the right communication and sharing, how much you focus on bringing your team together, you can never coach and manage each individual team member remotely as good as by having frequent personal contact. No one will question that managing bad performers in a team is difficult, for the manager, but also for the team member to overcome this negative experience. In a remote team, the complexity increases further exponentially.
Several of us will believe that for well performing, or even over performing team members the location of the manager isn’t that crucial. Your team member will do a great job and managing can be done efficiently. And yes, they will do good or even excellent. But still, as a manager you will miss important signals that could influence the team members happiness and future career: experiencing the focus, experiencing the tone of the conversations, experiencing the energy level at the start and at the end of the day… Working at the same location will give this extra %’s towards the overall team members performance.
Conclusion:
Changing your life and career during a pandemic, a big step, a scary step. The news that Atlas Copco and myself agreed to stop working together hit like a bomb in my network.
Lots of reactions from friends and close contacts. Some of them worried, some of them full of hope.
My closest contacts realised this was the small step I needed the get out of my warm and golden comfort zone. Ready for some new challenge.
But still, why now?
The first months were a roller coaster, finally some time for myself after working 25 years, time to rethink where my career should go to, time to reflect on what gave me energy, on what drives my motivation, time for a new work / life balance.
Networking (as good as it can), following some outplacement and coaching tracks, following some professional and personal training.
Reading some professional books, from purely motivational books (Think and grow rich), upto specialised books (scaling agile in organisaties), watching TedTalks, ...
Preparing myself for the upcoming 20 years. The sky was / is the limit.
Slowly a new career path evolved, the path of becoming a freelancer. But hey, only for projects that fit in my long term ambitions, which feel right.
Lots of challenges... How to mix my experience with flexibility, creativity & social aspects? How to stay on top of the commercial opportunities? How to find the right projects without networking in real life, without meeting persons in real life? How to find projects in times that the whole market is shrinking? Is the digital world really still expanding? How will I deal with the uncertainties of the freelance world?
3 months after closing the doors at Atlas Copco for the last time as employee, still early to judge, but a lot has happened: burried in the huge workload of my start up, the first orders I declined, the first projects, the first coalitions in preparations.
Learned a lot, as a person, as a friend, as a professional. Extremely grateful for my network! More than ever convinced that I made the right choices...
Afterwards as a CRM consultant, building CRM solutions to follow all customer data from sales and support. Main objective: get more customer friendly processes as a more customer friendly approach will result in more loyal customers and after all, it's easier and cheaper to keep a great customer than finding new ones.
The last 18 years working for Atlas Copco, building websites and apps, setting up processes for lead generation and marketing automation processes, looking at personalisation, working on customer journeys and interactions. Main objective: provide the right information at the right moment to your customers. This to increase the activation rate and via this way, delivering happy customers
All these years, the same patterns are visible:
- focus on customer data: the better the view on the customer, the more valuable
- focus on customer interactions: make the more efficient, more to the point
All these years, new solutions, new approaches, new technology, new buzz words were introduced, always with the promise that finally we will manage the whole customer journey.
During all these years, success of the initiatives were not easy to measure.
Key for successes on a mid term / long term isn't as simple as implementing the new solution. On these aspects, I seem to be pretty conservative, more conservative than each companies I worked for as for me, the most successfull implementations have a good balance in multiple aspects
- know what you want to do / get to know what your customers want - strategy
- do the right things, in the right order... - roadmap
- implement on an efficient way - implementation
- get your organisation ready - change management
- manage the new processes / solutions - harvesting
Personal conclusion: no new wine in old bottles, but success isn't a matter of implementing new initiatives, success is a result of a long term vision, a flexible and pragmatic roadmap and getting your organisation ready during the implementation, but definitely also after implementation :-)
Through my whole career, I have been working in customer facing applications.
Starting with a credit scoring system for KBC, crucial was to get to know your customer (data) as good as possible and get a customer view as complete as possible. Main objective: serve your customers faster and better by using data and artificial intelligence.
Customer interactions over the years, new wine in old bottles, or not really?
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