Relationship between Company and Employee

＊This article was originally written in Japanese by our CEO, Yoshihide Arai.

With less than a week until 2018 is over, though there were many things going on throughout the year, I’m relieved to end this year without any huge illness or injuries…

I would like to end this year’s blog by writing about he relationship between myself and my company. Recently, I’ve gotten a lot of opportunities to talk through media and events about how to make use of managing organizations and engagement in terms of running a company. Thanks to this, I noticed and also realized some new things once again.

That is, my relationship with my company.In capitalism, I believe that the role of companies is to make people happy. And of course, there is a reason why people come together as long as people gather in one company. That is probably the mission or vision of the company.

Since we can earn money without joining a company these days, it’s easy to understand that people who join companies believe that they can provide something better as a company than alone. Otherwise, why would people even bother joining something with rules and restrictions? However, it might be the case that a lot of the employees in Japan do not have that kind of mindset.

It’s easy for executives to understand since the growth and improvement of the company directly affects themselves. Well then, how about normal employees?

Many people think that they earn money in return of their work force, knowledge, or output. If so, they try to give less and get more. And that’s probably natural to think. The bigger the company is, it’s probably true and logical that people try to get more than what they give.

However, there shouldn’t be a win-lose relationship between companies and employees. Since a company is just the box. The actual company is about the people that gather to do some business. Therefore, it makes no sense to think that, a company is just a aggregation of people and each person that belong there is the company.

But, generally speaking, people tend to think that the executives are the company and the employees are just people who were hired. This thought probably comes from the Western idea that companies belong to stockholders and executives were given the role of managing, but I think this is misunderstood and misleading the idea. Let’s say that the idea above actually exist, it’s okay if the relationship between the company (executives) and individuals (employees) have trust in each other.

However, it’s more likely that this is not the case. So if there’s no trust, then for individuals, a company is an opponent in the labor-management relation which leads to wanting more with less giving.

To summarize, the important thing is to think about the relationship between the company and employees. An organization that could think of the company themselves are strong and effective. A team that is full of people that focuses on the vision and work towards it or a company full of people that just thinks of earning more and giving less, it’s easy to see which one is a better or stronger organization.

Most managers tend to think that their employees skip out of work. So, they give orders and try to control the employees. Since employees have a mindset to give less and earn more, they choose to skip out because that is the reasonable choice.

If employees feel excited and really understands the value of the vision, and are able to trust each other and work together, no one would choose to skip out.

Why? Because they think that company is not an opponent but their own company. No matter how much the “tangible factors” such as the welfare system or the evaluation system improves, if the “intangible factors” such as building trust between members and employees understanding the value of their vision doesn’t change, the organization will not become stronger.

In Google, they call these aspects “psychological safety” and really focuses on it. This is exactly the same thing as “engagement”, the idea that we advocate.

At any rate, I hope that more people can feel excited about working together as a team especially since we live in an era where people can work alone.

2019 will be the year for Atrae to work hard as a “People Tech Company”, expanding people’s possibilities through technology.Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone for everything throughout this year. We only have a few days left, but will do our best.

I’m looking forward to the up coming year.

Happy Holidays!!