“Can Japanese men alone win the world?” Mercari Shintaro Yamada’s 60-minute passionate speech

Shintaro Yamada, CEO of Mercari.

Mercari CEO Shintaro Yamada talks about “organizational theory.”

The second part covers the 10 topics so far, including how to maintain employee motivation during the process of growing from a startup to a large company, what a diverse organization needs is “equal opportunities, not numerical targets,” and overseas FinTech expansion plans. Looking back on the past year, we asked Mercari what its goals are for the next 10 years.

(Interviewer: Yu Ito, text/composition: Ikuko Takeshita, photography: Toshiharu Takei)

Reference article:Mercari CEO Shintaro Yamada: “I was too timid.” “Successor” began to be considered under the new management system

Motivation only leads to the growth of the company

Mercari, Shintaro Yamada

Speaking of Mercari, it is known for its generous benefits and flexible working styles, such as being one of the first to introduce egg freezing cost subsidies, allowing employees to choose whether to work or work remotely, and providing transportation expenses of up to 150,000 yen per month. .

Mercari conducts an employee survey once every three months.

It is known that companies with higher employee engagement have higher ROE (return on equity), ROIC (return on invested capital), and PBR (price/book value ratio), and motivating employees is a management perspective. This is a big issue, especially in these days when it is important to maintain alignment with shareholders.

—— In Japan, there are people who work in a way that “even if their motivation is low, they cling to being an employee anyway,” and some people use terms like “professional employees.”

As a management, what are you conscious of to keep employee engagement high? I think the larger the organization, the more difficult it becomes.

I believe that a company exists to accomplish a mission, so I think the main premise is to have people empathize with that (mission).Therefore, the management team”Let’s plant the flag first.”That’s what I’m saying.

If people are coming together under our banner, I think that means they are motivated, and we are seeing results as many customers are using our product, and our employees are also motivated. I think that if you can feel a sense of growth, you can naturally create a state of high motivation.

justThe most important thing is for the company to growis.Even if all employees do what they want to do, if the company fails to produce results as an organization, everyone will be unhappy.turn into.

Employee motivation and engagement are important, but producing results is what matters.I am very conscious of this when conveying this. That’s exactly what I say, “A manager’s job is to produce results.”

Continue to provide opportunities to try new things

commute

Even if the company says, “This is what I’m aiming for right now,” and people join the company thinking, “I want to do this right now,” if they change their mind and want to do something different, they’ll continue working with us. There’s no need.

After all, wouldn’t it be great if you started a business because you sympathized with another company’s mission or came up with such a good idea?

I understand what I want to do as an individual, but if it doesn’t match the direction the company is aiming for, I might not need to stay with them. I feel the same way about myself, but I think the organization as a whole understands this.

— Rather than taking measures to increase employee engagement as an organization, we are creating opportunities to continue doing new things that will make people want to commit to this project at this company, no matter how long it takes. I believe that providing this information will ultimately lead to increased engagement.

Even if it’s not a new business, there are many things that are new to the person. For example, someone who used to be an engineer might be in charge of human resources. I am consciously creating such opportunities.

So, even if it’s not what the person wants, their boss may decide that the project is suitable for them and assign them. The same goes for personnel changes.

I don’t think only the person himself or herself knows what is suitable for him/her.

I’m the same way, but if you just do what you want to do, it’s no fun. There are a lot of things I’ve done that I’ve been invited to do, like barbecues and camping that I thought I wasn’t good at, and ended up having fun.

Can “Japanese men” alone create a service that will win the world?

Mercari, diversity, sustainability

Mercari’s efforts to promote diversity and inclusion.

Mercari also puts a lot of effort into diversity. When hiring and promoting to managerial positions, we set KPIs to ensure candidates are not biased based on their gender or nationality, published a sustainability report in 2020, and established the D&I Council, an in-house committee under the direct control of the CEO, in 2021.

Currently, women account for 32% of all employees, 22% in management positions, and 25% in executive positions. Employees working in the Tokyo office come from over 50 countries.

Mr. Yamada personally launched the Shintaro Yamada D&I Foundation, which provides financial support to female students aiming to pursue STEM education.

—— Speaking of organizations, how to ensure diversity, such as hiring women and foreigners, is a major issue for Japanese society as a whole.Approximately half of companies have “zero female managers,” and it is large companies that are holding them back.There are also survey results. What should we do to create a diverse organization?

For example, Mercari aims to be a globally successful marketplace. But then I asked, “Can only Japanese men do that?”

The reason we started hiring foreign engineers was because there were too few Japanese engineers to begin with, and if we were going to do business globally, it didn’t really matter if they couldn’t speak Japanese. However, doing so will increase diversity and create many new ideas for services.

There are very few Japanese IT companies that have grown to this size. The ability to manage an organization of this size is something that only a global organization can have. People from big tech such as Google brought in best practices and became more inclusive, such as how to do large-scale development.

However, the number of foreign employees at the VP (executive officer) level and above is still small, and there are challenges.

KPIs for the gender of hiring candidates, the important thing is “equal opportunity”

Mercari, Shintaro Yamada

(On the other hand) when it comes to gender, there is still so much that has not been done.

As for engineers, it’s a structural issue.There is a lack of women in science and computer science in Japan.doing. So I think we have no choice but to hire people from overseas and really take the time to make an impact through education, like I am doing at the foundation.

Of course, there are many challenges for non-engineers as well. Various legacy problems such as unconscious bias are accumulating, and there is no silver bullet that will solve everything by solving this problem, so we need to make efforts in each place to solve them.

The way to do it isInstead of setting numerical targets such as the number of women in managerial positions, which are common, we set KPIs for the process, such as the gender ratio of candidates when hiring.is.”Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome”This is the concept.

Of course, there are voices within the company that progress is slow, but I don’t think it can be done overnight, and I don’t want to insist that things are progressing well.

We are exchanging information with various companies, wondering what we should do and what we can do.

—— Why do you set KPIs for processes such as recruitment, rather than results?

I am concerned that setting numerical targets may have major negative effects. If we say that we will increase the number of women in management positions to 30%, both the person who has been promoted and those around them may feel that it is just a matter of making numbers for 30%, and it may be difficult to do so.

For the “talent pool” in recruitment, we set highly driven KPIs, and in the end we select based on ability.. By doing so, we aim to create an environment where each employee can continue to work comfortably and demonstrate their abilities.

Source: BusinessInsider

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