What Is Working Environment & Why Is It So Important? (Part 1)
By Kim Pedersen (Guest Blogger)

Kim Pedersen is an expert in Japan business and global working environments and the founder of Roukan.com (Roukan.jp localized for the Japanese market) as well as a member of the High-Impact Coaching Alliance's advisory board.  

Why Is Working Environment (WE) So Important?
Well, the simple answer to this question is that it has a huge impact on a company’s profits. If a profitable organization is important to you then you should pay careful attention to your company's WE. This is just one of the reasons why WE is so important.

Another reason for its importance is that it influences an employee’s well-being to a very high degree. From a corporate standpoint, depending on how you understand and manage WE you can either increase the profitability and competitiveness of your company or you can risk being potentially sued and/or losing money through lack of employee engagement and reduced productivity, absenteeism and so on.

The funny thing about WE is that depending on which path you choose you will either receive all of the positive effects or all of the negative effects. There seems to be no middle ground in regards to WE. In practice, this means that you can choose to have very satisfied employees, a good working environment and higher productivity and profits or you can choose to have very unsatisfied employees, a bad working environment and the chance of litigation and resultant lower profits. 

So what is your choice going to be? 

A big thanks goes out to Roukan.com as Roukan.com's Work Environment Surveys Solution Is Now An Official Sponsor of FirstPoint Japan.

We are pleased to welcome John Taylor, an online marketing and advertising expert, to the FirstPoint Japan Advisory Board.

John serves as FirstPoint Japan's online marketing and advertising adviser charged with promoting the website while building web traffic and share of mind.

John is a seasoned sales executive and consultant with experience in the US, Japan and Australia. He's an expert in online media and traffic analysis and previously worked as a senior manager at a major online market intelligence and insight software firm where he developed partnerships with some of the most heavily trafficked sites including MegaUpLoad, online gaming sites and well as dozens of other high profile and highly trafficked sites.

He currently works for a major Silicon Valley enterprise software company and is the founder of the Wider Sales Funnel, the premier platform for accelerating your business performance.

John is a native speaker of English as well as a native speaker of Spanish and currently resides in Sydney, Australia and previously resided in the US (California, Boston and Florida) and Tokyo, Japan

We are pleased to welcome Kim Pedersen  a Business and Working Environment Consultant to the FirstPoint Japan Advisory Board.

Kim is a truly multicultural person with extensive experience living, working and doing business in and with Japan over the last 40 years. He is trilingual with native Danish and Japanese abilities as well as possessing fluent English. He also holds an export and marketing degree from the Danish Export Institute.

Kim has been working under both Japanese and Danish working environment (WE) at several different levels ranging from being employed as a commercial attaché at the Royal Danish Embassy, being a manager in a Japanese company as well as running his own businesses in Japan and Denmark.

Having seen and experienced both WE and having seen how beneficial a sound and healthy WE can be (as well as how damaging a bad WE can be) Kim has devoted much of his time to try to improve the Japanese WE through the launch and operations of roukan.com (and roukan.jp for the Japanese version).

If you've been attention lately you may have noticed that we've been in the process of completely rebooting FirstPoint Japan.

We expect the full reboot to be completed by October 1st.

Now, many have asked, "Why are you rebooting FirstPoint Japan and in what direction are you taking it?"

The answer is this: FirstPoint Japan is being taken back to its original direction which was and is to serve as the first and only English-language portal that helps you Accelerate Your Japanese Business With Expert Advice™. 

Ultimately, FirstPoint Japan™ is to be the place Where Japanese Business Begins™.

Specifically this means several things:
1. We will focus only on business related themes. Very rarely will consumer themes (e.g., what's the "hottest bar" or "best night spot") or "hey, isn't Japan weird?" themes be discussed unless such information is very relevant and would be of interest to our readers whereby they could better understand the Japan marketplace or cultural expectations.

2. The core readership for FirstPoint Japan is primarily Gaishikei (foreign firms) either entering the Japanese market, building out existing operations, accelerating growth, maintaining themselves in a sustaining phase or rebooting.

3. An additional target readership is (primarily) Japanese-language bilinguals (i.e., people of any nationality or ethnicity who are bilingual with one of their business level languages being Japanese) who are working for or would like to work for a gaishikei firm in Japan.

4. Given that Japanese firms are moving overseas and investing again in such operations again, another target readership is foreign individuals (non-Japanese or overseas Japanese) who are interested in working for a Japanese firm in a local market. For instance, such as a local person working for or interested in working for a Japanese firm like Honda in Vietnam.

5. The hottest topics previously as well as now include market entry and company build-outs. This centers much attention on issues such as hiring and the use of third party agency recruiters. Previously we maintained a large reviews database of "good eggs", "neutrals" and "bad eggs" recruiting agencies.

However, since the industry is so opaque and "rough and tumble" (to put it mildly) we found ourselves spending an inordinate amount of time maintaining reviews that, for the most part, were just "bad egg" recruiting firms which was just a waste of everyone's time.

We are now reversing the model. 

This means that now everything is considered and deemed suspect unless it is on FirstPoint Japan. We will be talking to, reviewing and placing on our site recruiting firms and other vendors with whom there is some level of trust, ethics and professionalism.


By the same token, any vendor that isn't on this site you can approach at your own risk since we'll consider them "radioactive". 


The list will start out small, it may even remain small, but rest assured we do the best we can to vet the lists and collect feedback on the firms listed.

6. The vendor directory will include recruiting firms, training and coaching firms, paralegals and lawyers (incorporation paperwork, IP issues, visa issues and so on), accountants and CPA's, HR consultants, translators, interpreters and so on.

We have a lot planned so we hope that you'll check back in frequently or if you'd like get the FirstPoint Japan Newsletter delivered straight to your inbox click on the button below.

Sincerely yours,

Publisher
FirstPoint Japan

When foreign law firms in Japan were finally allowed to directly hire locally qualified lawyers, or bengoshi, in 2005, many leaped at the chance.

“I think a lot of the firms, particularly United Kingdom firms, had a model to be as local as possible,” says Piyasena Perera, a former Allen & Overy partner who worked in the firm’s Tokyo office between 2004 and 2011. “It’s a big asset for saying you’re a one-stop shop.”

Perera, who is now a senior foreign counsel at Japanese firm Anderson Mori & Tomotsune, was on hand when Allen & Overy launched its bengoshi practice in 2006. Linklaters plucked two of the name partners in Japanese firm Mitsui, Yasuda, Wani & Maeda to start its own a year before.

At its height four years ago, Allen & Overy’s Tokyo office counted around 30 bengoshi; now it has five. Linklaters’s office in the Japanese capital is now down to 40 lawyers, from 60 in 2005. U.S. firms Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Paul Hastings have also substantially reduced their bengoshi practices.

Read more: http://www.americanlawyer.com/PubArticleAL.jsp?id=1202610878523&Foreign_Firms_Stumble_Going_Local_in_Japan#ixzz2bwX8KuZg