HIDA Journal 2014 AUTUMN No.5

11/26

9No. 5 AUTUMN 2014living in Japan and made them highly motivated. This allowed them to handle our company’s training thereafter, for which we are extremely grateful. During their visit to Japan our company also resolved to welcome the trainees amongst our families to build relationships of trust. In addition, we also communicated via our awareness of creating our stores together. The other day we received a pleased review from a Japanese person who visited one of our local stores who said, “I was surprised to see the exact same level of customer service as you would find in Japan,” which made me feel that the training is producing results.% Hanadai Co., Ltd. (Tokyo)“Conveying Japanese flower culture to the United States”Type of business: Sales of fresh and artificial flowersEmployees: 8Destination country: United StatesWe are a florist company that has set up two stores in Tokyo. Since we do not anticipate significant growth in the Japanese market in the future, and after having been in talks to open a Japanese supermarket on the west coast of the United States we decided to expand out overseas.Nonetheless, in order to succeed in the United States we needed to differentiate ourselves from other stores. It was Japan’s flower culture that provided the key to doing this. In the United States large bouquets of flowers that are cheap and shoddy are sold in unmanned vending machines. Perhaps this is a cultural difference between Japan and the United States, but for Americans they are at their happiest when receiving a large bouquet, and do not have the custom that Japanese people do of taking them home and displaying them in vases so that they can enjoy the flowers for a long time. For this reason, even if you intermix flowers that seem like they will soon wither away in a bouquet the customers will not lodge a complaint. If customers were to use preservation techniques then the flower’s role will not end the moment they have been given as a present, but rather they can be enjoyed for a long time to come at home thereafter. We anticipated that there would be a demand for this long-lasting enjoyment of flowers in which customers buy flowers by personally selecting them one by one.In order to create a shop that has this sort of culture we used the HIDA expert dispatch program to send two employees over as experts immediately after the opening of the shop in September 2013.The first person was in charge of giving technical guidance for handling the flowers. While he is almost completely unable to speak English he has a good eye for flowers, and so he communicated with the vendors during purchases by exchanging hand gestures. The local employees accompanied him during purchases and learned how to select excellent flowers. The second person gave instructions regarding business aspects. In Japan, shops provide special accommodations such as remembering the names of their customers or inquiring after flowers they have previously purchased in order to obtain repeat customers. Fortunately, such services are consistent with the open culture in the United States, and so the local employees were able to adopt them successfully. Although we are a small company, we were able to expand our business into the United States through HIDA’s expert dispatch program, for which we are really grateful.The introductions of case examples and the panel discussion conveyed how each company is leveraging its own respective strengths and characteristics to effectively promote human resource development for local employees through the use of our training programs in Japan and expert dispatch program. In addition to using these programs, their various different innovative approaches and considerations for building relationships of trust with the local employees could also be said to be secrets behind their success in developing “OMOTENASHI” talented persons.In the panel discussion carried out after the introduction to the case examples, a great many specific questions pertaining to human resource development were received from participants who have already had experience with advancing into overseas markets, or who are considering doing so in the future, over issues like how to hire or keep up the motivation of local employees.HIDA will continue to provide support on into the future for the development of human resources, which companies find problematic when expanding into overseas markets.Mr. Michimori Nakazawa, Representative Director, Nakazawa Co., Ltd.Mr. Yugo Sawano, Representative Director, Hanadai Co., Ltd.

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