The economy has been rattled by a myriad of changes and the Employer of Record industry is experiencing the fallout from the downturn, including our clients and competitors laying off employees.
We understand and respect the decisions made by other organizations. Every company has different circumstances, investors and individual needs, and from time to time must make difficult business decisions. During this tumultuous time, we want to share our business philosophy to help our existing employees, future colleagues, clients, partners and vendors understand how GoGlobal operates.
Diversity in business practices is key to navigating challenging times
When people talk about diversity in an organization, they often think about different cultures, backgrounds, race, gender, age and sexual orientation. We genuinely value these different perspectives and think they add to GoGlobal’s vibrant culture and quality of expertise. Diversity is core to who we are as a company.
Have a look at our website and see how diverse we are. Did you know the pictures on our website are of our own team members and not stock photos?
Diversity is also part of our core business practices. We’ve taken the best from our founding culture and blended it with best practices around the world.
How we think and act
GoGlobal originated in Japan and is the only global EOR (Employer Of Record) solution provider founded in Asia. Just like the Japanese soccer team and audience at the World Cup left a positive impression globally by cleaning up after themselves in the locker or the stands, the idea of thinking of others and the impression left on the world (e.g. our reputation) was probably as important as beating former world champions Spain and Germany in the actual matches.
In Japanese culture, sometimes how you do something is more important than what you do. Form is often more important than substance. This longer-term thinking leads to business practices unique to Japan, including no layoffs and a lifetime employment practice. How we treat our employees during good times and bad leaves an impression for a very long time – people don’t tend to forget these things. Many of our colleagues are people we have known for years as former clients or coworkers. Many of our clients have worked with us in the past in other organizations. Relationships are long-term not transactional.
That said, despite being “Made in Japan” we have not adopted all Japanese business philosophies. More aligned to western organizations and our peers, we’ve adopted some practices which have propelled some of these organizations to be at the forefront of technology and innovation. For example, we don’t believe in Japanese lifetime employment as we think it can dilute the average staff quality to the lowest common denominator. We pay above market happily. We value the best ideas over hierarchy: the “Our People” page on the website is ordered alphabetically rather than by title to emphasize this point. We don’t follow the Japanese approach of pure consensus-driven decision-making, long hours of overtime or homogeneity in the boardroom.
So, what does this all mean?
- Diversity in business practice is a net positive for the business. We have our own business practices, and they are not tied to any one country; they’re unique to our firm and reflect our global perspective.
- Thinking longer term, rather than purely about monthly results leads to better outcomes. It’s OK to not grow sometimes.
- Senior management should take responsibility and take pay cuts before any staff suffer their own pay cuts. We need to always lead by example.
- Merit and performance are still important.
- People have long memories and in a people business you must make sure they are good ones.
GoGlobal is still hiring. If our philosophy resonates with you, please consider applying and joining our team.