Matsushita là một trong những công ty cuối cùng để quay trở lại của nó vào Nhật bản truyền thống, nhưng vào năm 1998, sau năm của hiệu suất kém, nó bắt đầu sửa đổi thực tiễn truyền thống. Nguyên tắc các đại lý của sự thay đổi là một nhóm quản lý những người có nhiều kinh nghiệm trong hoạt động ở nước ngoài của Matsushita, và bao gồm Kunio Nakamura, người trở thành giám đốc điều hành Matsushita vào năm 2000. Trước tiên, Matsushita thay đổi chương trình trả tiền cho các nhà quản lý 11.000. Trong quá khứ, các khoản tiền thưởng hai lần một năm truyền thống đã được dựa trên gần như hoàn toàn vào thâm niên, nhưng Matsushita đã nói họ sẽ được dựa trên hiệu suất. Năm 1999, Matsushita thông báo quá trình này sẽ được thực hiện minh bạch; nhà quản lý sẽ được hiển thị của họ rankings hiệu suất đã và làm thế nào có đưa vào trả tiền thưởng. Tiểu học vì điều này có thể âm thanh ở phía tây, cho Matsushita nó đại diện cho sự khởi đầu của một cuộc cách mạng trong nguồn nhân lực thực hành.About the same time, Matsushita took aim at the lifetime employment system and the associated perks. Under the new system, recruits were given the choice of three employment options. First, they could sign on to the traditional option. Under this, they were eligible to live in subsidized company housing, go free to company organized social events, and buy subsidized services such as banking from group companies. They also still would receive a retirement bonus equal to two years’ salary. Under a second scheme, employees could forgo the guaranteed retirement bonus in exchange for higher starting salaries and keep perks such as cheap company housing. Under a third scheme, they would lose both the retirement bonus and the subsidized services, but they would start at a still higher salary. In its first two years of operation, only 3 percent of recruits chose the third option – suggesting there is still a hankering for the traditional paternalistic relationship- but 41 percent took the second option.In other ways Matsushita’s designs are grander still. As the company has moved into new industries such as software engineering and network communications technology, it has begun to sing the praises of democratization of employees, and it has sought to encourage individuality, initiative taking, and risk seeking among its younger employees. But while such changes may be easy to articulate, they are hard to implement. For all of its talk, Matsushita has been slow to dismantle its lifetime employment commitment to those hired under the traditional system. This was underlined in early 2001 when, in response to continued poor performance, Matsushita announced it would close 30 factories in Japan, cut 13,000 jobs including 1,000 management jobs, and sell a “huge amount of assets” over the next three years. While this seemed to indicate a final break with the lifetime employment system- it represented the first layoffs in the company’s history- the company also said unneeded management staff would not be fired but instead transferred to higher growth areas such as health care.With so many of its managers a product of the old way of doing things, a skeptic might question the ability of the company to turn its intentions into a reality. As growth has slowed, Matsushita has had to cut back on its hiring, but its continued commitment to long-standing employees means that the average age of its workforce is rising. In the 1960s it was around 25; by the early 2000s it was 35, a trend that might counteract Matsushita’s attempts to revolutionize the workplace, for surely those who benefited from the old system will not give way easily to the new. Still, by 2004 it was clear that Matsushita was making progress. After significant losses in 2002, the company broke even in 2003 and started to make profits again in 2004. New growth drivers, such as sales of DVD equipment, certainly helped, but so did the cultural and organizational changes that enabled the company to better exploit these new growth opportunities.
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