That Thing about Uniforms

At the beginning of last week, I held my biggest workshop as of yet with 120 participants in a hotel in Odawara (some pics from the hotel and it’s very nice view randomly inserted into the post ;-)) – the topic: how do we lead people and how do we want to be led.

The workshop was based on six leadership principles that this specific division of our company developed and one of the principles is that “we want to have more fun and joy at work”. (other principles include trust, fairness, open mindedness etc., all in all nothing “new” and no rocket science but very basic, if of course very important, principles.)

  

The 120 participants worked on these principles, what they mean for them, how they want these principles to be lived and how to implement them into their daily work.

For the “fun and joy” principle something happened that I didn’t understand at first.

It also must be noted that people from three sites were gathered, two plants in the north of Tokyo and one office in Yokohama where sales, engineering, administration, etc. are located.

One of the proposals from people at one of the plants that came up to increase fun and joy at work was to get better uniforms. They were of the opinion that new “cute and good-looking/cool” uniforms (the Japanese terms they used were kawaii and kakkou-ii) would increase their fun and joy at work.

Wow… not the kind of answer to “increase fun and joy” that I would have expected.

  

So why do people at the plant north of Tokyo want uniforms and think that will increase their “fun and joy” at work?

I asked a few of my Japanese colleagues, who didn’t participate in this workshop at lunch the next day. Their answers were quite simple and striking.

  

The current uniforms are quite horrible (synthetic stuff in dull gray), so surely it increases their fun and joy if they get better quality and better looking uniforms. I asked next why they want to wear uniforms in the first place. Answer: uniforms reduce the “distance” between white and blue color workers in the plant and the plant people need the uniforms so that their own clothes are not getting dirty.

  

Ah, a very nice answer, which shows the desire and need for equality in the plant. Nevertheless, I also think that need for equality is a very Japanese answer. You don’t stand out of the crowd, you don’t want to be “different” from the others, you want to belong to a group and identify yourself with that group.

In the light of this, I hope the management will provide money for new uniforms at the plant sites.