Episode 64: The Reality of Trinity’s Unique Programs, Part 6: Comprehensive Benefits and the Purpose of Seat Rotation

“Real Management | The Real Stories of Company Presidents, Speaking Candidly and Unscripted About Successes and Failures in Business Management”

In this program, I, Hossy, also known as Hoshikawa Tetsumi, will speak candidly about management and what goes on behind the scenes, based on my own experiences.

Real Management isreleased every Friday morning at 6:00 a.m.

Good morning. I’m Hoshikawa Tetsumi, also known as Hossy, a free spirit.

Right. Gajirou, we’ve been talking so far about Trinity’s unique systems. We’re basically about halfway through at this point.

Is there anything that has left the strongest impression on you, or anything you think really doesn’t exist anywhere else?

Yes.

Ah, I see.

Mm-hmm.

The depth of their pockets, so to speak.

Well, yes. I’ve said this before, but in the end, unless the business is generating solid profits and you’re confident that will continue going forward, you can’t implement measures like these. Basically, all of them require the company to shoulder some kind of cost, so as Gajirou said, if you’re in a situation where you’re worrying about how to manage next month’s cash flow, they’re pretty hard to make happen.

By the way,last timewe talked about free lunch. From the employees’ perspective, something worth 1,000 yen becomes free.

But in reality, when you consider that it’s a restaurant operated by Trinity, the cost ratio is basically around 35%, so you could say the company’s actual burden is about 350 yen. In that sense, precisely because we operate it ourselves, employees can say, “This is such a great benefit,” even though the company’s burden is only 350 yen.

In reality, it’s a very cost-effective measure. It’s not as if we have chefs solely for that purpose; the restaurant also operates normally and has many regular customers. So when it was busy, we sometimes had to ask employees to wait or come at a different time.

In any case, including things like that, we tell employees that while we want to give back to them and provide various measures, “We can do this because the company is viable, in other words, because we are making solid profits.” I want each person to think about how we should generate profits in order to continue. If profits disappear, these systems could disappear too. So it’s also a message that we should all work hard together so we can keep them going.

There are a few health-related things that we didn’t quite get to last time.

First, as I mentioned last time, Trinity has free lunch, but in addition to that, Trinity also has all-you-can-drink beverages.

Hot coffee, iced coffee, iced tea, water, and later on, was it Savas? Protein drinks and things like that.

For a while, we even had vegetable sticks.

There were also snacks and things like that.

Exactly.

No, not that. We had them delivered separately.

But the tricky part is that if you prepare exactly enough for all 20 staff members, you inevitably end up with leftovers.

Then if you prepare fewer, people feel strangely hesitant, thinking, “If I take one, there won’t be enough for everyone.”

Even if there are 20 people and you prepare only five, you can still end up with all five left over.

The balance is actually pretty difficult. Of course, it feels wrong to throw away leftovers, so in the end everyone, including me, would take them home. Because of issues like that with distribution, we eventually stopped providing vegetable sticks partway through.

I don’t know about the current situation, but around the time I was last there, we had things like Savas. There were also two types of coffee makers, Delonghi and Balmuda.

The Delonghi was the type with a grinder that grinds the beans on the spot and brews the coffee, while the Balmuda was the type that automatically brews from ground coffee. The two taste completely different.

The Balmuda is the type that brews in a way close to hand drip, while the Delonghi is more like what you often see in shops. Actually, the coffee served at Trinita also uses a Delonghi machine, so you can enjoy the same authentic flavor. So even when it came to something as simple as drinks, we had a pretty carefully selected lineup.

In the summer, of course, we also had iced coffee. As for tea, in addition to tea bags, we also prepared bottled tea. And Savas could be stored for a long time, so we kept it stocked and bought more whenever supplies started to run low.

So in that sense, it was basically all-you-can-drink.

And on top of that, we had a snack duty system.

It started back when we had fewer people, but twice a month, I think, someone would be in charge of buying 3,000 yen worth of snacks. The snack duty rotated among everyone.

Exactly. Since it was autumn, there might be things like roasted chestnuts or chestnut-flavored snacks.

There was something fun about how the choices changed depending on who was in charge. But as it gradually became harder to choose every time, the easiest option was to order something like a “snack variety set” worth about 3,000 yen on Amazon. Something with various Umaibo snacks included, for example.

Those kinds of things are individually wrapped, which also helps. If you open a large bag, you feel rushed to finish it quickly, but variety packs are divided into individual portions, so they’re easy to use. In the end, toward the end, we always settled on those convenient options.

After we split between the second floor and the first floor, each floor had its own snacks.

This isn’t exactly one of Trinity’s interesting systems, but at Trinity, we change seats once every six months.

It is like school. There’s a second floor and a first floor, and roughly half of the staff work upstairs and half downstairs. Once every six months, we change seats along with a major cleaning. One purpose is, of course, that whether upstairs or downstairs, the sales team is placed together as the sales team. They aren’t scattered around.

Communication is necessary, after all, so customer support is grouped as customer support, marketing as marketing, and so on, with each department seated together. One major purpose of changing seats is to address the sense of distance between the first and second floors. When the floors are physically separated, day-to-day communication inevitably tends to become weaker.

You can’t see what kind of work the team next to you is busy with, whether they’re struggling with something, or whether they’re dealing with trouble.

So by changing seats, it becomes easier to understand if, for example, the sales team and the development team are placed in the same area. Say the sales team has taken orders for a new product, but progress on the development team’s side isn’t going well. You start to hear that kind of situation. You realize, “They’re really having a hard time.”

If you see, right nearby, the process of them having intense exchanges with the factory in China and desperately making adjustments every day, then even if a delay occurs as a result, it feels understandable. If you know nothing at all about those struggles or the background, it simply turns into dissatisfaction, like, “Why is this late?”

When the development team and support team are next to each other, for example, if something was missing from a shipment, or if the team pursued thinness to the absolute limit and, as a result, the strength wasn’t sufficient and the product cracked, leading to daily complaints from customers,

in those moments, when you regularly see the support staff right nearby desperately apologizing, you naturally start to think, “Ah, I really caused trouble here.” It leads to an awareness that it’s not enough just to make the product; you need to think more properly about durability and things like that too.

Each team has its own circumstances, and there are busy seasons and slow seasons. At that time, for example, they might be preparing for a new iPhone, creating hundreds of different packages, and constantly producing them in China, so they’re panicking every day. If you can’t see that, there’s a possibility you might send all kinds of requests their way.

For example, even with an urgent request like, “Please prepare the in-store POP materials by tomorrow,” if you can see right nearby that the other person is already pushed to their absolute limit, you end up saying, “Maybe we can wait until next week.”

Right, exactly. Things like promotional materials used in stores. We felt that everyone should be able to see how the different teams were working—whether they were having a hard time, whether things were easy, whether they had downtime, or whether they were insanely busy. So we started changing seats once every six months. At the same time, we do a big cleanup. If the same person stays in the same place forever, vested interests start to form.

Like, “I’ve always kept my stuff here, so this area belongs to me.”

We have lockers, but rather than being assigned to individuals, they’re assigned by team. Like, “The development team, please use these lockers.” So when people move seats, they have to move those things too. At that point, you can get rid of things where you realize, “We haven’t looked at this once in the past year,” or “We’re not going to look at this in the future either.”

In that sense, I recommend changing seats about once every six months—depending on the company, even once a year might be fine. Even if everyone is on one floor, you still end up not knowing much about the people who are far away. For companies that have grown to around 20 or 30 people, if they use hot-desking that may be fine, but if people have assigned seats, I recommend doing a seating shuffle.

It really does change communication quite a lot. There are people who mutter to themselves, you know. Like, “This is bad, this is really bad, there’s no way this is possible.” At times like that, someone from another department might ask, “Is something going wrong?” I think it’s important to pay attention to other people like that.

So, to get back to the point, I brought up the seating changes because otherwise this next part wouldn’t make sense. Every six months, the people upstairs and downstairs switch places. When that happens, the amount of snacks people eat differs between the upper and lower floors.

The people on the lower floor run out of snacks first and come upstairs to get some. You can’t tell whether they came to talk or came to take snacks, but while they’re chatting, their hand is actually reaching into the snack box, and they’re taking snacks from it. They’ll say, “We’ve run out of chocolate downstairs.”

Very peaceful.（笑）

We also manage and order coffee beans and water by floor, but sometimes when one floor runs out, there’ll be exchanges like, “Could you spare one bottle?” But drink costs aren’t trivial either. If you buy coffee at a convenience store, it costs almost 200 yen per cup, and if you drink two cups a day, that alone is 400 yen.

No, that isn’t counted as salary.

That’s treated as consumables. At Trinity, we basically keep the accounting very transparent. So with free lunch too, if we didn’t declare it, you could say no one would know.

In Trinity’s case, we also talked about it on our blog and such, so if someone from the tax office saw it, they would know. And I didn’t want it to be pointed out later if something happened, so we handled the accounting very properly and transparently.

This is a slightly different vector from physical health, but we decorated the office with flowers. We had a nearby flower shop deliver them every week. After all, having flowers in the meeting room makes the atmosphere feel a little more relaxing.

Yes. It’s not directly related to health, but more about how people feel.

Exactly. As a form of mental health, we had flowers delivered every week. Some people also grew plants—not in pots exactly, but in planters.

The flowers were a company expense, or rather, we paid the flower shop and bought them.

Another health-related thing is Trinity’s health insurance society.

Unlike the national Kyokai Kenpo, or Zenkoku Kenko Hoken Kyokai, which ordinary companies join if they don’t have anything else, Trinity belongs to “Kanto IT Software Kenko Hoken Kumiai,” commonly known as “IT Kenpo.”

Originally, I think a lot of companies in the Softbank Group were probably members. Because it’s IT and software, the members tend to be young. With ordinary health insurance societies or those of large companies, if they have a long history, the average age generally goes up, so people increasingly go to the hospital and use insurance. That’s why a considerable portion of health insurance societies out there are in the red.

But this Kanto IT Kenpo is in the black.

I think the average age is probably around 30. There are a lot of IT-related companies and group companies like Softbank and Yahoo!, so the age range of the members is young. That means they have fewer opportunities to go to the hospital, and medical expenses are kept down. So it ends up in the black, and as a result, the insurance premiums become cheaper.

Of course, it’s limited to the IT and software industries, but if you can join, Kanto IT Kenpo is really recommended. Not only are the insurance premiums low, but the facilities are also excellent. For example, if you get your health checkup at one of their directly operated facilities, you can eat a luxurious lunch afterward. In Okubo, it might be Chinese food; in Tameike-Sanno, Japanese food. They also have restaurants operated by the association that you can use at extremely low prices.

A famous one is the sushi restaurant in Tameike-Sanno. Something that clearly looks like it would cost more than 10,000 yen can be eaten for around 5,000 yen. The downside is that it’s impossible to get a reservation, though.（笑）

That’s how worthwhile it is if you can get in. Insurance premiums are basically split evenly between the employee and the company, so the company’s expenses go down a little, and the employee’s burden also goes down a little.

Since it’s the Kanto IT Software Kenko Hoken Kumiai, you basically have to be in an IT- or software-related industry to join. Trinity applied a long time ago, but because Trinity wasn’t doing software development, we applied as an IT company. We handled iPod, iPhone, and iPad cases, screen protectors, and cables, but we were rejected once, with them saying, “This isn’t IT.”

Among the products we handled at the time, there was a device that extended signals through what’s called a LAN network. For example, USB is basically limited to 3 meters, or maybe 5 meters now. You can’t extend it beyond that. But there are devices that let you extend it about 100 meters. These are used a lot in video and recording studios.

You have only a keyboard, mouse, and display at hand, while the actual machine is in the machine room and you operate it remotely. Also, just off the top of my head, Trinity is doing two software services.

Software only. I’ll talk about this another time, but when we created that first piece of software—or what would now be called SaaS, a cloud service—we said, “See? This is IT software, isn’t it?” and I think we applied again and were accepted.

My memory of the rules at the time is a little vague, but I think the membership requirement was five employees for companies in Tokyo and ten or more for companies in Saitama. So when our staff exceeded ten people, we applied, but at that time we were rejected because we were “not an IT company.”

However, the LAN-based products I mentioned earlier were quite close to IT in the sense that they were network-related. And when we created a software service, we went back and argued, “This is clearly a software business now,” and that is how we were finally approved to join.

Unlike the national Kyokai Kenpo, which ordinary companies join if they don’t have anything else, you join a health insurance society called the Kanto IT Software Kenko Hoken Kumiai. So the health insurance card you have is different too.

And that card is actually pretty uncool, the insurance card.（笑）

It’s so uncool that you wonder why it looks that bad.

I’ve forgotten a little, but I think it’s probably around 0.5% to 0.8%. (Note:In reality, 10% and 9.5%)

So it’s not dramatically cheaper. But the health insurance portion of the monthly social insurance premiums does go down a little.

This is a bit of a tangent, but this is from when Trinity brought the game company Eureka Studio into the group. I think they had about six or seven people at the time. We applied to have that company join IT Kenpo too. Eureka Studio was a full-on smartphone game company, so I thought, “It’s 100% software, so surely it’ll be fine!” But we were told no.

The reason was—and I’ll talk about Eureka Studio in more detail another time—that they don’t have an office. Everyone is fully remote. They are registered at a virtual office in Shinjuku, but the health insurance society said they reject companies that don’t have a real physical address.

Their argument was that they couldn’t tell whether it really existed or not. In the case of a virtual office, they said it was no good because there was also the question of whether documents would definitely reach us if they sent them.

They said, “We reject them across the board.” In reality, with a virtual office, if mail arrives there, they forward it to you. We use a place called One Stop Business Center, and they basically forward everything together once a week for free.

In that sense, compared to mail coming directly, there is a slight time lag, but there probably aren’t any health insurance association documents that are that urgent. So I told them that it didn’t make sense to reject us for that reason.

In that regard, the enrollment requirements for this Kanto IT Kenpo are actually quite strict.

If I remember correctly, it’s also no good if the average age is too high.

Also, it’s no good if salaries are too low.

In other words, they say “software,” but there are companies from the old software industry that have people around 60 years old, right? If that happens, they end up using a lot of insurance funds.

Because they go to the hospital right away. And if salaries are low, the insurance premiums also become low. So it becomes harder to stay in the black.

So the screening is quite difficult.

Exactly. This is really IT and software, and on top of that, there was Covid-19 and so on. Eureka Studio used to have an office too. Then we got rid of it because of Covid, and since it seemed like we could keep going without one, we became fully remote.

From now on, working remotely without having an office is going to be especially easy in IT and software, isn’t it? Compared to manufacturing and the like. So in the coming era, these kinds of work styles and companies like this will keep increasing. That’s why I said it was strange.

The person at the counter said, “We reject them across the board,” so we had no choice but to ask to speak with someone higher up. So we spoke with someone higher up. I think we talked for about 30 minutes. The person above said, “I understand. We’ll discuss it within the organization.” After that, they had a board meeting on their side, and they discussed it there. They decided it would be okay as long as we could guarantee things like how quickly we would properly receive and respond to mail.

Yes. Now you should be able to join even with a virtual office.

Yes. In that sense, I opened the way, so it’s thanks to me that companies with virtual offices can now join. (laughs)

So, with that little digression included, our time has come again this time. Time really does pass quickly. Maybe we’re digressing a bit too much.

You know, I think one of the values of a podcast is in these kinds of digressions. If we were just reading from a fixed script, then synthetic speech would be enough. But when the two of us go back and forth like this, the conversation can move in unexpected directions, or we suddenly remember things like, “Oh, now that I think about it, that happened too.” Just following a script isn’t interesting, and that’s exactly the part that AI can’t replace.

AI can’t replace this experience of mine, can it? Unless I’ve explained every single detail of my entire life to AI, it’s impossible. In the sense of listening to my stories on a podcast like this, AI can’t do it.

Things like being able to eat lunch for free are something I’ve also written about on the blog, so AI might be able to state the facts in a plausible way. So we’ll just keep talking about things in no particular order, and when we run out of topics, the discussion about unique systems will be over.

Let’s proceed like that. Well, we’ve already passed the halfway point, but please stay with us a little longer for Trinity’s unique systems. We look forward to having you with us again next week.

“Real Management | Successes and Failures in Corporate Management, the Unscripted Reality of a President Speaking Honestly”

We’ve included a link to this program’s website in the description. We’d be happy to receive your impressions, messages, requests, and so on through that link.

Your hosts up to this point were Hoshikawa Tetsushi, also known as Hossy, and

Until next week, we’ll see you again through your ears.