Lifting the ban on side-jobs with “Outside-Challenge Work” (2016)

The contrarian HR of a company with no outside capital

The heart of Outside-Challenge Work can be read less in the permitting of side-jobs itself than in taking an idea proposed by employees and moving it straight into a formal scheme, swinging the very corporate philosophy over to the side of challenge. As scale became hard to picture in a mature domestic market, Rohto sought the source of its growth not in plant or acquisitions but in the quality of its people. Opening a circuit to bring experience gained outside the company back into the core work was also a quiet attempt to break down the conventional view of employment that pens talent into a single job. It is discernible that what made this contrarian move possible was an independence that let the founding family keep the initiative even as a listed company, hard to bind to the market’s short-term judgement.

How far the scheme bore fruit in talent and results, though, is still being judged. Two years after it began, in 2018, President Toshiaki Yoshino died suddenly, and Kunio Yamada of the founding family returned as chairman and president, after which the axis of management shifted toward holding down promotional spending and prioritising the profit margin. How an HR scheme raised under the banner of challenge would coexist with a management bent on earnings efficiency in a mature phase was a question left for afterward. How much of the experience employees opened outward through side-jobs comes back into new businesses and culture at the core — that answer, it seems, will be measured as the years of the scheme accumulate.