We can see where there are issues in the organization and have concrete discussions to make improvements

Business overview

Mr. Lee Jongwoo
L&T Lexus Corporation is a South Korean automobile dealer that sells Lexus and Toyota vehicles. I am the director in charge of the administrative department.

Issues affecting the business and our organization

Mr. Lee Jongwoo
At our company, messages from management were only shared at the regular monthly meetings. We also set aside time once a year at an event commemorating the company’s founding to talk about our annual strategy and medium- to long-term plans.

But our strategies, policies, and vision hadn’t been communicated throughout the organization, which I felt was a major issue. I sensed a considerable distance between the department in charge of strategy and the department in charge of execution. Also, when a problem occurred, rather than promptly taking care of, it would often be neglected. Such issues weren’t so obvious before, but I think they became more noticeable after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2019, we’ve faced many difficulties in our Lexus dealer business. It began with the boycott of Japanese products, after which we were hit with the pandemic, and then a shortage of semiconductors. Amid these hardships, a growing number of employees left the company and I also had a number of problems.

Behind the introduction of Motivation Cloud

Mr. Lee Jongwoo
At the time, an HR specialist I’m acquainted with recommended a book to me. The book was by Link and Motivation and, as I read it, I realized there were other ways of doing things, and there were other companies experiencing the same things we were going through.

There had been a time when foreign consulting companies entered the Korean HR market, but they all failed and left. But since then, with labor laws having been strengthened, the importance of HR has increased and the need for HR consulting services in South Korea is quite high.

While the HR market has been developing at a remarkable pace, there aren’t many Korean consulting companies that have been able to meet the country’s diverse HR needs. So I also started looking into Japanese consulting companies and compared them with Korean companies. One of those Japanese companies was yours.

Looking into Link and Motivation, I found it had two major strengths. One was the huge amount of data it had on some 10,000 companies. I felt this data would save us a lot of time in trial and error.

And the other strength was the supportive nature of the consulting services the company provided. Generally, the consulting company will diagnose the client company and come up with a plan to address issues, but it’s left up to the client company to carry the plan out. They have to make the decisions, execute them, and then take responsibility for the results. But with Link and Motivation, the scope of the process doesn’t end with the drawing up of the plan. It also includes the execution of the plan and producing results, which I found very appealing.

Struggles in introducing Motivation Cloud

Mr. Lee Jongwoo
Our “Evangelists” played an important role in the adoption of Motivation Cloud. That’s what we call the employees who promoted the introduction and use of the service with the help of Link and Motivation. These Evangelists were really vital in determining the success or failure of this project. But one of the big concerns they had was the language barrier.

Some people within the company had raised questions about why we chose services from a Japanese company given the language barrier, but following a lot of internal discussion, we decided to go with Motivation Cloud.

The reasons for our decision, of course, included the two strengths I mentioned earlier, but another significant factor was that, as a company handling Lexus vehicles, a Japanese brand, we have a culture closer to that of Japanese companies than to other Korean companies.

That, of course, didn’t mean the language barrier would go away. But Link and Motivation’s professionalism led me to believe that we’d be able to overcome the language barrier. Before we adopted the service, we spent a lot of time with your consultants, wondering and thinking about how we could better adapt the service to our company. It was the professionalism and enthusiasm your consultants demonstrated during this process that made me feel that language wouldn’t be an issue.

It's true that, initially, we had doubts over whether the service would be able to solve our problems, and whether it would really enable us to change. But, amid the consultants’ professionalism and enthusiasm, our conviction gradually grew stronger, from thinking we might be able to pull it off to eventually believing we could make it happen. We arrived at our final decision, convinced that Motivation Cloud, with its wealth of experience and know-how of Japanese companies, would be of great help to us.

The value of Motivation Cloud

Mr. Lee Jongwoo
The first survey revealed issues that we had only vaguely been aware of. What really made an impact was that it clarified the specific points of these issues.

Up until then, we’d thought there might not have been enough communication, but once we looked at the survey results, we were able to see where in the organization and the type of communication that was lacking. I think the real value of Motivation Cloud lies in its ability to give us a detailed picture of the status of our organization, such as which of our company policies are disconnected and where, and the extent to which our strategies have been communicated within the organization.

Also, unlike before, we’re able to engage in concrete discussions. When a problem arose in the past, everyone would rely on their own individual intuition and subjectivity when talking about how to address it. As a result, we usually couldn’t reach any kind of consensus. But after the survey, we were all able to come to the table looking at the same data, which allowed us to have more concrete and clearer discussions.

I mentioned earlier that we were able to overcome the language barrier, but that doesn’t mean we had no concerns whatsoever. For example, we worried that the language difference might make the operation inefficient and take up time. But as it turned out, we had nothing to worry about.

Much of Motivation Cloud is made up of web services, and the language barrier has largely been eliminated through technical innovation. The system is also constantly being improved. For example, a recently added feature uses AI to provide advice on action plans. Of course, we’re adapting to Motivation Cloud, but Motivation Cloud is also constantly evolving and improving, and I now realize we made the right decision when we introduced it.

There were also a lot of benefits in the support we received. First was the high level of expertise of Link and Motivation’s consultants. We were satisfied with their expertise and the effective support that they constantly provided us with.

And we also appreciated how they shared our concerns and thought things over with us. The problems we faced weren’t typical. They were rather complex issues that were unique to our company. And solving these problems required fairly deep understanding. In this regard, too, the consultants would patiently ask us questions, sometimes probing even more deeply than we did to get to the essence of the problem.

To offer an analogy, the consultants are like pacesetters during a marathon. They’re important partners who run alongside and support us during the race.

What we hope to achieve with Motivation Cloud

Mr. Lee Jongwoo
The ideal that I envision now is for the leaders of each of our teams to communicate with each other using Motivation Cloud as a tool.

For example: “Did you see the results from last time?” “What were the strengths and weaknesses?” “What sort of action plan did you carry out?” “How did that change the organization?” This is the kind of communication I’d like to see. If we can engage in such communication, I think we’d the leaders would be able to proactively tackle improvement activities.

Our vision for the organization

Mr. Lee Jongwoo
Work accounts for a large part of our lives. I don’t seek anything grandiose from work. I just want to make our company a place where every employee feels each day to be fulfilling