Consensus in San Diego

Japanese managers are famous for inspiring loyalty, long hours and high-quality production in their workers. But can they carry that management skill with them to other countries? TIME Correspondent D.L. Coutu last week visited a Sony television manufacturing plant in San Diego where Japanese executives help supervise 1,800 workers. Her report:

Time clocks are banned from the premises. Managers and workers converse on a first-name basis and eat lunch together in the company cafeteria. Employees are briefed once a month by a top executive on sales and production goals and are encouraged to air their complaints. Four times a year, workers attend company-paid parties. Says Betty Price, 54, an assembly-line person: "Working for Sony is like working for your family."

Her expression, echoed by dozens of other American Sony workers in San Diego, is a measure of the success achieved at the sprawling, two-story plant, where both the Stars and Stripes and the Rising Sun fly in front of the factory's glistening white exterior. This year the San Diego plant will turn out 700,000 color television sets, one-third of Sony's total world production. More significantly, company officials now proudly say that the plant's productivity approaches that of its Japanese facilities.

Plant Manager Shiro Yamada, 58, insists that there are few differences between workers in the U.S. and Japan. Says he: "Americans are as quality conscious as the Japanese. But the question has been how to motivate them." Yamada's way is to bathe his U.S. employees in personal attention. Workers with perfect attendance records are treated to dinner once a year at a posh restaurant downtown. When one employee complained that a refrigerator for storing lunches was too small, it was replaced a few days later with a larger one. Vice President Masayoshi Morimoto, known as Mike around the plant, has mastered Spanish so he can talk with his many Hispanic workers. The company has installed telephone hot lines on which workers can anonymously register suggestions or complaints.

The firm strives to build strong ties with its employees in the belief that the workers will then show loyalty to the company in return. It carefully promotes from within, and most of the assembly-line supervisors are high school graduates who rose through the ranks because of their hard work and dedication to the company. During the 1973-75 recession, when TV sales dropped and production slowed drastically, no one was fired. Instead, workers were kept busy with plant maintenance and other chores. In fact, Sony has not laid off a single employee since 1972, when the plant was opened. The Japanese managers were stunned when the first employee actually quit within just one year. Says Richard Grossman, the plant's human relations expert: "They came to me and wanted to know what they had done wrong. I had to explain that quitting is just the way it is sometimes in Southern California."

This personnel policy has clearly been a success. Several attempts to unionize the work force have been defeated by margins as high as 3 to 1. Says Jan Timmerman, 22, a parts dispatcher and former member of the Retail Clerks Union: "Union pay was better, and the benefits were probably better. But basically I'm more satisfied here."

Sony has not forced Japanese customs on American workers. Though the company provides lemon-colored smocks for assembly-line workers, most prefer to wear jeans and running shoes. The firm does not demand that anyone put on the uniforms. A brief attempt to establish a general exercise period for San Diego workers, similar to the kind Sony's Japanese employees perform, was dropped when managers saw it was not wanted.

Inevitably, there have been minor misunderstandings because of the differences in language and customs. One worker sandblasted the numbers 1 2 6 4 on a series of parts she was testing before she realized that her Japanese supervisor meant that she was to label them "one to 64." Mark Dempsey, 23, the plant's youngest supervisor, admits that there is still a vast cultural gap between the Japanese and Americans. Says he: "They do not realize that some of us live for the weekend, while lots of them live for the week --just so they can begin to work again." Some workers grumble about the delays caused by the Japanese system of managing by consensus, seeing it instead as an inability to make decisions. Complains one American: "There is a lot of indecision. No manager will ever say do this or do that."

Most American workers, though, like the Japanese management style, and some do not find it all that foreign. Says Supervisor Robert Williams: "A long time ago, Americans used to be more people-oriented, the way the Japanese are. It just got lost somewhere along the way." The Sony experience in San Diego might show Americans how to regain some of their lost skills at employee relations.

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