The Progress Report in 2021(Summer): How Zeals Becomes a Global Team

Introduction

Hi there! I'm Ryota Araki, currently working as an HR for the development department and belong to the CTO Office in Zeals (I wrote about the CTO Office in the last section).

I decided to write an article about the globalization of Zeals because around a half year passed since I wrote the article below at the end of last year(it was in Japanese though), lots of things have been happening in Zeals and I want to publish them to the world.

And first of all, I personally do not like to write like "Non-Japanese" or "foreign members", etc. Because as far as I am using these expressions, we are still Japanese organization, and these expressions make me feel as if I'm far from team members. But for its convenience, I sometimes use these kinds of expressions in this article. However, hopefully in a few years, the diversity will be respected more and we will not use these kinds of words anymore in Zeals.

Globalization Overview

For those who do not know Zeals or did not read my last article, I briefly write the background of the globalization of Zeals and Zeals itself. Zeals is a chatbots startup company based in Japan. And now we are pushing on globalization mainly because of 2 reasons. To make challenges of products in global markets and to improve the scalability of a development team. There might be other big reasons behind it, but as far as I understand, these are the main background of our globalization.

ZEALS Co.,ltd | 株式会社Zeals(ジールス)

By the way in the last article, I wrote like "Zeals decided to make a dev team globalized since last July", but that was incorrect. Zeals decided to recruit non-Japanese members in the phase of the very beginning when full-time workers are less than 10. Therefore, "last July, Zeals decided to accelerate our globalization more" would be correct. Around 40% of members in a dev team were already non-Japanese members as of July last year and I realized this was a very big advantage to realize our current globalization through the conversation with people in other Japanese startups.

Globalization of the dev team

We are still proceeding with the global recruitment in the dev department, and now that more than 70% of the members in the dev team (including HR, PMs) are foreign members. If we focus on only engineers/designers, more than 80% are from foreign countries. The number of nationalities also increased and went over 20, so I can say our team got even more diverse. 

Recently I compared the recruitment of global engineers with the recruitment of Japanese engineers. And in conclusion, I figured out these 2 ways have difficult points in different phases respectively. 

Firstly, focusing on Japanese engineers in recruitment is very tough. In that respect, recruiting foreign engineers is not that much difficult (of course, not easy). For instance, once I used one major Japanese engineer's recruitment service, I searched for ("kubernetes" or "k8s"), and then it hit only 10 engineers. However, on LinkedIn, it hits 830k+ candidates with the same keywords.

Meanwhile, global teams are harder to build than fully Japanese teams. In terms of languages, even though we use English, most of our team members are not native English speakers. And members in the dev team communicating with Japanese clients or members in other departments (they are mostly non-English speakers) is also not easy. And in terms of culture, among Japanese or the same nationalities, they have some sort of unspoken agreement. Also in the case of Zeals, some engineers are working from other countries, so time differences or the difference of local matters (e.g. national holidays, currencies, the frequency of natural disasters, etc.) could be problems sometimes.

We have been recruiting 2 to 4 engineers every month during this last a half year, and now we are trying to make this number 5 to 6 these days. As I wrote before, one reason we decided to accelerate the globalization of the dev team was to improve the scalability of a development team, so in the respect of recruitment, I can say we have made good achievements so far. However, we still have several big walls to take advantage of a global team. I will be very honest here and write about 3 main problems we are facing and we have to face, and how we are trying to get over them from now on.

The problems a dev team have to get over

The first problem is, we do not verbalize and define the stance of our organization yet. "Culture Map" shows 8 significant differences in business scenes depending on culture, and Zeals also have to face these differences.  For example, the author of "Culture Map" states in some cultures people are willing to get negative feedback directly, but that kind of feedback is not acceptable in some other cultures. Consciously or unconsciously, we should make mutual understandings on these kinds of points.

The second problem is the difference in contract types. Some members are working from outside of Japan right now because of the pandemic, even though some of them want to come work in Japan right away. And currently, Zeals is not hiring them directly because Zeals does not have any foreign branches in other countries, and Zeals might be able to employ them in some countries, but we could not make research for the possibility of employing them directly because of lack of resources and expertise for this topic. That is why members working from overseas are currently working as subcontractors, not as permanent staff. 

However, we want to make every full-time member of our team fair because we want to pursue our vision or build our culture together. Also to improve the productivity of the members, our engineer team is trying to make our team as flexible as possible in terms of location, work hours, diversity, languages, etc. Therefore we have to make solutions for making a team everyone can feel a part of a team without having unfairness or big differences, otherwise I cannot say with confidence that our decision of recruiting members in other countries was a critical step to push Zeals forward.

The third problem is pretty simple, languages. So far, members in a dev team are basically talking with each other, but now we are trying to make our team cross-functional. In this cross-functional teams, English-speaking engineers and Japanese-speaking business members belong to the same team. However, all members mastering English is realistically impossible, so now we are thinking and discussing the culture and support system. The point here is we should think of "Zeals-like" system or culture. For example, focusing on what you gain from learning English and encouraging members to learn English is pretty "Zeals-like", rather than making penalty for the members do not learn English. While avoiding from our ideas being a castle in the air, we will find realistic and Zeals-like ways here.

↑ We sometimes "gather" for having a casual conversation in Gather Town. Using this kind of service is one good way to promote communication beyond the difference of departments.

Summary

As I wrote in the introduction part, I'm currently working at the CTO Office, this team is basically working as an HRPR in the dev team, and I'm the leader of this team for now. The mission of the CTO Office is "To expand the engineering organization at Zeals". So our team should be working on the recruitment, PR for developers, improving employee experience for members in a dev team, scaling up the dev team aside from recruitment, etc. We have many things to do to fulfill our mission, and we can expand our work by facing our mission more.

The globalization of Zeals is still on the way, and the 3 problems above are just the main ones. I want to talk with someone who knows a lot about the globalization of organizations. Also, Zeals is actively hiring people and now Zeals is in a very exciting phase. So if you want to build a global team together, feel free to contact me. I am very open to having casual meetings or discussions. My LinkedIn profile can be found here.

I will probably write my next article by the end of this year, or I might write another article around this autumn if I feel like it. Thank you for reading my article, hope to see you in the next article soon!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RyotaAraki