Japanese semiconductor equipment manufacturer Disco is famous for its unusual corporate culture. While many
companies
change their corporate culture with different standards and traditional approaches, Disco has taken its own unique
path:
employees must pay each other and must pay for everything (Bloomberg).
And now let's talk about it in order. Disco was founded in 1937. The CEO is Kazuma Sekiya, and the company was
founded
by his grandfather, who introduced an internal currency called «Will» in 2011 to create a micro-economy. The
essence of
this system is that employees pay each other for everything - sales departments pay workers in factories that make
products, and workers in factories pay engineers for product development, thus working groups or teams bill each
other
for work done. As mentioned above, employees pay for everything - the computer, the workspace, the meeting rooms
and
desks, i.e., everything has a price in «Will». Employees work like startups: they bid for a certain job every day
and
compete for the right to present their ideas in a place called the «Colosseum».
Each time Disco makes a new deal with a customer, the amount of "Will" currency is replenished. Disco management
converts the remaining "coins" into employee bonuses at the end of each quarter.
During the pandemic, the company could not afford to have all employees work remotely because it was necessary to
keep
the plants running, so the company introduced a system in which employees who worked remotely paid a certain
amount,
some of which went to employees who continued to work as usual. In this way, the company's currency provided
behavioral
incentives, leaving the choice to the employees. At the beginning of the caronavirus pandemic, about 40% of the
company's employees continued to work as usual, receiving substantial bonuses for doing so, while the company's
infection rate remained quite low. The company now has about 5,600 employees, and as of June 2021, nearly 90% had
returned to work, while 10% were still working from home and bonuses were down from 2020. Management believes the
system
is fair enough, as Disco CEO Kazuma Sekiya told Bloomberg, "It's not fair to require some employees to be present
in the
office while others work from home."
Are all employees happy? No. As Kazuma Sekiva stated - several people have quit. However, the experiment, which
began in
2011, has brought visible results. Disco's sales profitability has risen to 26%, up from 16% before the
introduction of
the system. Disco posted record revenue and profit last fiscal year, the highest margin in the industry, and its
stock
has more than tripled in the last 5 years (Bloomberg).