Hi there! I’m Sato (@slamdunk772), representing applemint, a digital marketing company based in Taiwan.
Today, I want to talk about why delegating tasks blindly in Taiwan isn’t a good idea, which applies not only to our local staff but also to our outsourcing partners.
In our day-to-day operations in Taiwan, amidst the hustle and bustle, there’s often a temptation to delegate tasks to companies and staff to lighten our load. I understand this sentiment well. However, Taiwan operates differently from Japan in this regard. While delegating tasks in Japan often yields satisfactory results, the same cannot always be said for Taiwan.
I believe it’s essential to maintain mutual supervision and a healthy level of accountability when delegating tasks.
In this blog post, I’ll share three instances where delegating tasks in Taiwan didn’t go as planned. I hope this blog serves as a valuable reference for executives and managers navigating the Taiwanese business landscape.
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Instances where leaders are unaware of how money is being spent
Let me tell you about a certain company. In short, the CEO of this company had no grasp of how the marketing budget was being utilized and what results it was generating.
The CEO had delegated all marketing activities to the marketing team.
Once, when we went to propose digital marketing strategies to the CEO, we suggested, “Let’s visualize the current marketing efforts and allocate funds more effectively to impactful campaigns!” The reaction from the marketing team was memorable—they appeared quite displeased.
And it’s understandable why. When marketing efforts are visualized, the autonomy they had enjoyed is restricted, and they are required to provide rationale and justifications for their strategies.
To complicate matters, the marketing team at this company were inexperienced in digital marketing; they were unfamiliar with tracking methods and lacked understanding of how to present their strategies visually.
As a consequence, they were pouring a significant amount of money into influencer partnerships each month without a clear grasp of their effectiveness. If the marketing team had been colluding with influencers and receiving kickbacks, it would have been even worse…
Stories like this, where tasks are blindly entrusted to local staff in Taiwan and company funds are squandered, are not uncommon. In this case, the Japanese CEO, fearing conflict and disliked by employees, chose to relinquish oversight of the Taiwanese staff, resulting in wasteful spending.
Many leaders of Japanese companies in Taiwan frequently mention “delegating” tasks, which may sound convenient and imply trust, but in practice, it often resembles neglecting responsibility.
Applemint Mishaps
Let me share a recent instance where applemint, like other companies, faced failures due to delegation.
In April 2024, I organized an event in Taiwan. However, in the 2-3 months leading up to the event, my focus was solely on its preparation, causing me to neglect applemint’s overall management.
During this period, two veteran staff members resigned in succession, and new staff members joined, requiring significant training and attention. This distracted me from closely monitoring our financial metrics, including sales and costs.
Feeling the strain of inexperienced new hires and sensing the company’s vulnerabilities, I made the decision to delegate more tasks to external partners.
By May, following the event, I took a moment to reassess our financial health and was dismayed to find that costs had ballooned and profits were under pressure. The company’s productivity had also dipped, prompting us to consider bringing more tasks in-house, though this risked compromising service quality.
We subsequently reviewed our expenditures meticulously, deciding to continue outsourcing where necessary but eliminating non-essential outsourced tasks aimed solely at easing our workload.
It may seem like common sense, but this experience underscored the critical importance of consistently managing costs in effective business management…
Remote Work Failure Results in Full Office Attendance
In Japan, remote work has significantly advanced since COVID-19. Perhaps the biggest concern with remote work is whether everyone is truly working effectively from home. Occasionally, there’s talk about younger Japanese workers having poor work attitudes, but I believe that the majority of Japanese employees working for “big corporations” or medium-sized companies are dedicated.
I emphasize “big corporations” because the treatment of employees varies between large and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), affecting work attitudes.
Even relatively large companies in Japan often become SMEs when they expand into Taiwan. SMEs in Taiwan typically do not offer the same benefits and salary packages as large corporations, sticking to more standard compensation and benefits. Unfortunately, expecting high performance from staff with such standard compensation doesn’t always translate well abroad.
A certain Japanese expatriate general manager in Taiwan, drawing from their experience of successfully implementing remote work post-COVID-19 in Japan, decided to adopt remote work practices actively in Taiwan as well.
However, the outcome was less than successful, and within a few months of introducing remote work, the company found itself mandating full office attendance again 😅
I view this more as a matter of compensation rather than national character. Around me, there are successful cases of remote work in Taiwanese companies.
Taiwanese companies that excel in remote work often provide competitive compensation to their employees. For example, many employees at high-paying companies like Taiwanese subsidiaries of foreign firms or TSMC are known to maintain discipline and perform well even when working remotely.
Unfortunately, many expatriates sent from Japan to Taiwan sometimes overlook their company’s SME status in Taiwan and expect the same productivity levels from their employees as they did back in Japan.
However, it’s worth repeating that demanding productivity without investing adequately in Taiwan (or abroad) is unrealistic 😅
On the flip side, among Japanese companies in Taiwan, it’s not uncommon for less productive employees who have lost their place in the head office to be dispatched to Taiwan with high salaries under the guise of “exile.” Moving forward, if true success is desired in Taiwan, reforming such wasteful practices and establishing a system that offers appropriate salaries to local Taiwanese staff is crucial.
However, “talk is cheap,” and companies have their own reasons, so it may be inevitable that low-productivity individuals earn high salaries in Taiwan…
In conclusion, from the perspective of applemint’s representative, this was a discussion about how delegating responsibilities to local staff and companies in Taiwan equates to abandoning responsibility!
Click to contact applemint.
