Uchiyama 

Europe 

GmbH

Unternehmenskultur

The working atmosphere was toxic due to management incompetency. Some managers run the One-Man show and did whatever pleased their ego, while the top management passively watching and doing barely anything about it. The headquarters is too far to see what is happening in the Dusseldorf office, but also not interested in the well-being of the employees.
Only in one year half of of the employees left the company, now you can have a clear picture of the working atmosphere. (Refer to previous Kununu reviews to see the pattern)

One of the biggest problems in this company is communication, especially with the headquarters and the local management. As described in the previous sections, the company is heavily dependent on the headquarters in Japan. Most of the employees in the headquarters have limited English skills, and even those who understand English may sometimes pretend not to, in order to avoid assigned tasks.
On a daily basis, communication is required with company branches in three different countries, each in different time zones. Simple inquiries about product status must be emailed to various locations, and responses often come after several days and multiple rounds of email exchanges. With the implementation of a centralized product management system, such inquiries could be resolved within seconds.

Except for the overseas colleagues and the management, dealing with most onsite colleagues was pleasant. But still, there was no team spirit.

Work-Life-Balance is a foreign phenomenon in this company. When you're sick and have an official doctor's report showing that you're unable to work, you will be asked to work from home, and in some cases, even pressured to come to the office. If you resist and declare that you're not able to work due to the same reasons for which the doctor has issued the report, then with disbelief, you will be asked to provide details about your sickness.

While some were drowning in excessive workload and had to do unpaid overtime to deal with it, others arranged 'business trips' to one specific city as frequently as once every two weeks sometimes. Here, I am not questioning the real goal, frequency, and city of these trips, but the most important question should be: What happens to their workload?

The behavior of some superiors, who acted as the de facto "Mr. Everything" of the company, was far from decent. Mobbing, humiliating, shouting, threatening… were among the most used managerial skills in their toolkit. They used these tools on employees both in workplace and outside workplace, even in public places, to intimidate them.
They didn't hesitate to make racist remarks and mock people's religious beliefs openly in front of the employees. Additionally, they negatively stereotyped and mocked employees for their religious practices, sometimes calling them by demeaning names.
Ironically, when former colleagues raised concerns about racist and sexist behavior of the management on platforms like Kununu, this same manager would publicly declare that such behavior had no place in the company and encouraged reporting such incidents to him!

There are plenty of interesting tasks, like asking the headquarter colleagues for the fifth or sixth time to send you the data that the customer needs and now you’re running out of all the creative excuses to justify this delay to the customer. Other interesting tasks include jumping from one folder to another in the well-organized data storage system so that you can find the needed data. Email, Excel and folders are the ultimate solutions here.
Some people delegated vast majority of their tasks to others, so that they had enough time to interfere in the topics they had no idea about.
Occasionally you will be pressured to sign contracts/documents that are beyond your area of responsibility and knowledge.