Next Stop: the classy city “Stockholm”

    IMG_6218Our next stop in Scandinavia is the gorgeous city, Stockholm. Stockholm is an very unique city because it is built on islands and surrounded by water. We took the SJ train from Gothenburg in the early morning, however, there was an accident that cause us arrived in Stockholm 1.30 hours later than our actual schedule. Right after we arrived we went to meet with Bettina Baumgartner, who working for a company called “Sandvik”. The presentation started with safety, which is pretty much about where is the emergency exit, and explanation about why they to start with the safety before the meeting. From the reason that their company mission is “Zero Accident”, everyone in the company must be thinking about the safety all the time, not only for the people in the production or engineer. Sandvik has their 4-core values, which are customer focus, innovation, fair play and passion to win. They claim that they set the industry standard with that 4-core values; especially, innovation and fair play is kind of unique.

    IMG_7386However, some of the company in Thailand which I had experienced with, we have pretty much similarly attitude, mission and vision as their company. For example, the Siam Cement Group, the company has the same vision and mission. SCG is ruled by the engineer and has exactly the same mission which is “zero accident”. Before every town hall meeting at SCG, they always started with safety story such as an accident in the quarter and, also, before the monthly department meeting the employees should sharing some story about the safety too. They also have quite similar 4-core values to Sandvik as well. The first one is SCG’s “Coherence to Fairness” and Sandvik’s “Fair Play”, these are quite similar in term of fair, such as the company need to be fair with other companies and all of the customers. Plus, I might say that one is close to Sandvik’s “Customer Focus” too. Secondly, SCG’s “Dedication to Excellence” and Sandvik’s “Innovation” and “Passion to win” are also comparable to each other, however, Sandviks’ is more specifically focus on beating with other company than SCG’s. The great reason about the culture that we can differentiate between them is Thailand companies are more care and have some attitudes that talking about the “internal” employee more than Swedish companies.IMG_2076

    We were so interested in how can we maintain that 4-core values sustainably and how can we make all of the employees keep all of that thing in their mind when they are working. Bettina said that Sandvik has some Code of Conduct training, e-learning, and communicate with their employee as often as possible. The code of conduct training is quite interesting for us, in South East Asia, most of the company do care about the employees but we always forget about training the culture to them.