The “Working at Rapyuta” series celebrates some of the best minds at Rapyuta Robotics. Through interviews with employees, we bring you the real story that you won’t find elsewhere.
Vol.2
Eriko Tabuchi – Talent Acquisition ＆ Marketing Manager
After graduating from Keio University, she worked in sales at a financial institution and was in charge of product planning for international flight lounge services at JAL for about 5 years. She then joined WeWork as Community Strategy Director, leading the service strategy and organization.
She joined Rapyuta Robotics in August 2021 and is currently responsible for People Operations and Public Relations.
Individuals become happier and organizations become stronger through “work”
I have been involved in services related to “work” for about seven years since I started working at JAL, including my previous job at WeWork.
I was in charge of international lounge services in JAL’s product planning department, where I mainly planned services for customers before their business trips.
I had been thinking, “It would be interesting if a business collaboration could be born here and I was struck by the concept of WeWork, a community-style coworking space, and decided to take on a new challenge.
At WeWork, I had the opportunity to experience working in a startup and the diversity of working styles. I had the chance to work with over 3,000 people from 500 different companies and organizations, create my organization and services, develop my team, and gain a lot of experience in accomplishing something for the first time in a short period.
In addition, through my experience as a people manager for a total of 30 people, I realized that people can achieve higher performance and work happily in an environment where they can utilize their strengths. Positive psychology research shows that improved well-being increases productivity and sales by more than 130% and creativity by 3 times.
As a human resource manager of a global organization, I became interested in realizing “an organization where all people can work happily by leveraging their strengths and thereby achieve their highest performance. I was strongly attracted to the diverse culture of Rapyuta Robotics, where more than half of the members are from overseas even though it is a Japanese startup, the personalities, and leadership of the two founders, and decided to join Rapyuta Robotics about a year and a half ago.
Organizations become stronger when diverse personalities come together, and we want to create a role model for global organizations
The deciding factor for me to join the company was, of course, the role that I wanted to play, but also the leadership of the two founders and my empathy for their mission, vision, and values. I had the opportunity to talk with both of them before my interview, and I was convinced that they are leaders who have the boldness, strength, and kindness to change the world.
Although the number of interviews was not small, I could feel that all the interviewers were trying to understand me, and through the interviews, I became more and more fascinated by Rapyuta’s culture and the people who work there. I was again convinced that I wanted to create a role model for future organizations in society by successfully leading this organization, where diverse people come together to achieve a single mission.
Today, as the owner of the People Operations Squad, I oversee the teams responsible for people operations, public relations, and marketing. To create a flatter organization, Rapyuta Robotics is made up of “squads” of 5-10 team members, rather than departments. By distributing authority to each squad, we can communicate and make decisions quickly.
In my squad, I am in charge of recruiting, employee experience-related tasks (onboarding and offboarding procedures, employee engagement, evaluation, HR-related regulations, internal event planning, training planning and execution, visa application support, etc.), and public relations.
The Japan office has 7 staff members and the India office has 4 staff members, and the two offices work closely together. In terms of recruitment, since robotics requires engineers with extremely advanced and diverse skills, we are always keeping our eyes on the world and hiring talented people from all over the world. We also jointly plan and implement training and events so that all employees can work as one team, regardless of whether they are in Japan or India.
Although most of our communication is online, our Indian team members recently traveled to the Tokyo office for a month to have a face-to-face discussion about our mid-term strategy.
The fun of creating a standard from scratch
When I joined the company, we had less than 100 people. But, but through trial and error with new initiatives such as recruitment content creation, PR, events, and partnerships, we have been able to attract more people and have now grown to over 160 people.
As the number of people joining has increased, we have also continued to improve our onboarding process. I believe that we now have a system in place that allows new members to feel comfortable joining the company and playing an active role.
I was new to both People Operations and the industry, so I tried my best to learn from communicating with many employees while studying hard. Rapyuta employees are very kind and talented, and they took sincere care of my amateurish questions. With the support of my colleagues, I was able to learn more about the people in the company and their work, which helped me to speed up my output. It also gave me confidence in myself that by successfully pivoting and applying my experience in another field, I could demonstrate my ability in an area in which I had no experience. The process of building up one by one while learning is very interesting and extremely rewarding.
6 core values of Rapyuta Robotics
Rapyuta Robotics has six guiding principles for decision-making, called Core Values that we value as a company to ensure that our global and diverse members are moving in one direction.
Because our members are multinational and have diverse backgrounds, ways of thinking, and areas of expertise, we are all constantly aware of these core values and make decisions based on them. I feel that [Fearlessness] is the foundation of the six core values. The company fosters an environment that is tolerant and supportive of taking ownership and taking action to achieve the company’s goals. The spirit of [Fearlessness] allows us to respect each person’s strengths and values, and to take on challenges.
I was very grateful for the existence of this value for me who had a series of challenges after joining the company, and I have been allowed to promote the organization of my squad with a great deal of discretion. When I joined the company, the Tokyo people operations was a team of only two recruiters, but now we have more members and are becoming the strongest team that can support employees in many directions. Society changes quickly, so I believe that our organization needs to continue to change as well. While preserving the foundation of the current culture, I would like to create an organization that can maximize performance by continuing to search for and provide an environment where each individual can work with even more satisfaction than before.
It’s no fun to be all the same. We are all going to see the world created from unexpected expansion
Rapyuta Robotics is an open and flat environment because we are an organization with a diverse group of members. Regardless of job title or position, we can easily communicate as necessary to solve issues we want to solve toward our mission and vision as a company, and we can all support each other.
In this culture, we hope to create the future of Rapyuta Robotics with people who are excited about our goal of making robotics attainable & useful for anyone.
I also hope that working at Rapyuta Robotics will mean something to the lives of every one of our employees. Through the hiring process, I love to see if what a candidate wants to accomplish in life matches the future and culture we envision for our company.
I believe that if we have the same goals and aspirations, we can achieve more than we ever imagined, even if our spoken languages and experiences are completely different. I believe that people are interesting because they all have different strengths and can create a future that cannot be imagined alone.
Let’s work together to create a world beyond our imagination, born from the expansion of people with sharp and unique talents.
We’re hiring!
