Exceptional Onboarding Program at OJ Electronics - Enhancing Employee Success & Growth

This applies not only to company management or employees with the most seniority. Right from the start, new OJ employees realize that this is not a company where you simply follow instructions and do your job quietly, learning gradually as the months and years go by. At OJ, the “whole you” is hired – including your ideas and willingness to share them.

But at OJ, like everywhere, speaking out is only half the equation. The other part is a receptiveness to new ideas – a basic curiosity and willingness to listen without judging, even if you come from a different department, have a lower-level position, or haven’t been with the company very long.

Because to succeed in business, a company must innovate. To innovate, you need ideas. And to turn ideas into innovation, they must be shared and taken seriously.

This article takes a deep dive into OJ’s culture of sharing and listening to ideas – and what employees themselves say lies behind it.”

Ideas from everywhere

At OJ Electronics, new ideas come from different places. In many cases, a new idea will be introduced by a customer. This is obviously important at a company like OJ, where collaboration with OEM customers is a big part of the business.

Sometimes a new idea emerges just from observing market trends. Are there new needs emerging? New technologies? What are customers really looking for right now? OJ’s innovations in digital displays and cloud services, for example, started with this sort of market awareness.

And then, of course, ideas emerge from within the company itself. And this is where speaking out and being heard are so important. According to Morten Zimmer Hansen, a product manager in our Thermostats unit who has been with OJ for over 30 years, ideas arise from within the product management team, but a lot of our ideas are generated in interaction with each other.

“There are weekly meetings for exchange of ideas, but in general we’re a small company where people naturally share ideas within their own teams – and often beyond”

Morten Zimmer Hansen, Product Manager

Sharing is part of the job

Lennart Grünsteidl, an embedded software engineer who joined OJ in 2023, says that when he comes up with a new idea, he shares it with his immediate co-workers first, but will often also raise the idea with his boss. “Once I even went to my boss’s boss with a new idea that I felt excited about,” Lennart says, added that OJ also makes it easy to go from one department to another with an idea. “It saves a lot of work and time in an environment where you often have to move fast.”

Lennart Grünsteidl, Embedded Software Engineer

Tobias Schult, Hardware Engineer

Tobias Schult, who joined OJ as a hardware engineer in 2024, was surprised that he was welcomed to initiate his own project at OJ after a very short time at the company. “For an employee, you naturally want to see your ideas brought to life in new products or improvements to existing ones,” he says, emphasizing that the project involved working closely with Morten and other colleagues in and outside his own department.

Jörn Petersen, an embedded software engineer who has been at OJ over 20 years, says that idea-sharing becomes especially important when time pressure is high. “When you have to move quickly, collaboration becomes even more important,” he says. “You can’t make decisions unilaterally, so you naturally involve the people around you – often beyond your own team.” Jörn sees this openness as deeply embedded in OJ’s culture. “It’s just part of the way we do things.”

Jörn Petersen, Embedded Software Engineer

Great ideas in unexpected places

Quite a number of OJ solutions have been created based on ideas from unexpected directions.

IDEA

An employee in the Production Technology department noticed that customer logo printing on white-label products – carried out at sub-suppliers with a 10,000-piece minimum and separate stock numbers for each customer – was expensive. He suggested a local printer who could apply the logos post-production, reducing both costs and complexity.

IDEA

Lennart recalls an employee in OJ’s assembly department coming to the software development team with an idea for altering the software used in product testing. The idea was well received, and the idea put in place – improving the testing process and, of course, the end result for OJ customers.

IDEA

Morten remembers when thermostats with displays were first in demand, and OJ was worried about the redesign costs of integrating a display. Someone came up with a “crazy idea” to simply remove a mechanical switch on the thermostat and install a small display in the hole left behind. The company aimed to sell 3,000 of these units in the first year ended up selling 15,000.

IDEA

Then there’s the story, recalled by several OJ employees, of a student who did her internship at OJ. Even as an ‘outsider’, she felt comfortable enough forwarding ideas that she proposed a different way of implementing cloud connectivity. The idea was implemented – in a testament to just how receptive OJ is to new ideas, no matter where they come from.

“Even the crazy ones”

Morten loves the energy that new hires bring when they start at OJ and the ideas they come up with. He is always curious to hear a new idea – “even the crazy ones” – because there are often parts of even the craziest idea that can be put to use.

And if an idea doesn’t work out? Jörn notes that OJ is very good at handling failures. “There’s never shaming at OJ,” he says. “Here, we look at the problem, not the perpetrator.” Jörn has also seen many employees move around the company over the years – often to pursue interests they’ve developed along the way. Morten himself has held five different positions at OJ Electronics.

A deliberate strategy

OJ’s managing director Anders Høgh Skov says that – although forwarding and being receptive to new ideas might come easier at a small company with a close-knit culture – it’s also something that management is deliberately cultivating. “Curiosity,” he says, “is one of a handful of themes we are focusing on in our work to make OJ a stronger and more competitive company.”

Anders also emphasizes the company’s relative lack of hierarchy as a factor that facilitates the sharing of ideas: “Anyone can speak their mind to anyone else here at OJ. A floor worker can talk to me directly, without going through his or her manager or anyone else. The attitude we cultivate that makes this possible is one of trust and no judgment.”

Another organizational step the company has taken recently is to create business-area teams where decision-making has been decentralized and pushed out to those closest to the issue in question. OJ’s head of HR Marianne Betzer sees this as part of the company’s work to create a culture of adhocracy – where agility, curiosity, and a willingness to take risks lead to stronger innovation.

The company is also tweaking its project development model to encourage employees to remain in the exploratory phase – which involves considering possible solutions – a little longer. “Instead of just going with the obvious solution,” Anders explains, “we want our teams to think a little longer about what might be possible, what different viable solutions could look like.”

According to others, OJ has always been a company that operates this way, and that this is surely one reason why the company’s owners chose it for acquisition, because BITZER Group has a philosophy of really using the powers of its people.

Rooted in culture

For Anders, the idea that employees should share and listen to ideas is rooted in OJ’s culture and that of the company’s owner, the BITZER Group. “BITZER has a philosophy of really using its own talent – making the best of what our people have to offer,” he explains. “Part of that means encouraging people to think and then share their ideas.”

The other side of the equation, he concludes, is listening: “Ideas are only useful if our culture also emphasizes listening – really having our antennas out so we’re ready to receive the latest great idea.”

Given this grounding in curiosity, trust, and a willingness to take risks, it’s really no surprise that OJ Electronics is a place where people are encouraged – no, expected – to come up with and share their ideas, and where those ideas are often taken seriously enough to shape technologies and products that keep the company ahead.