Japanese companies are generally extremely inefficient. Outside of a few powerhouses, partially thanks to a protected and large domestic market, Japanese labor practices are antiquated. There is a culture of overwork that begets a culture of inefficiency that boggles the mind. Few people know that Japan has a labor productivity lower than Italy, for example.
To give a concrete example, you will have companies where people will make sure to start meetings at 7 pm to make sure they can maximize "残業" (overtime). The labor ministry is trying to curb on companies that expect more than 80 hours of overtime per month. On top of it, if you live in one of the big city (Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka), 3 hours of commute per day is not atypical. And then you have the practice of 飲み会 ("business dinners" where people drink, abuse toward women common, etc.), which also takes time.
Finally, Japanese companies rely a lot on paper and 判子 (hanko) and other seals systems. My wife sometimes has to go the desk of a colleague dozens of times a day to get some paperwork. IT systems are antiquated. And yet, Japan has one of the most educated workforce in the world. Especially women are often relegated to menial work. Internet is fast everywhere. It is the true steam punk country !
Coronavirus and WFH change this. Seeing large companies like fujitsu publicly taking a stance is highly significant in a country like Japan where executives are often extremely risk adverse.
If you spent so much time at the workplace like the Japanese you end up with a low producivity on paper pretty much by definition, because it's simply output divided by amount of time worked.
But I wouldn't overestimate the importance of computerization on productivity which is actually extremely low. Here in Germany we have a similar paper culture (although not quite as extreme) but very high labour productivity. The Japanese could simply go home or work a day less and their productivity would go up, it's not really comparable to much of Italy. (except the north of italy which is actually also extremely productive).
In fact Microsoft in Japan actually did just that and introduced a 4 day week a while ago, and productivity went up 40% (https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...)
It is not as simple as that: in general, more developed countries tend to have higher labor productivity. Japan has been historically low for several decades.
I'm no specialist of labor statistics, but note that Japan actaually worked fewers hours than Italy , accoding to OECD anyaway: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS. I am pretty sure that most people unfamiliar w/ Japan would not place its productivity as low as it is, close to countries like Turkey or Slovakia.
>Here in Germany we have a similar paper culture (although not quite as extreme) but very high labour productivity
I am familiar with both countries, worked in both, and it is nowhere near comparable. But paper is only part of it. The overtime culture is quite intense. I still vividly remember my first work experience in Japan > 15 years ago, with 3-4 hours-long meetings where half the members, including the lab's head, were sleeping.
My anecdotal experience is that I think the most fun, and therefore most productive place to work in the Western world so far, for me anyway - was the good ol' USA.
Sure, the 80 hour work weeks were killer. But, the camaraderie, coordination, and just fun getting-shit-done'ness of the average American company exceeds most others.
But only if there was no daily commute, because a daily commute in America is a sheer kind of hell that nobody should tolerate - in which case, Japan or Austria are definitely the lifestyle/work balance leaders, even though they are far lazier cultures - Germany too, to some extent, but I could generalise about Germany until my holzhacker is burned to a crisp, and it'd still taste great.
Anyway, the reduced work week culture can be observed around the world. I think, the efficacy of the culture matters too, though. Germans admire rigor, Austrians reward laziness - Japanese, duplicity - and America, getting things done no matter what.
These were all just regular very good senior engineers. But it would have been insulting to go to the meeting without the inflated titles.
The bug was very specific to their use case and they wouldn't help us replicate it in our labs so I never figured it out until a year later helping another customer. It was a bug in counter wraparound handling.
It's one of the most fascinating things I love about Japan.
[edit: typo]
For example are Toyota's engineering and factories running on wasted meeting time, fax machines, and hand-written letters? Doesn't seem likely. If they are it seems to produce great results!
There are synchronous human tasks in some assembly-lines, but as long as they're rote tasks, inefficiency usually isn't introduced. Humans working as if they were machines, are rarely inefficient; and if they are, this inefficiency is "legible" for blue-collar work in a way that it isn't for white-collar work, so an inefficient human "part" can be, er, swapped out.
The whole "thing" that Toyota did to revolutionize car manufacturing, was essentially to make quality-assurance part of the same ground-level machine (i.e. make it a computed outcome of a series of "dumb" machine and worker steps), rather than making it a separate auditing process. As such, they essentially squeezed the ability to be inefficiency/incompetent out of the QA process.
I used to work at Toyota, although it might have changed since I was there (I doubt it changed significantly, though).
The factories and supply chain seemed well optimized. This is a huge cost in producing cars, so it makes sense to focus on this even over engineering productivity, to some extent.
But engineering certainly did involve lots of meetings, paper documents with hanko seals, and antiquated IT systems.
>For example is Toyota also thriving on wasted meeting time, fax machines, and hand-written letters? Doesn't seem likely.
I don't want to go too much in specifics, but the examples I gave are actually coming from a company whose sole client is a large car company.
They’re also the exception. The domestic economy is generally heavily protected, regulated, and inefficient.
One view of the situation is that the exporters prop up the rest of the economy with their foreign revenues.
As somebody driving a Toyota they simply don't add too many gimmicks and options are usually limited to just trim levels and maybe a few bundles you can buy separately. Overall it's a far cry from e.g. German manufacturers where the configuration form can have tens of items from which you can pick and choose.
Also apparently creative work such as software engineering lends itself to inefficiencies, because the outcome isn't easily measurable. You have to have a culture that accepts irreducible uncertainty to navigate in such an environment.
All the overtime and useless meetings produce a lot of decisions by consensus that balance out the random “maverick” ideas a VP might come up with. This creates a bizarre balancing act that sometimes produces decently market-synced products.
Also the just crazy amount of seasonality in Japan makes even the slowest moving company make large pivots at least four times a year. New season? New product, even if it’s weird and nobody wanted it, they figure out how to sell it and get 1500 workers to all shift left at the same time.
When it comes to computer products, I am a fan of REALFORCE keyboards, which are manufactured in Japan. They have really made a difference in my day to day work.
Have you cross shopped vehicles lately? Your statement is arguably true about Nissan and Nissan only.
Japanese light vehicles typically carry an initial price premium that self perpetuates for a whole host of reasons beyond the scope of this discussion.
Disclaimer: Gaijin, working in Japanese company
That starts to date now but I have been at karaoke parties where some guys would be naked w/ a sock on their dick dancing. I also had to several times make sure women would get back safely because some colleagues clearly tried to get them to miss their last train and go to a love hotel.
Japan is a country where still today politicians can say that women after 40 are useless because cannot procreate. For the very few public sexual harassment affairs, the common defense of the perpetrator is to claim the woman was looking for it. It is victim blaming all the way down.
I think this is the phenomenon you describe (Office ladies):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_lady
But not all women are like this. There are career oriented women that are not interested in menial work or becoming housewives.
Which would explain the paper use. Don’t know if it’s still true though.
Usually things that seem inefficient boils down to law in the end.
source please, there's no need to add baseless trivia to underline your point
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report#WEF_G...
The culture of the customer is always right also implies making contortions to please them, including many on site meetings where you have to be there just as a sign of respect. It is interesting the first time you do it, but gets boring fast.
I believe Japan has so much untapped potential, the generalization of WFH may be the catalyst for Japanese management practices to catch up the last 60 years.
I've always wondered if there could be something like a badge you could put on your business, to signal that you're participating in a separate sub-economy where the customer isn't always right. There must be modern companies where both sides of the giving-face transaction are just going through the motions with neither side actually thinking that that's the way things should be. Can't both sides in a long-standing relationship just get together to agree to change the deal? Or, if they can't do it on their own, can't a third party help them?
Maybe there could be a Japanese charter-city with the goal of being a "mock Silicon Valley", i.e. where every business there knows that every other business else there is going to present itself with the attitude of a real SV startup where you "fire your bad customers" and so forth. So, when dealing with a company from there, everyone else would know that you don't have to give them any face, just like you don't need to give real Americans any face.
I've been reading some Japanese discussions boards about remote and it's a mixed big. A lot of people enjoy remote and say it's their first time not having to do OT anymore because of the lack of (assumed) peer pressure. Some new managers are now discovering that they can contact their employees at any time of day now due to services like Slack. Not that they couldn't before, it's just more efficient now.
Either the general feeling is 'I've seen things now that I cannot unsee' and the expectation is things will change but no one is sure in which direction.
The reason the tides are changing is that there is a social consciousness aspect to it now whereas before it would've been viewed differently.
My wife and I are both WFH right now, and we had to buy a second desk and chair and repurpose what was previously our 2nd bedroom. The 3rd bedroom has always been a home office. If we lived in a downtown apartment, I'm not sure what we'd do, as we're both in management and spend the majority of the day teleconferencing.
After the war, Japanese USED TO work from home, since there was no other way, and that common area was usually the only one away from bedrooms etc. Then, after the infrastructure starting to recover, buildings coming up, offices etc. Culturally, ALL employees were required to return to their offices. This development also had side effects in making "focused communities" (business of certain kind concentrated around certain area), which made housing expensive and many employees having to live far away - 2hour commute in packed train is nothing unusual, and I've met people who actually don't mind since this is their time between home and work when they can kick back, read a book and "relax".
Once you step out of a small number of markets, the price problem goes away. I live in a well sized metro in the midwest, and I've worked, from here, for companies you've heard about. 4 bedrooms in my street, sitting on half an acre and a decent school district, are $250k. A 1 bedroom apartment would be under a thousand a month to rent, and that's a modern building with good appliances, a gym, a pool and gigabit internet. A single person in tech, right out of school, can easily save enough to get a mortgage in their first year working.
So yes, your situation is very real, but if there was less pressure to be in Seattle, NY or SF, the housing problems would melt.
This is why I don't live in the Bay Area, and have no plans to. I was casually surfing Trulia, and found new construction in my area starting at $170k for a 3 bed/2 bathroom. The idea of paying that much for an apartment(!) is simply foreign to me.
And it's why I asked. At least my mental picture of Japan has most people living in very small (by American standards) apartments. That might not be accurate, based on other comments - with many people commuting 2+ hours each direction (which seems completely bonkers to me). Either way, the average size of a home in Japan is smaller than the US (though I have no idea how it compares to Europe).
I miss the weather, but we're so much better off financially. Plus we bought a 2,400 sqft home with 3/4 acre in an amazing area for $300k. I have a huge home office, and two extra bedrooms. I don't need this much land, but to be anywhere near this comfortable in Silicon Valley would be years off and would require several things to work out perfectly.
Most people my age who have purchased a home got significant help from their parents.
Update: (Not modern but im a fan anyway. https://www.redfin.com/WA/Bothell/15601-Cascadian-Way-98012/...
America is a big country and is not specific enough when describing these prices.
There were some news stories about people at organizations that have committed to wfh for the foreseable future relocate to suburbs but a lot of companies reverted to office work once Japan lifted the state of emergency. Some companies are hesitant to downsize their office space and eat their losses in the middle of their contract. Other companies are struggling with managing their workforce.
There was a news story about a company that required workers to install a mouse tracker on their PC. If the mouse doesn't move for 5 min, they'd were docked a certain amount of pay so this guy would have his kid fiddle with the mouse if he wanted to go for walk or make a quick store run.
Exceptions apply if your local economy is in that sector specifically, but this prosperity only comes at the expense of output everywhere else.
In the ultimate economy, everything is free and you can have as much as you want.
If I am sitting in the office I may as well spend 20 minutes on a code review trying to figure out a cleaner solution, but at home its harder to do it. There is just a general feeling of racing towards that 'done' status which represents a good amount of completed work for the day. Before it was just 9-5 and a thorough code review was a welcome use of that time.
The most common complaint about WFH is actually the opposite, that the work day is never really done because you don’t have to shut down your computer and drive home like you would in an office. WFH has allowed me to reclaim hours that would have been spent poorly (just doing work for the sake of filling time) and lets me choose how that time should be used.
If I got my work done and everyone agrees the work is done, there is no reason to keep working. We only do it in the office because our manager and coworkers are watching us.
I'm convinced the true winners will be those companies that find a smart mix of both worlds. This includes recognizing that both concepts have their strengths (e.g., people are a lot more disciplined about meetings in a remote context) and weaknesses (e.g., a further breakdown of the separation between work and live). WFH needs more than just giving people the green light to work from home on selected days. It also, for example, needs a radical rethink of office infrastructure (most offices are not designed for 10 people sitting side-by-side and being on the phone most of the day), management culture, and shared best practices how to approach non-transactional work (e.g., how to tackle complex topics with people who do not know each other remotely?)
And while teams can coordinate time in the office, the more people are mostly remote the less value there is in others coming in.
>Obvious choice #1 is near extended family. What else motivates people to move?
They like the environment more? I work with someone who just ditched their downtown city apartment and bought a place on the coast of Maine.
As far as human pyschology goes, I think it's hard to be productive over the very long term with almost no real in-person time to connect with your team. We're social animals and we bond best when together. And we are more productive and efficient when we have bonded in that way.
Even famously all-remote companies shell out cash to fly everyone together at least a few times a year because of this. At some point, though, there are diminishing returns to getting everyone in the same room. The optimum point surely varies from person to person and depends on the nature of their work, but I don't think the peak is "every day" or "never".
Yes, offices are less useful when they're empty half the time. But homes are too! Most American homes sit empty from 8am-6pm every single day. Miles and miles of dead suburban streets, empty driveways, houses silent except for the ticking of thermostats.
I'm interested to see a company try a middle ground like this: Everyone works from home most days. At some periodic interval, maybe once a week, everyone comes to some shared space for meeting and coordination work.
This sounds like the worst of both worlds because you need both home office space and office space. But the office space can likely be shared with several teams. An office big enough for 100 people could service a 1,000 if teams only came in once every two weeks. If in-person days are mostly around meetings and communication, you don't need a lot of dedicated desk space. It doesn't need to feel like a permanent "territory" for each worker. Instead, just a pile of shared meeting rooms and open spaces.
If you still have to come in a few times, then it sounds like you're still stuck living close to an urban center. But, actually, the livable radius increases dramatically. A one-hour each way commute is a nightmare if you do it every day. That's ten hours a week stuck in a car. But if you only come in once every two weeks, then you could cut your total commute time in half while living five times as far away. And, since in-person days are mostly for meeting anyway, it's viable to have an understanding that commuting is part of your "work day" and have a shorter in-person work day.
In return, you get to spend less time commuting and more time in your own community, with your pets, with your loved ones, and in your own home.
Anecdotally, I am aware of folks who were highly motivated to move away from their extended family.
Building a new house in Japan is surprisingly affordable, but getting one built to Western standards (say, effective insulation and an expected lifespan of more than 20 years) is not. And I'm not even being facetious here: Japanese building codes assume that wooden houses last for 20 and concrete ones for thirty, then they get torn down and rebuilt by the next land owner.
1. At its core, I believe it's a clever bit of financial engineering disguised as a worker-first policy. All of a sudden your startup doesn't have any accrued PTO to keep on the books, and doesn't have to pay out anything to people who leave (I know this varies state-by-state but at least in CA I got paid out at previous jobs).
2. There's no tangibility to your vacation. You're just given access to this nebulous thing and it is up to you and the company to define a culture and a policy for it, and most of the time they don't do it well. People end up coming up with a "virtual bank" in their heads to justify taking time off and keeping track of things. This leads to totally different value systems between individuals, teams, managers, etc. All of a sudden a number I could look at in my payroll software and was inarguably whatever integer it was to anyone who looked at it is now some weird "idea" that my boss and I have to agree upon, potentially every time I go and take time off. This leads to unfair application of policies across a business, because every employee and manager is different.
3. In an unlimited system, the value of 1 day and 1 week has to be self-assigned by me or my manager, since with "unlimited" the value of any individual day is by definition basically zero. I think this leads people to see their time off as less valuable and are more likely to come online to check an email or respond to a slack. At my current company we have an unlimited PTO policy, but they found people weren't actually "off" when they said they were, so we now have one day a month that is dedicated as a company holiday so that everyone is off at the same time. It's usually used for creating a 3 day weekend, or extending a federal holiday.
Overall, I hope the policies continue despite my cynicism, but only with more guardrails. I hope that companies have better policies in the future encouraging employees to take time off. I would like to see companies do more "full shutdown" days like mine currently does. It's a forcing function that benefits everyone.
I see this being repeated over and over but I can't help but think that it's become a way to discourage giving employees time off from a company's perspective. I've successfully taken 30+ days off in an unlimited vacation environment (not consecutively) and not been reprimanded in any way because I was able to operate responsibly. Before I left for any length of vacation, I made sure that projects were delivered and successfully launched weeks before hand and I created documentation and trained others on continuing work processes (the lack of my presences should not have ANY impact).
"Unlimited vacation" should be a work perk that is attractive. Often times I find that it's the managers who don't believe employees should be given time off or the company decides to just implement unlimited vacation without any process in place to revoke the privilege or guidelines as to what a responsible policy looks like. It's easy to say something doesn't work when there was never any intention or effort to make it work.
Just my 2 cents.
Believe it or not, many people for many years had to come up with some sort of excuse to work remote (have to pick up the kids, waiting for plumber/delivery, etc), so normalizing remote, even nominally, would be a good step forward.
Of course a global pandemic helps move the agenda too.
I think it needs to be a culture change.
There are some issues regarding where your residence tax should be paid to but those are minor compared to what I've read on here about crossing state lines in the US.
Culture cannot change quickly. I expect only a few Fujitsu employees will work from home. Most will continue to waste countless hours sitting at a desk to "demonstrate commitment to the company." It won't matter that the desk is in a satellite office. Male managers will require their female subordinates to work from the same satellite office with them. Only determined top leadership can change a Japanese company's time-wasting sexist culture. I doubt Fujitsu will succeed before the pandemic ends.
A company like Fujitsu already has offices in nearly every time zone. The average meeting there already has people who are joining remotely. Teams already have to coordinate and managers already have to manage on the other side of the world. Letting people join their daily standup WebEx from home instead of whatever office they usually go to doesn't really have much impact on that workflow (especially since ~20% of the company already does that on any given Friday).
What WFH it does have is an immediate and direct impact on is cost.
If you're in management and you see that cost reduction in the numbers, productivity appears unaffected, morale appears unaffected (and some people even say it's improved) can you justify to your superiors not continuing to give people the option to WFH where possible?
In my company, my productivity skyrocketed, while that of my work colleagues crashed. It largely correlated with things like tech literacy and being open to change. Where I work, there are a few people with who invested in nice WFH setups, work-life integration, and all the things needed to make this work, who found productivity going up. And then there is the majority of people who stubbornly still refuse to even use a headset or learn to use tech, and are just waiting for the office to reopen.
Outside my company, it's not quite the same split, but most people are dipping their toes in rather than diving headfirst.
Honestly, this is a very patronising view. I understand that a lot of people here are strong permanent WFH advocates, but it doesn't fit everyone.
My home setup is pretty good and I'll still be first in line for getting back to the office for a variety of reasons - and there's many others like me.
If you think that means I'm less "tech literate" and not as "open to change" then that's your perogative.
Don’t overlook the stress of living during a pandemic. Has absolutely ruined my productivity during WFH.
Now, that things calmed down and they started "Kurzarbeit", basically reducing working hours where the state offsets salaries, the company insists that everyone returns to the office. Old ways die hard it seems.
It is going to be hard to get good data on this, since so many people are not just working from home but are also caring for children or stress out of their minds due to a pandemic.
From talking to people, it seems that senior engineers are doing well and junior engineers have lower output. I think this is reasonable. People who need more hand holding will have more friction separating them from help. People who already have a strong background have fewer distractions and can focus deeply on code. Whether this sums to an overall positive or negative change in productivity, I have no idea.
In service companies keeping or accounting time (so that clients can be billed) is a thing.
When working from home, keeping account of time spent may be a challenge. As long as one is in office, even though they may not be clacking away on a keyboard (but goofing away) they can be billed without any guilt and if the service company is really questioned or audited, they can show employee swipe in and out time.
For WFH employees one cannot, also just tracking login maynot cover full story (Ex. tele calls would not be accounted for).
I suspect that shift has mostly come out of the fact they couldn't really play the usual management cards of "collaboration will suffer", or "its harder to manage people remotely" after multiple months of nobody at all being in the office and work continuing more or less as normal. My fear going into this is that it would be the nail in the coffin of remote work, with companies going into it unprepared and everything falling apart for an extended period - at least in our case the transition took all of a week or so before everyone got used to it, and if anything productivity is higher than it was with everyone working out of the office.
Management in the UK by and large sucks.
I don't necessarily disagree but I have to say that it's miles worse in Spain.
I might've been lucky but I've only had a bad boss and even he treated me far better than the best bosses some of my friends in Spain had treated them, so clearly YMMV. (obviously anecdotal evidence)
To add my own, my company was shifting to working remotely for the development team gradually, but now our CEO has been impressed with how well we adapted to working from home and has told us that our office will not be open until September at the earliest.
WFH is now more normalised and sensible companies will adopt it ASAP as the standard. Laggards will begrudgingly have to adopt it as otherwise they will lose talent and restrict their access to new talent.
On top of that, my guess is that WFH people will go out for lunch less often, so those restaurants won't just relocate to more residential areas, they (and their jobs), will just disappear.
Some of these will not want to cook lunch in the middle of work, and at least order takeout instead.
If 10% of the people keep WFH after the pandemics, that means real state prices will plummet. But restaurants will see a 10% decrease on revenue.
Also longer term a lot of housing stock will become les desirable and new residential housing will become bigger and more expensive.
Oh and H&S inspections will now have to be included
Also, Mozilla will reimburse space in the form of a coworking lease in the worker's city. (Edit: Who knows if this will continue after Coronavirus) I don't think there's any kind of benefit for the costs incurred by the increased use of home space, but I do think there should be.
Mozilla did an ergonomic inspection on my workspace at my request when I still worked in an office. I haven't had one on my home office, but I do agree that companies should pay for ergonomic assessments of home offices.
I do agree that as more traditional companies switch over, they may not be so generous with their reimbursement since one of the biggest benefits for them is cost reduction. They can silently move all the costs of working space onto employees. And I do think this will result in people seeking larger living spaces in general as well, unfortunately for energy efficiency.
In the UK that might include beautiful countryside in places like Wales and Cornwall, or larger houses available in the North.
Assuming the internet is fast enough!
Dragging my arse into an open office during a pandemic has killed my motivation completely.
I've gone from hard working to doing just enough not to get fired while I look for another job.
But, yes, a small urban apartment is not going to be great for working from home. Especially without coffeeshops etc. open. Longer term, people who WFH indefinitely will either need to move to larger places or they'll want a co-working space that either they or their company pays for.
WeWork specifically was failing anyway, but it strikes me that in a world where permanent workplaces are deemphasized and workers are inherently more mobile, the market for a broker of temporary spaces is probably larger, not smaller.
If I were a company with 100 employees, I'd get 50~ hotdesk spaces at my local coworking space chain and let employees come in up to 3 days a week whenever they feel like it.
However, there might be promise for a sort of coop remote work environment, not necessarily tied to your company, but shared by your neighbors. For instance, I would love to have a work station in the neighborhood, in walking distance to my apartment. I only need a desk, a monitor, decent internet connection, but things like having a more secure shipping address and print/copy/fax/package dropoff would be great perks. I would gladly pay a membership fee for a small, hyperlocal, neighborhood-based incarnation of wework, where I would be guaranteed to have a desk whenever I choose to walk the block or two and get some work done. Basically, the local cafe, but I always have a seat, a monitor, and basic fedex functions.
