Working transformation: Home office becoming the new normal in Japanese cities
Employees have adapted to working at home and companies appear to be happy with the financial benefits, but there are concerns that the shift away from the salaryman model will experience problems.
migrator
Chennai
The tides of salary-men and office ladies who used to cram into commuter trains to flood into Japan’s major cities have slowed to a trickle over the last three months as the government encouraged companies to keep their staff at home due to the coronavirus crisis. And even now, with life returning to normal in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and elsewhere, the number of employees heading for their offices is nowhere near the levels of before.
Experts believe that Japan’s legendary salaryman has had his day and that work in a nation that is famous for its diligence and commitment to the company may never be the same again as firms embrace remote working and more flexible hours.
“I have been working from home for the last two months and, to be honest, it was very stressful at the beginning,” said Masakatsu Yamamoto, who works for Tokyo-based property developer Mori Building Co. “For the first two weeks I was fighting with my wife over who would use the dining room table, but we got used to the situation, doing everything through our computers or mobile phones.”
“By the beginning of the second month, I had become really comfortable with the situation,” he added.
Back to work
From the start of June, however, the company has begun to gradually bring staff back into the office and presently about 30% of Mori employees are back at their desks. For Yamamoto, it’s not a positive development. “I’m a department manager, so I thought I should start going back, but I found it so difficult to readjust to being in the office,” he said. “It was like reverse culture shock.” Yamamoto says plenty of people who were previously completely happy with the way they worked are having second thoughts after enjoying the benefits of avoiding the commute, four-day weeks, working from home and having more free time with friends and family.
Companies have also caught on to the idea and are embracing remote working. In an interview with the Yomiuri newspaper on June 7, Masahiro Minami, president of financial services giant Resona Holdings Inc, said his company plans to reduce office work to zero in as little as three years by introducing more technological solutions.
Telecommunications firm NTT Data has decided that a maximum of 50 percent of its staff will need to come to the office and they will be encouraged to stagger their hours. Hitachi Ltd and Mitsubishi Electric Corp are following suit. Toshiba Corp is considering introducing a four-day working week.
The move has even been welcomed by Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation, which responded to the coronavirus pandemic by calling on member firms to adopt “various working styles” to reduce the spread of the disease. And now it is advocating that those emergency measures be made permanent.
Martin Schulz, chief policy economist at Fujitsu Ltd’s Global Market Intelligence Unit, says he has not seen the inside of his offices for three months and admits to being taken aback at the sea change that Japan is experiencing in its attitudes towards working. “I would never have expected to see this, but I think it has gone on for long enough that it has caused a major rethink within companies,” he said.
— This article has been provided by Deutsche Welle (DW/dw.com)
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