This is the second feature of Don´t make Japanese salaryman work from home.

 

The target of this survey done by tele-work association was major Japanese enterprises, about 5,000 of them.

In theory, bigger enterprises have more facility in terms of maintaining the condition for tele-work including security matter. However, in the reality, nearly 70% of the enterprises were hesitating to introduce this system.

Moreover, about 76.8% of those which hadn’t introduced tele-work system confirmed that they had no intention of introducing it. The survey showed how passive Japanese companies were towards working from home.

 

So why?

At home, they can use as much as space they want. There should be more benefit working from home than in the office.

 

The article shows the case in Panasonic, one of the Japanese major electric company, and is one of the enterprises which encourages their employees to work from home. They call it “e-Work” and has been promoting it since 2006 as they opened a new section, e-Work promotion team.

In Panasonic, there are 35,000 office workers and 7,000 of them have been working from home. 7,000 seems to be a quite amount but it’s only 20% of all employees.

And for those 20%, it wasn’t their choice either. They were forced to work from home by e-Work promotion team by imposing a quota for each month. It sounds harsh but after all this effort, yet they could make only 20% of employees work from home.

 

Then what happened to these people after? Despite of their comment “it was quite effective”, most of them stopped working from home and came back to the office. It was “an experiment”.

This means that although Japanese salarymen admit that working from home is effective and has an advantage, majority of them don’t take that opportunity.

 

Why is that?

One of the most common reason is their living condition. Having study room is their ideal lifestyle although not many Japanese housing allow them to. They can´t work from home because they don´t have a space.

But they don´t need much space, they can work if there is a Little corner to put their laptop. The dining table is good enough. At work unless you are director, the company gives you only a small desk. So, working at the dining table gives you much more space than the office.

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I don´t think not many Japanese people can have a study like this but they prefer not working from home because of the space sounds to me an excuse. There should be another reason for not to do.

Why Japanese salarymen prefer to put themselves in a gray suits, get on a packed train, set themselves at a little desk and work having their bosses around.

 

In the next article, we´ll get to the bottom of this strange behavior of Japanese salarymen.  

To be continued.

 

 

More about Japanese working situation

Kagome initiates no Zangyo after 8 

Service overtime work 

Zaitaku