Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53303364

by l31g • 6 years ago

519 274 6 years ago

Covid might actually result in permanent changes. Sucks for a lot of commercial real estate companies. WeWork is probably 100% done

reustle2• 6 years ago

Here in Tokyo, I actually feel the opposite. WeWorks are quite busy again, but then again we didn't get hit as hard as the west.

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.

sirn2• 6 years ago

And that's quite surprising to hear. I also live in Tokyo, but given how packed Chuo line/Shinjuku station in the morning for the past few weeks, it feels like everyone has already gone back to their regular office hours routine. :(

onetimemanytime2• 6 years ago

In the sense its cheaper to outsource than having your own permanent offices? That's possible but major companies would probably have them meet/come at existing offices on alternate days.

C1sc0cat9• 6 years ago

Employees HATE hot desking - you'd also have to disinfect / clean much more rigorously similar to hospital standards.

C1sc0cat9• 6 years ago

Sucks for the worker who now has to bear the cost of providing office space and internet connections and your local network.

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

noir_lord2• 6 years ago

I would happily provide that cost since I pay for all of that anyway to work from home.

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.

adwww3• 6 years ago

On the other hand, it's probably boosted the value of more remote homes in otherwise desireable areas that have previously suffered for local employment opportunities.

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!

ghaff15• 6 years ago

I have never heard of a health and safety inspection for a home office. I'm quite sure mine would fail in multiple counts.

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.

jon-wood3• 6 years ago

For most people I suspect they come out on top even with the extra expense of needing a decent internet connection and some office space. Commuting (particularly into London, which is what I'm most familiar with) is expensive - I'm a 1.5 hour train ride out from London, and an annual season ticket costs £6,000-£7,000 per year, depending on the route and whether I want a travelcard for London as well.

fzzzy3• 6 years ago

For existing companies like Mozilla where we are mostly remote anyway, the company already reimburses home internet and office equipment like chairs and monitors and desks.

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.

CubsFan10602• 6 years ago

I also wonder the impact it'll have on retail and lunch places. A lot of small restaurants popped up around places with a lot of office workers. If those office workers are all WFH now, the previously desirable restaurant locations will become semi-worthless.

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.

zrail• 6 years ago

The restaurant owners who really want to make it work will hustle into delivery out of more affordable commercial kitchen space. If WFH sticks I won’t be surprised to see more commercial kitchens opening closer to residential areas.

jfoster• 6 years ago

Would it be those ones that suffer? If some existing companies depart a central area, isn't it more likely that others would replace them in that area, rather than a geographically uniform reduction in occupancy?

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 6 years ago

OTOH, isn't it pretty customary for any large office (let's say 1k+) to have a cafeteria, with presumably most employees eating there?

Some of these will not want to cook lunch in the middle of work, and at least order takeout instead.

marcosdumay• 6 years ago

That's a different market.

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.

vharuck• 6 years ago

Might be a chance for diners or other restaurants to offer meeting rooms. They could charge less than coworking spaces and make up the difference in food and drink sales.

ajross• 6 years ago

WeWork is probably 100% done

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.

ghaff15• 6 years ago

For at least some who want to live in a city and are WFH full-time, it will make more sense to rent a co-working space than to move to a bigger apartment with a dedicated office.

buboard2• 6 years ago

people dont want to pay 2 rents for no reason though, unless the rents are very cheap, so they won't be able to price these things high anymore. probably

asdff8• 6 years ago

Wework was a parasite, it was done whenever landlords figured out they can just deal directly with the tenant and both would save an expense.

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.

dcow• 6 years ago

Is productivity going up, or are workers more happy, or both?

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

Costs, which can very easily be measured, probably went down.

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?

murgindrag• 6 years ago

I think it depends on the company and on the team.

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.

CubsFan10602• 6 years ago

I'm curious, what all do you include when you think about a "nice WFH setup"? For me it's largely a defined space, a nice desk, a nice chair, and a nice monitor. Anything else on your list?

paulcole• 6 years ago

It largely correlated with things like tech literacy and being open to change

Don’t overlook the stress of living during a pandemic. Has absolutely ruined my productivity during WFH.

tazjin• 6 years ago

It largely correlated with things like tech literacy and being open to change

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.

hef19898• 6 years ago

My wife's company is kind of curious, and also typical, I think. She works in production planning and SCM, so obviously the early phase of the Covid-19 crisis was the one with the highest workload. It was also the first time they were allowed to WFH. One would have expected that it would be very difficult. It was, for a week or so until people got to understand Teams.

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.

UncleMeat• 6 years ago

Is productivity going up

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.

zkid182• 6 years ago

Wow, that huge for Japan I believe. I live at Kichijoji and it takes me 1 hour to get to work in Akasaka. I love my place and somehow get used to this routine, but honestly I wish I could rent a place in Japanese countryside.

azuriten• 6 years ago

If I could somehow guarantee a remote-work job for the foreesable future I'd love to move back and live somewhere more countryside but still with decent links to Tokyo such as the Shonan area or even somewhere a bit more east of Kichijoji like Hachioji or Ome.

TuringNYC• 6 years ago

I think this is the key thing. 75% of our family's problems would be solved if we could untangle ourselves from the burden of having to live in job-driven-metro areas close to the office. Mortgages would no longer be a problem, neither would school districts, neither would crushing commutes. Neither would childcare, since we'd have enough room in the house for help.

kubatyszko2• 6 years ago

You can actually get a house for free in some areas, mostly central Japan. Many cities are becoming deserted and houses are left alone, governments offer incentives to take them over. Might come with a catch such as committing to maintenance of farming.

9nGQluzmnq3M• 6 years ago

The main catch is that the "free" houses are usually in complete disrepair and require a lot of non-free work to make them livable.

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.

y-c-o-m-b• 6 years ago

My wife did a little light reading on this subject and found it's more complicated than that. It turns out that finding the owner of these properties is an enormous challenge because due to the high level of taxes and fees associated with these buildings, the owners are reluctant to claim them (to avoid paying the taxes/fees). I would like to see someone living in Japan confirm this, though.

saos• 6 years ago

Thats really good. I wonder how UK companies will respond.

noir_lord2• 6 years ago

They largely won't unless forced to.

Management in the UK by and large sucks.

reallydontask2• 6 years ago

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)

dyadic• 6 years ago

I wouldn't count on it. The aversion to WFH always seemed to be the risk, but now they've already been forced into it and mostly handled it quite well, the unknown isn't unknown any more.

Accacin2• 6 years ago

I always wonder how people come up with these statements, is it just anecdotal?

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.

jon-wood3• 6 years ago

Sample size of one, but my employer have significantly shifted their view of remote work from being something that's only really accepted in extreme circumstances (or in some cases such as my own, grandfathered in from the early days). All our offices are currently closed with everyone working remotely, and have been since late February, but even once they reopen its already been stated that they expect the new normality to be most people working remotely 2-3 days a week.

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.

erfgh• 6 years ago

You said it, "more or less".

martiuk• 6 years ago

Unless it's full of younger management, it'll be bums on seats forever.

simonswords82• 6 years ago

UK companies will broadly respond the same way.

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.

john4534243• 6 years ago

Even software service companies have started to go full remote. WFH is the future.

dtech• 6 years ago

"Even"? softare dev is one of the easiests things to do remotely

achow• 6 years ago

"Even" because the comment is about software service companies (as opposed to software product ones).

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).

alistairSH3• 6 years ago

Can Japanese residents comment on how this works WRT office space in the home? Do people typically have space in their homes to have a proper home office setup?

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.

reustle2• 6 years ago

Very unlikely that people have enough space. I'm here in Tokyo and video chatting with many clients' staff members. Most seem to work at their dinner table (for those that have one) and also often from their bed.

tkgally• 6 years ago

Japan resident here. Home floor areas tend to be smaller than in North America, at least, but discussions I’ve seen in the Japanese press about WFH issues since corona have not emphasized that point as much as they have childcare, work-life balance, exercise, etc. People I know personally who are working from home haven’t been complaining about space, though I’m sure it’s a problem for some people.

kubatyszko2• 6 years ago

Very ironic fact from the past (and an interesting explanation WHY kitchen areas are REALLY well lit in many (older) Japanese homes.

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".

jmchuster2• 6 years ago

It's also very interesting that this is where the whole mobile gaming gatcha market comes from. Your user base has no free time and tons of expendable income, so they'll gladly spend thousands of dollars a month on the games they play on their daily 2 hour commute.

asdff8• 6 years ago

If commuting is effortless, it is relaxing. I can't walk while reading a book, but you sure can fly on a bullet train while reading. Back when I was commuting, I actually would get a little miffed if my bus commute ended up being faster that day as it would prevent me from getting a chapter done and hitting a good stopping point in the book I was reading.

cactus2093• 6 years ago

I mean FWIW I’m American and your explanation sounds very foreign to me. I’m a millennial though, so owning a house at all is quite obstacle. Scrounging up a down payment when even a 2 bedroom apartment is $1-$1.5 million is not the easiest task. Renting an extra 2 bedrooms to have lying around in case we suddenly need 2 offices would also cost an extra couple thousand dollars a month. My wife and I are both working from home from a 1 bedroom apartment currently.

matchbok2• 6 years ago

In the same spot. Home ownership is so out of reach for the vast majority of the people my age. Even with good salaries and savings!

Most people my age who have purchased a home got significant help from their parents.

jdhn• 6 years ago

Scrounging up a down payment when even a 2 bedroom apartment is $1-$1.5 million is not the easiest task.

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.

flattone2• 6 years ago

You can take 600k 30 minutes out of seattle and love your 2800sqft modern home (approx/just now starting to look for myself)

Update: (Not modern but im a fan anyway. https://www.redfin.com/WA/Bothell/15601-Cascadian-Way-98012/...

alistairSH3• 6 years ago

I get it. That's part of the reason we live AND work in the 'burbs (out near IAD, instead of inside 495). We were very purposeful about where we bought - balance of cost, location, etc. It's doable in most regions (SF/SV and NYC being notable exceptions).

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).

dfxm12• 6 years ago

Scrounging up a down payment when even a 2 bedroom apartment is $1-$1.5 million is not the easiest task

America is a big country and is not specific enough when describing these prices.

hibikir• 6 years ago

The US has very localized housing problems. Many tech giants are realizing that they have to either diversify their locations or enter into a housing spiral, as there just aren't enough houses for how many people they'd like to hire.

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.

pottertheotter• 6 years ago

I grew up in Silicon Valley and worked there until a few years ago when I moved to the Midwest to do a PhD. My wife and I are millenials and she is also from a big city area. The plan was to move back to Silicon Valley, where I can easily get a lucrative job in my field. But when we did the math, it was an easy decision to stay in the Midwest.

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.

m3kw9• 6 years ago

In their case they can live further out of the city to save cost and have a bigger space

caymanjim3• 6 years ago

Even in the US with larger houses (outside cities anyway), few people have an entire room to dedicate to a home office, much less two. We repurpose attics, garages, large closets, guest rooms, etc. If a couple wants two dedicated permanent office rooms, it doesn't make sense to stay in an urban center. It might make sense to rent external office space (perhaps to share with others), or stay cramped and consider it part of the tradeoff of not having to commute.

xen2xen1• 6 years ago

I'm intensely curious about how this will affect larger cities like Tokyo if the trend stays. Isn't / wasn't the real estate prices in Tokyo super important for the Japanese economy? If workers could suddenly move out to the burbs how would that affect places like Tokyo?

fennecfoxen• 6 years ago

High real estate prices don't help most economies. Neither do high oil prices, high energy prices, high raw-materials prices, high food prices, or other high prices.

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.

ekianjo2• 6 years ago

In Japan you can end up with more office space at home if you can spare space for a decent desk than at work, where desks are small and crammed next to each other's, at least until COVID19.

Yellow_Boat• 6 years ago

You think this will change now? (the crowded office spaces)

flocial• 6 years ago

On average it depends on your family size and if you live in a big city. If you're a double income household with no kids, you still might not have enough room to carve out office space so one partner has to take work elsewhere or work side by side and vacate to take calls. Even for singles I doubt they have a decent working space unless they're into gaming.

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.

JonathanKurumi3• 6 years ago

Me and my girlfriend are lucky(?) enough to live in Saitama so we have an extra room that we’ve converted into an office. Most of my colleagues/friends don’t have this space and had to slap their computers on top of their Kotatsu’s before summer rolled around, now because this doesn’t look to be ending anytime soon they’re all buying desks or “floor office chairs”

poma88• 6 years ago

Finally someone had the brains to do it! Beautiful.. if they pay for the use of space and resources at home

runawaybottle2• 6 years ago

I’d love to see companies convert ‘Unlimited vacation time at your discretion’ over to ‘Unlimited remote at your discretion’.

xtracto• 6 years ago

"Unlimited vacation" is a deception. Real perks are to have 15 or 20 days of vacations, increasing with seniority at the company, and forced vacations (i.e., the company forces you to take the vacations every year). It is also good for the company health (ensure that no 1 person missing has a large impact).

runawaybottle2• 6 years ago

Sure, I’ve heard that and can believe it. I think one of the side effects of the term is that it kind of gets rid of the shame and social gymnastics around taking time off.

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.

wontonzealot• 6 years ago

"Unlimited vacation" is a deception.

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.

Ductapemaster• 6 years ago

I'm a cynic about unlimited vacation policies for a few reasons:

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.

skizm• 6 years ago

There are a bunch of companies that technically have that, but you are pressured to work in the office and working from home more than once a month is looked down upon. I have noticed though that if you use kids as an excuse (valid or not) you're given much more leeway, and can get away with maybe 2-3 times per month without an negative social stigma.

I think it needs to be a culture change.

snarfy• 6 years ago

Any Japanese care to chime in on how WFH is accepted culturally? When I worked for a Japanese tech company I was surprised by how old school they were. Landlines, business cards, reams of paper, week long meetings about policies, and this was a software company. WFH was forbidden unless it was an emergency.

artsyca• 6 years ago

I live in Japan and at first everyone was against it, now everyone is for it and a whole new industry is cropping up. HP is early to the market with their solutions and Fujitsu must also be sensing the opportunity.

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.

xwdv• 6 years ago

Ah, office theatre.

lnsru2• 6 years ago

Add fax machines and it will be perfect picture of current situation in Germany.

zeeZ• 6 years ago

Naturally. You can't do business in Japan without a fax machine.

typon• 6 years ago

How are two of the most advanced manufacturing countries so backwards?

cdavid6• 6 years ago

It traditionally isn't. Japanese middle management practices would often make office space look good. Especially in software, the culture is quite antiquated, because software is traditionally seen as a cost center, and most companies externalize all their IT. If I had to describe most offices in Japan, it would be an unglamorous version of Mad Men.

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.

derefr3• 6 years ago

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.

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.

SenHeng4• 6 years ago

I'm wrapped in the software dev industry bubble and WFH is mostly doing well here. Some of my friends' workplaces are trying to do a half remote, half office situation where you come in to the office 2-3 days a week. Usually it's because they haven't got their communication flow done well and need to use those in-face times to do proper coordination.

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.

cdavid6• 6 years ago

I am quite bearish about the impact of WFH, especially for software engineers, but if there is one country where I think the coronavirus can have a huge positive effect for the economy, it is Japan.

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.

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

How does this square with for example the Japanese car market, which I thought led the world in labour practices and efficiency? They've invented many labour practices that are considered the best we have today. And their cars are so cheap - how are they doing this if they aren't being efficient?

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!

pault• 6 years ago

I believe that's an issue of manufacturing efficiency vs. corporate efficiency. Toyota invented "lean manufacturing", but that doesn't mean that their biz dev, marketing department, etc isn't massively inefficient. I'm not saying they are, just that the two are orthogonal.

cdavid6• 6 years ago

So manufacturing is generally quite efficient. Toyota would be one of the powerhouse I had in mind, as would be most car companies. Note that Toyota is very much a global company and under the pressure of competition worldwide. But many large Japanese companies aren't.

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.

jbay8082• 6 years ago

The inefficiency is generally limited to white collar workers. Japanese blue collar workers are very efficient. Also, internationally competitive companies like Toyota often (but not always) have better business practices.

quicklime• 6 years ago

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!

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.

derefr3• 6 years ago

An assembly-line is a machine designed to avoid the need for synchronous human decision-making. Instead, there are only synchronous machine decisions, and asynchronous human decisions based on e.g. sampling, or spotting.

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.

kirykl• 6 years ago

Toyota tends to subordinate technology to process

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

And their cars are so cheap

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.

smallnamespace• 6 years ago

Successful Japanese exporters are world-class, almost tautologically.

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.

Tade0• 6 years ago

how are they doing this if they aren't being efficient?

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.

29athrowaway2• 6 years ago

Many products in the Japanese market are well designed, durable, functional and cost-efficient, this is not something specific to cars.

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.

JonathanKurumi3• 6 years ago

Japanese companies have a baffling knack for internal innovation that kind of transcends the overwhelming management style.

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.

0xCMP• 6 years ago

When I visited Japan I couldn't help repeating over and over to myself that it's a country with one foot firmly in the future and another foot stuck firmly in the past.

It's one of the most fascinating things I love about Japan.

[edit: typo]

benmw333• 6 years ago

What struck me was the seemingly 1995 era laptops people were working on in the trains.

celim307• 6 years ago

This bleeds into their North American operations too. Nowhere else in my career have I seen a more wretched hive of incestual politicking, inefficiency, lack of respect for lower workers, and obsession with beaucracy at Panasonic’s American operations

pkaye• 6 years ago

Reminds me of when my past employer sent me to Japan to debug a firmware issue for a potential customer. Every day for a week I had to spend two hours talking to their engineers talking about my debug decision tree for debug work for the rest of the day. And that was with an English/Japanese translator to help communicate. Most people adapt their debug strategy as they collect more data but they wanted it all planned out ahead. A very different way of doing it.

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.

baron816• 6 years ago

There was an Economist article on this exactly: https://www.economist.com/business/2020/05/09/japanese-offic...

29athrowaway2• 6 years ago

Especially women are often relegated to menial work

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyaria%C5%ABman

stu2b50• 6 years ago

There's a difference between being relegated and being interested. He's saying that current business culture causes many women to work menial office jobs, not that the women themselves are not ambitious.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

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.

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...)

cdavid6• 6 years ago

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.

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.

bobthepanda• 6 years ago

One major issue with paper vs digital is that paper scales really, really badly. IIRC (I can't find the article) there was a marked difference between how easy it was to access COVID benefits in Korea (where the process was entirely digital) vs Japan (where you had to show up to an office and fill out paperwork)

fit2rule• 6 years ago

Over 40 years as a professional I have worked in tech companies in countries around the world, including Germany and Japan, and now in Austria - where the reduced work week is not only a cultural norm, but rather supported by the bureaucratic classes as their right and obligation. Kafka and Vienna, mmkay...

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.

VWWHFSfQ• 6 years ago

They also care very much about their job title, and the job titles of the people they are dealing with. A few years ago my company (American) worked with a Japanese company and before we went into the meetings we had to establish new job titles for the people on our team that would be representing our company in the meeting. We couldn't go in there with just a bunch of senior engineers when they were sending their VP of Engineering. It wouldn't have gone over well.. We had to have a Director of Engineering, Senior Director of Mobile, VP of North American Engineering. Etc.

These were all just regular very good senior engineers. But it would have been insulting to go to the meeting without the inflated titles.

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

It would be funny if that wouldn't be so widely spread in other countries too. I have a fancy title that sounds nice on various levels. People's attitude changes completely: they listen to me,some even try not to say something wrong and etc. Oh, and I'm popular amongst sales people,who want to sell me all sorts of solutions because they assume I sit on a big budget. It's a circus.

subsubzero• 6 years ago

Really interesting comment, I know a bit about the salary-man culture with business men asleep in subways/alleys as they had dinner drinking sessions that extended past the last subway ride back to their home stations. I wonder how this practice came to be culturally? Was it something that manifested after WWII where the country felt like it needed to 'catch up' to the US and other allied countries? Or was this always a thing there? As for paper, calligraphy is a revered art form there, as well as stationary and writing letters. So being really into paper and forms does not surprise me.

nikanj2• 6 years ago

Japan exists simultaneously 100 years in the past, and 100 years in the future. Averaging out it's still like living in 2020, but for each small interaction you never know if you'll be facing the 1920 experience or the 2120 experience.

zanmat0• 6 years ago

abuse toward women common

source please, there's no need to add baseless trivia to underline your point

tonyedgecombe• 6 years ago

Sort this table[1] on the last column and see how far down Japan is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report#WEF_G...

danielscrubs• 6 years ago

I got it explained quite simply by: digital signatures is by law not valid in court.

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.

fomine35• 6 years ago

It's valid now.

garfieldnate• 6 years ago

I worked there under a very common payment model called みなし残業 (minashi-zangyou), meaning my contract gave me a minimum monthly pay which assumed a certain amount of overtime (40 hours a month in my case, meaning no additional pay was provided until surpassing 40 hours overtime in a month). This was really awful because I could be made to feel guilty for not staying late, and superiors had no qualms about keeping me. I naively accepted the contract (it was a permanent contract, highly sought after) and at some point realized that the pay was not at all worth it (about 42k a year). This was not the kind of job I could sleep at, either!

zkid182• 6 years ago

I wouldn't interpret 飲み会 in that way. Yes people drink there but I wouldn't claim that women abuse is somehow common there. From my experience Japanese are quite polite even if there are drunk.

Disclaimer: Gaijin, working in Japanese company

cdavid6• 6 years ago

I have seen behavior that would be guaranteed to get a sexual harassment suit in the US in pretty much every company I worked at, big and small, public and private.

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.

thesumofall2• 6 years ago

Not commenting on this specific case here, but I believe we currently see the pendulum swinging from one extreme (WFH only at a very exclusive subset of companies) to the other extreme ("WFH first" policies)

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?)

buboard2• 6 years ago

There is no middle ground -- WFH is self-reinforcing trend, because offices are much less useful when they are half-empty and all processes have go online. As soon as some coworkers move, others follow. If people start working 2-3 days at home ... they start to think about moving somewhere better. I wonder what is the endgame of this rearrangement? Perhaps nomadism will become common? But in that case, cities will lose even more cohesion than they ve lost so far. If we take away the work factor, the question "where do i/my family live" becomes much more open-ended. Obvious choice #1 is near extended family. What else motivates people to move?

ghaff15• 6 years ago

I tend to agree in that coming in only one or two days a week gives you some greater flexibility in where you live, but only some. For a lot of people whose companies are in expensive urban areas, WFH a few days per week means they need more housing than they might otherwise need but they can't move somewhere that's cheaper/preferable.

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.

munificent• 6 years ago

I don't think it's anywhere near as bimodal as you say.

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.

thesumofall2• 6 years ago

I’m not sure I agree here. I struggle with the assumption that all processes can go online without any loss of value. For some jobs this might be possible, but the more a job is not just about realizing clearly articulated requirements, the more this will be difficult. Hence, companies will expect a pay cut for the loss in productivity. Again, I believe there is a great middle ground to be found that leverages the strengths of both worlds

webmaven• 6 years ago

Obvious choice #1 is near extended family. What else motivates people to move?

Anecdotally, I am aware of folks who were highly motivated to move away from their extended family.

bradleyjg• 6 years ago

The big coming conflict is over splitting the surplus. If remote friendly policies going into play, even if it’s the “live three hours away because it’s only once every two weeks” variety then pay is going to fall. Many engineers seems pretty excited about the glorious remote future but I don’t think they’ve thought through the impact on compensation. Even after the Facebook announcement the prevailing sentiment seemed to be denial.

njerschow• 6 years ago

Hey, you should add your company here: remote.lifeshack.io !

SenHeng4• 6 years ago

Another side often missing in these dicussions is that Japan's tax laws are relatively sane and are the same through all states. You will not be taxed differently just because you're living in a different state or are living between states.

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.

helen___keller• 6 years ago

Considering how Japanese companies are famously conservative, I can't help but wonder if Fujitsu executives were faced with undeniable evidence that productivity increased during the pandemic WFH

ericmcer• 6 years ago

The one big downside I have noticed from WFH is that any efficiency I introduce in my own work becomes reclaimed time. If I can crank through a days work in 4 hours in the morning I can reasonably take it easy in the afternoon. This is great but it has created some stress around things like code reviews and impromptu mentoring etc.

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.

freehunter• 6 years ago

I’ve been working from home for six years and I consider that the biggest upside actually. I don’t have to waste time pretending to work just because it’s “work hours”. A lot of times good enough really is good enough and my reward for getting my work done early is I get to reclaim my time. It typically balances out with the times I’m still working past 5 or 6pm for things that really do matter.

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.

josh_carterPDX2• 6 years ago

I think it's even more difficult when you factor in kids at home. We've had to deal with that at our home which means our ability to get work done has been cut in half. It also puts a lot of burden on co-workers. The biggest issue with this has been people without kids wondering why coworkers WITH kids aren't getting as much done.

bbojan• 6 years ago

But once the situation with the coronavirus is over, the kids will be in school/daycare, so this won't be an issue.

georgex7• 6 years ago

All companies remote work policies: remote.lifeshack.io

AlexTWithBeard• 6 years ago

But if software engineers can work from home, they surely can work from Mumbai?

alkonaut• 6 years ago

If they speak japanese and are happy to adjust their working day to the japanese timezone I can't see why not.

mleonhard• 6 years ago

The company also said the programme would allow staff to choose where they worked, whether that was from home, a major corporate hub or a satellite office.

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.

Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

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