CommunityNews

CommunityNews

The productivity of working from home: Evidence from Japan

Working from home has become much more prevalent across advanced economies during the Covid-19 pandemic. This column uses survey data from Japan to explore how widely working from home has been adopted across industries and how productive employees are at home. It finds that the overall contribution of working from home to labour input is surprisingly small. Even where firms adopted the practice, many employees did not exploit it; and even those who did work from home did not necessarily do so throughout the week. The firm survey responses suggest that across industries, the average productivity of employees when working from home relative to at the workplace is 68.3%, which is similar to the findings from an employee survey. The results suggest that there is room for improvement to make working from home more feasible…

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Most Liked

malloryerik

malloryerik

… average productivity of employees when working from home relative to at the workplace is 68.3%

Hmm, I wonder. The number rises to %80 for IT.

But… two thoughts. First, we’re still just learning to work remotely.

Second, I think there’s a good case to be made that Japan’s work culture presents a more challenging fit for remote work.

With a nod to Erin Meyer’s book The Culture Map, we can make some generalizations that’ll seem clear if you have experience in Japan.

Japanese culture is extremely high-context, all about saying something without saying it. Negative feedback too. Sometimes a Japanese, “Ah ha, that could be a good idea, it’s interesting” might be translated by my Dutch friends as, “That’s the worst idea I’ve heard in my life and I grew up surrounded by morons” or the American, “Uh, let’s look at some other ideas too,” all depending on the tone and circumstance in the context of the interlocutors’ particular relationship.

Yet for example Reed Hastings in his recent book describes how clear guidance and goals are usually required in Japan as people may feel uncomfortable taking initiative and making decisions without approval from leaders and group consensus. Therefore, and it’s my experience also, many Japanese people seek consensus while being at the same time quite hierarchical and all the while not wanting to say what they want to say but greatly preferring to rely on innuendo, inference and reading the room. What’s more, their trust at work is more relationship-based than, say, Americans, who tend to compartmentalize trust into individual tasks. So without a decent relationship to begin with, although someone has a great idea or suggestion to make, it might be very hard to get them to make it, and with high-context communication being hobbled by the low bandwidth of remote comms, it might be lost in transmission.

None of this seems like the fertile soil in which remote work will easily blossom.

On the other hand, it seems that Japanese culture tends to be such that once someone understands a situation and promises to do something, it happens and happens really well, so maybe there is a way for remote work to flower in Japan after all, bringing us back to my first suggestion, which is that as societies we’re just at the very beginning of learning how to work remotely. My guess is that doing it well will require structural changes in how work is organized.

Maybe the Basecamp people are closer to finding a right way to do remote? But if you read David Heinemeier Hansson’s books, it’s like the polar opposite of Japanese culture. Low context, direct negative feedback, no nonsense just-say-it style.

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Culture will inevitably play a role. The Japanese culture is also not at all helped by their expectations of you putting 16h a day in the office so you seem like you are hard at work.

Needless to say, extremely dogmatic bosses who love that ego stroking won’t give it up easily due to the pandemic – or any other reason.

I’d be willing to bet that a lot of Japanese workplaces are already putting people back in offices, even.

dyowee

dyowee

Able to focus more at home?

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: bot
FUZIX FUZIX is a fusion of various elements from the assorted UZI forks and branches beaten together into some kind of semi-coherent pla...
New
First poster: iPaul
TOKYO (Kyodo) – Japan’s government plans to encourage firms to let their employees choose to work four days a week instead of five, aimin...
New
First poster: bot
The overengineered Solution to my Pigeon Problem. TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlle...
New
First poster: bot
Developing Godot Projects with Neovim. When I started using Godot Engine, what surprised me the most is the built-in Language Server Pro...
New
First poster: bot
Large Language Models like ChatGPT say The Darnedest Things. The Errors They MakeWhy We Need to Document Them, and What We Have Decided ...
New
CommunityNews
Apple Patents Suggest Future AirPods Could Monitor Biosignals & Brain Activity - AppleMagazine. The US Patent & Trademark Office...
New
First poster: dyowee
A Go package for building Progressive Web Apps. A package for building progressive web apps (PWA) with the Go programming language (Gola...
New
New
First poster: adamaiken89
Why Ruby on Rails still matters. An old tool endures in a Next.js world
New
CommunityNews
GitSyncPad is an innovative micro keypad designed for effortless Git version control. Execute commands like git add, git commit, and git ...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
I have seen the keycaps I want - they are due for a group-buy this week but won’t be delivered until October next year!!! :rofl: The Ser...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
mafinar
This is going to be a long an frequently posted thread. While talking to a friend of mine who has taken data structure and algorithm cou...
New
AstonJ
If you get Can't find emacs in your PATH when trying to install Doom Emacs on your Mac you… just… need to install Emacs first! :lol: bre...
New
New
First poster: joeb
The File System Access API with Origin Private File System. WebKit supports new API that makes it possible for web apps to create, open,...
New
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
New
CommunityNews
A Brief Review of the Minisforum V3 AMD Tablet. Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information fo...
New