Working With People From Different Cultures

Again on the topic of Japanese business culture, here's another article I translated from the Japanese language blog of Eiji Sakai, a Japanese software engineer and with a CPA from an American university and an interest in economics, culture, and technology.

This article is called "Working With People From Different Cultures" （異なる文化をもつ人たちと働くということ）

Working With People From Different Cultures

Nowadays, due to the spread of the Internet, interaction with people from around the world is more and more common, and it's becoming an age in which we must cross national borders and do daily business with people from other cultures.

Can Japanese companies respond to these changing times? Japanese companies are far too specialized for Japanese culture, and I wonder if it isn't the case that only Japanese people can work in them.

For example, I want you to take a look at this. It's a blog entry from a Japanese man who lives in Singapore, and calls himself a "foreigner NEET" (Not in Employment Education or Training), because he was unable to hold down a job here in Japan.

This entry is entitled: "The correct way to use paid holidays is to have fun." [Link appears to be broken now.]

In this article, Mr. Foreigner NEET severely criticizes the assertion made by a certain website that "paid holidays are not for having fun, they are provided for when you get sick." Paid holidays, along with being a legally established right of the common worker, are the employer's obligation. It is not expressly established how paid holiday should be used. So of course, it should be the case that you can use them for fun as well as for when you get sick. Many countries also have mandated that companies also provide separate paid sick leave. But it is also true that in Japan there are a lot of companies in which it is understood that paid holidays are only to be used when you're actually sick. It seems that there are very few people in Japan who actually use all of their paid holidays every year.

Now let's imagine the situation in which a foreigner comes from abroad to Japan and starts working at a Japanese company. We'll say he is given two weeks paid vacation a year. But when he tells his boss he wants to take two weeks of vacation, his boss tells him that will be difficult. How exactly is his boss supposed to explain this situation to his new employee? The foreign employee will likely stress that the employee handbook says that he gets two weeks of paid vacation a year, so he should be able to take time off. But if the boss explains that this is Japan, and in Japan you're expected to use only half of your paid holidays, will his new foreign employee understand and consent to this requirement?

Consider the English-speaking world, where if a company's rulebook specifies that an employee shall be allowed a certain number of paid holidays, that is exactly how many he or she will be allowed to take. It's not common practice for the official stance to differ greatly from what happens in reality. For businesses in the English-speaking world, all the rules are expressly stipulated in the employee handbook, and the gap between what's written there and how the business is actually run is small, and it's not common to hear "Well, it's not a written rule, but it's just common sense to do it this way." I feel this makes it quite suitable environment for people from various cultural backgrounds to work together.

Even if Japanese companies were to imitate the way English-speaking companies work, it would probably be hard for them to surpass these companies in terms of performance. Japan has a long, independent history, and that has fostered a unique culture here. I think what's important now is to thoroughly contemplate what the essence of Japanese culture really is, and to create a new form of Japanese culture that adapts to the age we live in, where it is necessary to work and associate with people of various cultural backgrounds.

Overtime is Shameful

Lately I've been thinking about the differences in working culture between America and Japan, and I came across the blog of Eiji Sakai (Japanese), who is, according to his blog, a software engineer and with a CPA from an American university and an interest in economics, culture, and technology.  His articles about the differences in Japanese and western business cultures written from the perspective of a Japanese person who has apparently studied and worked abroad is particularly interesting to me, so I started reading and translating some of his articles.  The first article I translated is called "Overtime is Shameful" (残業は恥だ), and I'm posting my translation here.

"Overtime is Shameful"

"If the concept of extreme overtime work were to disappear from Japanese companies, just that alone would surely make the Japanese people much happier. If overtime disappeared from Japanese companies, I myself would consider once again working for one.

Let's take a look at the way people work in western companies where, unlike Japan, there is almost no extreme overtime.

Managers will assign work to each of their subordinates and manage progress.The subordinates will do only the work in the scope that has been assigned to them by their boss. If your own work is done, then you can go home at a regular time, but if it is not finished this results in overtime. Even if the person sitting next to you is doing overtime, that’s someone else's work and thus not your responsibility, so you can still go home early.

In this kind of environment, if somebody is consistently doing overtime, this means that the boss is not correctly estimating the ability of his or her subordinate. So the boss will usually ask his subordinate why he or she is doing so much overtime, and then will redistribute the workload in a manner such that all of his or her subordinates can go home at a reasonable time.

What about Japan? In Japan the boss tends not to give detailed instructions to their subordinates. At departmentwide meetings, the boss will present broad objectives. And the boss will suggest broad roles for each team member, but these are not absolute. It is expected that the team members will talk to each other and decide how to adjust the amount of work each member has appropriately.

In other words, in Japan they don't clearly delineate the work by saying "Okay this specific subset of the work is my responsibility." In this situation, it's hard even if just one person is doing overtime for anyone to go home early. Perhaps some small part of the work that is causing your teammate to do overtime is your responsibility. If that's the case, then the appropriate action is to stay and do overtime yourself to help that person. This means that, when the areas of responsibility are not clearly defined, there is the possibility that everyone's work will increase to no end.

So, how can we decrease the amount of overtime in Japanese companies? This is a difficult question. The only way that I can think of, is to make the division of work clear as they do in western companies, and thus reduce this "social overtime". However the Japanese are an ingenious people when it comes to making it ambiguous where responsibility lies (for example, it's typical for the anonymous culture of the Internet to be criticized in an anonymous article in a newspaper). So, the tough part is really whether this ideal is actually possible or not.

It's probably also important to have an attitude that recognizes that work is just work, and a job is just a job. Work is a public thing, and not a part of yourself. Because Japanese workers feel too strongly that their work is a part of their character or individuality, there are times when it's hard for them to draw the line between public and private life. Work is certainly important, but at the same time it's just work. Exactly what work is more important than your own family or friends? When you fall ill, who's going to be the one to come running to help? Will it be your job? Or will it be your family?

When discussing the reduction of overtime, usually what is emphasized is the effort of the person doing the overtime, but essentially the reduction of overtime is their responsibility of that person's manager. Here, the person who's in the wrong is the boss that failed to plan the work appropriately. Perhaps even the Japanese government could start a propaganda campaign with the slogan "the subordinates overtime is the bosses shame." It should be taken as a given that career bureaucrats in the Japanese government departments should themselves get rid of extended overtime."

NEWSFLASH: Snowboarding is awesome

I'm from Massachusetts.  I grew up tolerating the cold and snow, but sometime during the windy winters at college on a campus laid out with a cruel, long walk from dorms to academic buildings through many wind tunnels, I sort of started to hate the cold.

But I understand now why cold weather exists:

SNOWBOARDING.

I went for the first time this month when some people invited me for work, and now I don't want to stop.  I even bought some gear:

It's a little bright, but when else do you get to wear interesting colors like that?  

I also started going with Tokyo Snow Club, their trips are pretty fun.

My Furnished Apartment

It's been more than a year since I've moved into my apartment.  Here's the progress I've made:

Furnished Apartment Photos

For comparison, here's what it looked like a year ago when I first moved in:

Empty New Apartment Photos (1 year ago)