Commentary: Pandemic fails to shift Japan’s attitude to employee well-being

The particular prevalence of remote work, he determined, remains low in The japanese because of corporate culture . Many Japanese businesses, he says, have a long tradition of staff members working together in the same room within the office and have a hierarchy with tight communication and lots of internal appointment.

“This system works well in team-based tasks, casual information-intensive work, less discretion, less autonomy and more exchange of tacit knowledge… however , our findings claim that all of those are unsuited to remote work, ” says Okubo.

The risk in order to employee health, at this stage, is that Japan results to post-pandemic normality without any significant corporate reset within attitudes towards well being.

“The previous couple of years have outlined the need to rework japan office workplace and to more rapidly accelerate an understanding of the critical importance of wellness, ” states Peter Eadon-Clarke, a good adviser to the Asian wellness consultancy Conceptasia.

“Initiatives to lessen lengthy working hours and stress , by both the government and private sector, were slow and steady, but the need for urgency is now obvious. ”

A study by market research corporation Intage strongly suggested that will workers themselves are even more pessimistic. In a document released in April, it found that will just 18 per cent of workers surveyed said their operating style had transformed during the pandemic, and 13 per cent predicted that those changes will be permanent.

Japanese workers, better than anybody, know precisely how hard-drawn are the invisible outlines in the workplace. They also know it will take more than an unprecedented global outbreak to shift all of them.