Last year, I was asked to take a national exam in Japan as a favor to one of my friends even though it’s not related to my job. It may sound very odd but the reason is not crucial here, so I shall skip it.
Each year, fewer than 20 people take the test and there are two portions to the test, the written exam and the practical exam. I passed the written exam but didn’t pass the practical one so this year, that same friend requested me to take it again. Since I’ve already passed the written exam, I’d just have to take the practical this time. In the application form, I checked the box that says I passed the written test already and mailed out the application.
A few days later, I received a phone call from the organization overseeing the test to tell me I have to fax over a copy of proof that I passed the written test (yes, fax is still very much alive in Japan). I told them I couldn’t find it and asked if they could reissue it, and the lady over the phone promptly replied, “Yes, I’ll mail it to you.”
If you have the data already, why do you impose an unnecessary step to waste time and paper?
There is a belief that inefficiency in the work place is partly due to improvements made to the workplace. Its ironic.
In other parts of the world, when there is automation of the workplace, people are laid off as machines and computers have displaced the need for low skilled work. This forces the workforce to constantly upgrade itself to stay relevant.
Yet in Japan, for people working the same job and the incumbent system/structures that they are made irrelevant by automation, its work as usual. Beyond the facade of Japan being a highly automated and efficient society, Japan seems not able to keep up with its pace of development. The old ways of doing work and thinking are still very much alive in the culture.
The people who lost their jobs to automation stays on to “supervise” the machines, new jobs are “created” for people to oversee the “automation” and “manage” the improved “work structures”. So the inefficiencies are, in my opinion, job preservation and an inability to adapt to a fast changing workplace.
What do you think?
If I try to make sense of the situation you described, the simplest explanation I can come up for that would be Japan’s “no firing of full-time employees” employment culture. At the office I work at, whenever I see my colleagues copying and pasting stuff from one excel to another, I suspect something is not right and try to help them automate that process and often, that would open up their time to do other stuff and reduce their overtime hours. This isn’t so much a problem until the point when things are automated at a faster pace than new tasks/jobs are being created.
Assuming an employee who has 10 tasks everyday takes 1 hour to complete per task, that would mean the employee works overtime for 2 hours per day. If 2 of the tasks get automated, that employee would have the time to place more energy on the other 8 and leave work on time. But what happens when 5 are being automated, and suddenly, 3 hours of their time is opened up but the management doesn’t have new responsibilities for them? That would be exactly the belief you mentioned where improvements have created redundancy, yet the Japanese culture frowns upon the simplest resolution to that (i.e. lay off that employee). But I wouldn’t see that as the perfect solution either. Now that that same employee has more time, from the perspective of the management, you are able to get more things done for the same amount of expense (i.e. employee’s salary) so the most ideal option would always be to assign new tasks. For a company to grow, the mindset should always be to create more jobs but, like you said, many are unable to keep up with their pace of development and end up having un-utilized overheads.
From the company’s point of view, I’ve bought your time so you have to be at the office and if I have no meaningful job for you, I’ll assign you something not very meaningful or just have you do nothing (see this post). And the easiest way to give someone the most relevant assignment would be to let them monitor whatever that’s been taken over by machines. I see purpose in having someone monitor machines, but that should mean the company ought to provide relevant training to help the staff move on toward a different career track and find ways to fully utilize the new skill acquired by the employee.
In that sense, I agree with your opinion that they arise from job preservation and an inability to adapt to a fast changing workplace; the former of which is something they cannot help and the latter of which is something they haven’t gotten the hang of.