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Panasonic Wants Employees To Relax, Limits Work Days To 11 hours (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the interesting-changes dept.

Japan is notorious for its long working hours, which have been blamed for a national health crisis known as "karoshi" -- death from overwork. From a report on CNET: Panasonic hopes to curb this, instructing its 100,000-ish employees to work no later than 8 p.m. each day, reports Asahi Shimbun. This hour reduction still enables a 55-hour working week, but the directive from Panasonic President Kazuhiro Tsuga also limited overtime to 80 hours a month.

6 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. reactions were mixed by nimbius · · Score: 5, Funny

    japanese: 11 hours!? ill never get anything done and my wife wont let me come home after less than 16 hours you insensitive clods!!
    Americans: 11 hours...so...thats an entire 11 hour shift at just one job? not 5 jobs?
    French: ....
    Americans: someone call an ambulance, the french guy just dropped dead after reading the title.
    dead japanese man: how shameful. ive been dead for 5 months and still manage to get to work on time. stop making excuses for yourself.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:reactions were mixed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Bingo. The average person does 6 hours of work a day. I don't mean you are at your desk for 6 hours. I mean if you stay at work for 12 hours, you get 6 hours of work done. If you stay at work for 6 hours, you get 6 hours done.

      A lot of companies focus on attendance over work completed. It's a stupid metric that needs to die.

    2. Re:reactions were mixed by GuB-42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've read a story somewhere about the manager of an engineering department dealing with critical systems at NASA during the space race.
      He imposed 9 to 5 work days, as part of his plan to promote a healthy routine. He noticed that overwork leads to mistakes and that nullifies any productivity gain made during extra hours.

  2. Quantity vs Quality by Dorianny · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Humans can be alert and productive for only so many hours a day, differs by person but it is definitely even less then 8 for most everyone. After that something that would take 1 hours in the morning will instead take 4 hours of overtime. Of course you will not be able to get anything done in a hour in the morning either because all that overtime means that you will not get enough rest. If you are a security guard, simply being there is good enough but if your work involves higher thought processes then quality beats quantity when it come to overall productivity. Something which is unfortunately lost in today's Corporate culture where the most valued personal is often the people responding to emails at 1am, no matter what gibberish

  3. Re:Only? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Japanese put in a lot of hours, but not much of that is "working". Japan's productivity is only 60% of America's. There is a social taboo to leave work before your boss, so people stay late and surf the web. The bosses are promoted based on seniority rather than ability, and are often incompetent with no incentive to take the initiative on more enlightened working conditions. It is better to just stick to prevailing social conventions and keep a low profile.

    America: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
    Japan: The nail that sticks up will be hammered back down.

  4. Re:Only? by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Japanese put in a lot of hours, but not much of that is "working". Japan's productivity is only 60% of America's.

    Productivity is a measure of output for a given workforce, not working time. Japan's problem isn't one of people surfing the web at work, it's arcane hierarchical structures getting in the way of getting things done.

    I remember working at one of our offices in Tokyo. Very simple task, we found a better way of doing something but to do that we needed another department to briefly do something for us:
    USA Approach: Walk over, knock on the door, "Can you quickly do this for us?", "Yeah sure", "Thanks"
    Japan Approach: Walk to your boss, sell the idea. He walks to his boss, sells the idea. His boss walks to his boss who oversees enough of the company that now the other department falls under him, he asks his way down the chain to see if it works. Eventually it gets to the bottom, person says "yeah sure". Up it goes again, over it goes again, yay we have approval. Walk over, knock on the door.

    No time to surf the web when your productivity suffers due to the horrendous inefficiencies of the workplace.