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Dentsu CEO resigns after overworked employee commits suicide
- MichaelBurge 10y agoThat's sad, especially since most of the extra hours are busywork and peer pressure from what I've read. What happens in Japan if you put in a simple 40-hour week, do good work, and then leave at the end of the day? I also understand their government makes it very difficult to fire employees. And I can't imagine they'd reassign you to watch the paint dry if you're actually doing good work. Would you mainly miss out on promotions? Is it just a social thing, or is it economic? Since it's harder to fire people in Japan, there's a lot of risk to hiring a new employee. So maybe the culture helps weed out uncommitted people, which helps derisk hires? Or, to a certain extent, lets you get more productive hours out of them.
- vezycash 10y ago>Is it just a social thing The little I know about Japan is from Anime, books, articles and online comments. In Japan, leaving before the boss is distasteful. Also, going home early instead of socializing after work is frowned upon even by one's spouse. I've also read that there's no job hopping. Employee for life is still a thing there. And an ex-employer's comment is heavily weighted by prospective employers. Additionally, loyalty is highly valued, probably more than ability. This Wikipedia article is a good summary of Japanese work environment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment
- throwaway2016a 10y ago> In Japan, leaving before the boss is distasteful My personal management policy is I get in before and leave after all my employees incase they need me and to show them that I am there for/with them (within reason - if someone is putting a really late night I may leave first). The idea of not leaving before the boss leaves is weird to me. I get higher pay and more stock options, why should I be leaving early when my team is working their butt's off? Edit: I realize this could be taken as a ploy from me to get the team to work more hours. But I also don't shame employees for leaving before me. It's not a contest. If they get their work done they shouldn't feel guilty leaving at 5:00.
- jodrellblank 10y agoIf they get their work done they shouldn't feel guilty leaving at 5:00. If they get their work done, should they feel guilty leaving at 3:00?
- freehunter 10y agoMy experience is, there's always more work to be done if you finish your tasks early.
- prodmerc 10y agoYeah, you can always do some of tomorrow's goals, and continue until you hit some more difficult problem, at which point your work in advance will let you spend more time working on that problem. People who don't like what they do won't do this, of course.
- com2kid 10y agoWhen I was a manager? Nope. I had people who got in at 7, left at 3. No problem.
- jodrellblank 10y agoNice subversion. But I was poking at the relationship between duration, rather than offset. Should they feel guilty leaving early if they finished their work? Should they feel guilty leaving late if they haven't finished their work?
- throwaway2016a 10y agoSerious answer... if they really have nothing else to work on then sure. But that's obviously rare. So more realistically... if the project was early I'd actually suggest to them that if they want to take some PTO time they can.
- keithpeter 10y ago"If they get their work done they shouldn't feel guilty leaving at 5:00." Good for you. Do you spread this message widely? OA5[1] on a t-shirt or something? [1] Scott Adams Out at Five as an organising principle.
- martin_henk 10y agoI live and work in Japan since 2011. The most part of this time in larger companies. Afaik Dentsu takes or took huge pride in being an elitist salaryman operation. People joining them couldn't be totally unaware of this. Keyence is another place with a similar reputation. Although you'll find more places like this, it is not that common. I am pretty sure every country has companies like this. Further, Japanese people work long hours. Some will due to peer pressure. Some will cause they have nobody waiting at home. In some workplaces your colleagues are like friends. So, they socialize a lot during work hours. I think there is no single reason why Japanese people work longer hours than Europeans for example. I am convinced however, that on the average a Japanese employee takes a huge amount of pride from doing a good job. The point: How to judge if a job was executed well or not? I experience this not to be so easy mostly due to the Japanese style of communication, which leaves a lot of space for ambiguity. Maybe long work hours stem from this.
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- vivekd 10y agoIf the Japanese are working so much that some a literally working themselves to death - why is their economy so bad? My guess is that a lot of that time is getting used up with unnecessary busy work rather than actual productive labor.
- pgz 10y agoSeveral people argue that working long hours will have a negative impact on productivity. For example if you look at EU countries, the ones with the economy in worse conditions are those with longer working hours (Greece, Italy).
- maverick_iceman 10y agoCorrelation doesn't imply causation. Maybe people are forced to work more because the economy is bad.
- hashmal 10y agocorrelation doesn't forbid causation, either.
- tylerhou 10y agoRight, but the original commenter tried to support his claims with some far-fetched correlation.
- IshKebab 10y ago"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'." -xkcd
- chaostheory 10y agoThere's already plenty of evidence that working beyond 40 hours a week translates into a reduction in productivity. This is not some new, revolutionary insight; it's old news yet so many people and organizations ignore it at the cost of efficiency. The 40 hour work week is not just for your sake, but it's in the company's interests as well. I could be wrong but a lot of the data from was from WWII. When your country's survival is on the line, most civilians will be very motivated to work as much as possible producing municitions and war machines. Some researchers measured productivity vs work hours during this time and they found a certain point where productivity just plummets. Unfortunately these are the only links I can find given 2 min and I don't believe that they cite WWII research: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-hours http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-... https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/ https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679cb506d#.zijtmile4 https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679... (What I like about Dustin's post is that he mentions that you can have a boost in productivity if you work longer hours temporarily like say for two weeks. Beyond that, there's no gain in productivity and most often there's actually a net loss)
- keithpeter 10y agoI gather that Japan has an ageing population and therefore issues with underemployment among older people. Spreading out the work among more people seems logical. In some ways, I admire the French approach to work/life balance.
- mikesickler 10y agoDentsu is exhibit A for what's wrong with the Japanese work environment. This isn't the first time they've been responsible for an employee's suicide through overwork. This young woman's tweets before her death are pretty revealing. References to her male superior telling her that she can't hack it because she's a woman, the toxic seniority system where you can't question those above you, 20+ hour days. Just awful.
- Asooka 10y agoHow long until people just start passively disobeying? I mean, if the choice is death by overwork or loss of career (maybe ending in death due to homelessness)...
- labster 10y agoIt's already happening. There's a large population of NEETs who have withdrawn from the work force.
- h1d 10y agoDoubt they withdrew after having undesired working conditions. Many just do not actively seek jobs.
- labster 10y agoThere are lots of reasons people choose not to seek jobs. A person can just look at their parents, decide they don't have the fortitude or attitude to integrate into the sarariman lifestyle, and rationally opt out. PROTIP: one can look for remote programming work in the U.S. or Europe, earn a decent living, and still engage in a NEET lifestyle. I have a steady diet of HN, anime, Perl, and reclusiveness and it works great for me.
- iopq 10y agoI drive Uber because I don't want to work 40 hour weeks.
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- rjeli 10y agoGreat blog post here recently on Japanese work culture: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ "Traditionally, salarymen (and they are, by the way, mostly men) are hired into a particular company late in university and stay at that company or its affiliates until they retire." "The employee hereby promises the company: Your first obligation, in all things, will be to your company. You will work incredibly hard (90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment) on their behalf." "Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake rather than because it actually accomplishes more productive work. Depending on one’s company, this overtime may be compensated or “service overtime” — “service” in Japanese means “thrown in for free in the hopes of gaining one’s further custom”, so your favorite restaurant might throw in a “service” desert once in a while or you might do 8 hours of “service” overtime six nights a week for 15 years." The whole post is a great read that comes from a first-hand experience.
- gragas 10y ago>Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake That's just stupid. It makes me wonder, though: is the work culture similar for ex-patriots working in Japan?
- vtange 10y agoReminds me of some college cultures actually. In architecture school you were almost expected to pull all-nighters for the sake of "being a dedicated architecture student". It is like hazing of some sort.
- chipperyman573 10y agoIn college nobody knows if you really do pull an all nighter
- vtange 10y agoUnless they're in your architecture studio. You basically live there while you work on projects.
- binarymax 10y agoDo I read this right, 105 hours of overtime implying a 145 hour work week (if accounting for a regular 40 hour week)?
- marsrover 10y ago> 105 hours of overtime in the month
- Asooka 10y agoOver one whole month, so that's more like 61 hours per week. Which, judging by the rest of the comments in this thread, isn't unexpected for a Japanese white collar worker.
- noarchy 10y ago>Over one whole month, so that's more like 61 hours per week. How many of us know people in North America who are putting in those kinds of hours? You know, gotta "go the extra mile" for the startup, and all.
- madengr 10y agoHell, I spent the month of December on a "karoshi" project with types of hours. Fuck that! I took two week off to recover. At least they paid me overtime for the hours between 45 and 60, which is highly unusual.
- sologoub 10y agoFor context, from the article: "Takahashi had clocked about 105 hours of overtime in the month leading up to her death, authorities found." Japan has a 40 hour work week and a max of overtime a person can volunteer for. In a month this limit is an additional 45 hours. An employee can agree to more overtime but the source refers to some labor safeguards that are supposed to kick in: https://www.jetro.go.jp/en/invest/setting_up/laws/section4/page5.html https://www.jetro.go.jp/en/invest/setting_up/laws/section4/p... So in essence, she worked more than double the allowed overtime (around 65 hours per week total work time).
- arkitaip 10y agoMany Japanese companies pressure their employees to report significantly less hours than they actually work. So not only will they work you to death, they are stealing money from you along the way.
- sologoub 10y agoThanks! Article definitely fails to mention this and it's an important angle to understand.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoHow does this reconcile with the difficulty of firing people? I've heard they have rooms where people just come in and watch tv all day because a company doesn't want to fire them. So how can people feel a need to work 100hrs?
- unsignedint 10y agoLack of career mobility has been cited nunerous times of why their is this problem exists to begin with. It is very difficult if not impossible to move one company to other mid-career, especially past certain age (job listing in Japan may can list upper age limit), as Japanese hires are very focus on graduates on given year. One reason is because it is not easy to fire people, one wouldn't find opportinities elsewhere, so they are often forced to put up with their situations without much controls. People who get sent to those "do nothing" room (they call it many ways to sounds politically correct, things like "career development department") are those company wishes to fire. There are scandals on these time to time, but instead of letting them watch TV all day it usually consists of meaningless tasks or simply forbidding to do anything to force them quit voluntary, but these are certainly newsworthy extremes. I will omit reasons for long hours as these are discussed elsewhere in other threads.
- joe563323 10y agoNo wonder Japan's birth rate is falling. Who in their sane mind would want their children's to have a difficult life. High time for Universal Basic Income.
- swiley 10y agoJapan has a serious problem that would prevent that: who would pay? They already don't have enough to pay for current subsidies.
- padator 10y agoSuicide seems a bit extreme. Could she not just quit? Also everyday people commit suicide. Why do we blame CEOs for that?
- madeofpalk 10y agoYou're right! Suicide is very extreme. That's kind of the problem that's being discussed.
- dylz 10y agoAnd never have another job again?
- iopq 10y agoAnd? Is that any reason to kill yourself?
- katehall 10y agoSuicide is very extreme, she should have simply quit.
- shard972 10y agoThis is an interesting difference compared to Denstu Aegis (which I worked for) which has been pushing from the top a lot of "Work-Life balance" principles.
- Ronin354 10y agoLooks like Japan might be the best place to start a company. People never quit, work long hours, does not have life outside work.
- markonen 10y agoI filmed this clip of the Dentsu HQ almost 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX6--sQtsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX6--sQtsA In it, you see how all the lights automatically turn off at 10 PM. You can judge how many offices still have workers in them by the lights being turned back on.
- hacker_9 10y agoKind of sad people think they have to work past 10 PM, just to bump up their company image and bosses bonuses. This is what slave labour looks like in the 21 century.