Two days off for the whole year?! Let's remove the Japanese cultural aspect for the sake of argument. Its relevant but lets keep it general. You'd be amazed h

Two days off for the whole year?! Let's remove the Japanese cultural aspect for the sake of argument. Its relevant but lets keep it general. You'd be amazed how much you can glean from even something as apparently simple as staff leave entitlements. Based on my experience in a previous type of role interacting with "less than stellar" businesses, here's how I'd review that guys manager and company performance: That guy's manager is either incompetent or in a high stress environment themselves from on-high. They don't know how to manage people. Likely running all staff at overload. They are therefore underperforming with fatigue an issue. Likely error rate is excessive, or worse, minor mistakes are being covered up and are already on slow burn to becoming larger ones. Fear is a factor in all decisions involving responsibility. CYA is overused. Leadership is probably running the business poorly across multiple measures. Untested or non-existent disaster contingency plans. Every person is either a critical link or near one. Too much in each persons head because they are too scared to share information. Proliferation of business silos. Entire groups are isolated from each other. Pointless duplication of work or systems. Managers increase headcount for power but then purge when expenses get flagged. Embezzlement or some other fraud is likely because no one is second guessing the day-in-day-out work. The corrupt group are left to run continuously and uninterrupted because no one honest takes the reins at regular intervals. No rotation of staff at any particular point needed because no one really goes on leave. Financial mismanagement at minimum is likely even if fraud is not present. Poor social inclusion/cohesion. Staff are isolated from their communities and those links are shaky or broken. This is not good for anyone and the damage will flow back in other ways. Low cohesive people later turn into messes of their own and in turn result in increasing turnover overall or worse they stay and lower performance of themselves or others. Bullying/mobbing are likely present. Since corporations are legal individuals, this one is a workaholic jerk that doesn't play well with others and at extreme is headed for prison / bankruptcy / or both. Even if the corporation succeeds its still a failure since it had to sacrifice so much to get there it barely got there at all. Dying at the summit is not success when the real success is returning to what matters. Plenty of companies are run this close to failure. Next financial hiccup will cause this company to trip or fall over. And that's how much you can link from staff leave entitlements. Its a lazy way of identifying red flags for sure. Some of these are only related because a company with bad leave arrangements is of a certain design or style. But the financial aspects have served me well as a rule of thumb. Culture matters. Be very suspicious of short leave entitlements and actual usage as they hide a multitude of sins and dysfunctions.