On Working Overtime in Japan: Is Virtualization the Solution?

Michael Downey of the aptly named MichaelDowney.com blog has a deep and thoughtful post about how he, as a foreigner, struggles with the Japanese expectation of working long overtime hours. It's an interesting dilemma to be sure. There appears to be no easy way to find a balance between your personal life and work if companies just don't allow you to do so. Here's and excerpt of what Michael has to say:

[I]t can certainly be seen above that the majority of Japanese people seem to also want rid of the heavy amounts of overtime, but see it as a ‘necessary evil’, in some sense. It’s also true that there have been governmental efforts made into bringing a more stable Work-Life Balance to Japan. But is it really changing anything, and if so, will it change enough in my lifetime? It is really, in reality, possible for a newly graduated foreigner to go to Japan and work a respectable 9-5 job at a decent company? Or am I doomed to submit to the system if I wish to work in Japan?

For me, this discussion brings to mind France's experiment with a four-day work week and how it cuts down on energy and transportation costs. Usually a leader in innovative ideas, is a four-day work week just too far out there for Japan to consider? I mean boob-grabbing machines and helicopter bottle openers are no problem, but a four-hour work week? No, that's just crazy talk!

Even if a four-hour work week is out of the question, can't technology help us solve this problem. I mean, remote access computer has advanced far enough so that we can easily use programs like Go to my PC to access your work computer from home.

A more realistic solution would be virtualization. Employees would be given their own laptop upon entering a company, which they could bring home and use as their personal computer as well. Their work operating system could be a virtual machine, and thus kept separate from the main OS. It would make sense if employees were given more freedom to bring their work home with them.

While many actually prefer the to work in the office, anyone who has kids at home would certainly appreciate such an option. Lots of companies already allow this kind of thing, but enforce numerous restrictions as to what exactly you can do on this company computer. For example, no World of Warcraft or Counterstrike allowed. Bummer...

But 2009 might be the year where we see more companies taking advantage of virtualization to this end. In fact, some departments at Microsoft has put this into practice. Give your employee a free personal computer, and let them install whatever they want on it. But the virtual machine is reserved for exclusively for work. A free computer would certainly be a attractive incentive to potential employees. And in these trying times, it would certainly give companies a leg up in the talent wars.

Comments

[Darg]

I would love to see this, but unfortunately I think a lot of companies, especially bigger ones, would resist this due to their perceived security risks among other things:

1) Japanese don't appreciate work as much if it's not done in front of them for some reason... even if you get the job done at home, they still sort of look at it as lazy. This is the biggest hurdle.

2) For bigger corporations, there's a big perceived security risk. I say perceived because if you're careful and do things properly then it's fine, but a huge amount of corporations and their employees are clueless when it comes to technology, especially the higher you get up the ladder. You were basically forbidden to take your work home at a corporation I worked at because of the risks of passing out proprietary information and virus contamination because no one apparently knows how to use antivirus software properly.

And virtualization? Again that'd be great, but it's not going to happen anytime soon for the large amount of corporations... let's work on everyone getting their files digitized instead of having masses of paper and train everyone to actually make use of it first. Walk before you fly.

I worked this occasionally at a smaller company, but again plenty of resistance due to item 1) above. Japan is well behind the curve on this one.

[HERNANDEZDOLLY29]

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