Fujitsu Announces Permanent Work-From-Home Plan (bbc.com) 47
Technology firm Fujitsu announced a new "Work Life Shift" program that will offer unprecedented flexibility to its 80,000 workers in Japan. "Staff will be able to work flexible hours, and working from home will be standard wherever possible," reports the BBC. From the report: In a statement sent to the BBC, Fujitsu said it "will introduce a new way of working that promises a more empowering, productive, and creative experience for employees that will boost innovation and deliver new value to its customers and society." Under the plan employees will "begin to primarily work on a remote basis to achieve a working style that allows them to flexibly use their time according to the contents of their work, business roles, and lifestyle." The company also said the program would allow staff to choose where they worked, whether that was from home, a major corporate hub or a satellite office. Fujitsu believes that that the increased autonomy offered to its workers will help to improve the performance of teams and increase productivity.
Give it 6 months after the pandemic ends (Score:1)
Re:Give it 6 months after the pandemic ends (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll take that bet. I'm at a financial company that wouldn't have considered wide scale work from home pre-pandemic. When the time came, the IT folks were ready and it was relatively seemless for employees to switch to remote work. Collaboration tools, video conferencing, etc all have worked mostly without incident. People have adapted. The IT folks took it in stride since many already worked from home on occasion. I don't think this is going to be reversed and now that people have gotten a taste of how simple it is to work remotely, it's likely they'd just leave if the company tried to walk things back to 40 hours in the office.
Silver lining and all that....
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It depends upon the psychology of those workers. If they are introverts no problem, in fact better for you and better for them. If they are extroverts, well, they will go fucking nuts, suicides will increase and you will have high turnover problems. There are way more extroverts than introverts (for obvious breeding reasons) so you will have problems sourcing staff. All targeting the small group of self motivated, self supervising introverts, who can focus on the own at the task at hand and enjoy that solit
Re:Give it 6 months after the pandemic ends (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you equate working from home with solitary confinement?
I've been doing it for most of the last 20 years, and that's not been my experience.
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I'm not enjoying working from home after about 9 months of doing it. There are some advantages but I'd like to have more interaction with people. The occasional video conference doesn't really cut it.
I wouldn't want to go back to the office for 40 hours a week or anything, maybe a couple of days a week would be nice though.
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...I'd like to have more interaction with people.
You have my condolences. I can only imagine how hard it must be to live life with that kind of disability.
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> There are way more extroverts than introverts
This is both retarded and wrong, when I'm at work my staff all think I'm an extrovert, but I'm most definitely not, and pretending to be one exhausts me. Besides, the idea that introversion or extroversion is directly inherited is in itself complete nonsense.
I'm not alone; most supposed extroverts are just introverts that know how to play the game when it suits; don't assume they're a majority. I would argue given that a lot of polls seem to suggest the majo
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Learn to live instead of yearning to live.
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The tide was already changing, look at this study from 18 months ago for example:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/ec... [yougov.co.uk]
75% - 80% of employees, and more important, HR decision makers in business, already felt that home working was at least as, or more productive.
Given everything that's happened in the last 6 months having forced necessary investment in home working and development of the necessary policies and implementation of necessary technologies by business it's hard to see why they'd now undo all that inves
Re:Give it 6 months after the pandemic ends (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm confident you're wrong. Companies are going to save a ton of money by having people work from home, and they aren't going to want to give that up. Providing people with office space is expensive, but working from home now means your employees are paying for it instead of your company. Even better, since employees are providing their own office space, you don't have to find more space for them when you expand. It's great for employers.
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Nope. The CFOs of the world have wanted to get rid of the boondoggle offices for ages. The people managers always managed to put them off with the bullshit arguments about butts in seats that I'm sure you can find lots of in this very comment section. Then COVID demonstrated that those people were wrong.
Now the CFOs have an airtight argument.
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Yup, that's what the control freak managers always say. Guess that's why you posted anonymous?
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Nope. The CFOs of the world have wanted to get rid of the boondoggle offices for ages. The people managers always managed to put them off with the bullshit arguments about butts in seats that I'm sure you can find lots of in this very comment section. Then COVID demonstrated that those people were wrong.
Now the CFOs have an airtight argument.
I wish, we're already back in the office at least 2 days a week. Butts on seats is perfectly cromulent to those that don't trust their workers, and there's a lot of people out there that don't.
Me, I like to get together with my team and go to a pub for lunch once a fortnight, maybe have a 'team meeting' in a cafe once a week, but otherwise I'm happy for them to work from home. Collaboration is not as fluid, but we're slowly improving. The pluses to the employee are significant, which is great for morale.
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Find a better CFO.
It's not going to be 100% right away, but it seems like the world is lurching towards more employee freedom. Freedom is funny. Once you've tasted it, it's hard to go back.
FTFY... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fujitsu believes that that the increased autonomy offered to its workers will help to improve the performance of teams and increase productivity...
...by identifying individuals whose positions may be outsourced to locales with lower wages.
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Except for the fact that doing so is basically an invitation for a lawsuit for constructive dismissal.
It is certainly possible in some cases to show that a company genuinely needs to lower the wages of its workers without getting dinged for constructive dismissal, but when there is evidence that the company really did something that can be construed as such (such as a demotion or reduction in pay), even if that was not how the company might have meant it, it can be very much of an uphill battle to actua
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Not everyone over here would necessarily sue for something like that either... although in my own observation, a company would cover its ass by always having the employee sign a release promising that they won't actually sue, and receiving perhaps some small additional immediate compensation in exchange for that promise, and if they don't sign it, they will simply be terminated, and be eligible at best only for some termination package applicable to the situation.
Not offering the employee that option, h
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Didn't Facebook or somebody already tell staff that anyone who moves somewhere cheaper will get wage cuts?
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That's the prelude to telling all the staff that didn't move somewhere cheaper they're getting wage cuts.
Re: FTFY... (Score:2)
The "customer service" department at my large international company already had a dual payscale system where you could work from home but at a reduced salary.
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There is very little outsourcing of jobs in Japan.
They have a very different attitude to jobs. Every year graduates apply to various companies who take them on en masse. It's less about specific roles and more about taking on talent that they can develop and assign as needed within the company. The number of such graduates taken on each year is seen as a good economic indicator, although companies feel obliged to do it even when things are bad and are willing to keep people on for the long haul. Downsizing
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And now, w/ this pandemic and increased unemployment, things have reset and countries are more keen to bring back jobs home. If offshoring made sense before due to globalization trends, the pandemic has shown how being excessively dependent on one country puts your own citizens at risk, since that country will prioritize their own citizens first. And it's not just China: anybody - be it India, Mexico, Brazil, even Canada, will try to ensure that their citizens are serviced before they go around helping ot
Work From Home (Score:2)
Every company that shifts to a work from home model is announcing to the world, "we are among the few companies that are not run by raging morons!" They seem to understand that they become a more valuable employer when their current and future employees know that they can work from home. It's going to improve employee retention. They see the statistics that overwhelmingly point to better productivity and massively improved morale.
Contrast that with my own employer, for whom overwhelming statistics that conf
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It's not unreasonable to assume that the productivity gains will be temporary. And once there are things to do other than sit at home and not get COVID people's productivity will drop. Or even once people get acclimated and especially once they are no longer trying to make the case for working from home, people will slack off back to other levels.
Also, there's a pretty clear difference that some people thrive at home and some need dedicated works space.
Obviously, WFH makes sense during a global pandemic.
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It's not unreasonable to assume that the productivity gains will be temporary. And once there are things to do other than sit at home and not get COVID people's productivity will drop. Or even once people get acclimated and especially once they are no longer trying to make the case for working from home, people will slack off back to other levels.
People who are going to slack will find a way to slack, regardless of if they're at home or in the office. They'll take twenty smoke breaks a day, (even if they don't smoke,) hang out in the cafeteria, go for walks around the office, chew the fat at the water cooler; whatever.
The solution isn't to punish the people who're doing their job, regardless of where they're sitting. The solution is to weed out the slackers.
Re:Work From Home (Score:4, Insightful)
There are plenty of employers who care more about enforcing their will on their employees than about productivity. It's the same thing that makes bosses demand 60-80 hour work weeks even though more than a hundred years of research shows people accomplish more when they work 30-40 hours a week. They value control and an intuitive idea about what works over any amount of research and evidence.
commute time (Score:2)
Fujitsu realized that they can now take the time that used to be commute time to get more out of their workers. This is a about more hours grinding away for the same pay.
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They can also pay less rent, offloading that cost onto their employees without compensating them. And they can abide by fewer workplace safety laws. Nobody loses!
If your work ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If your work ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because all humans have the same skill set and we are all replaceable by anyone at any time. Domain knowledge and experience are meaningless. Right?
Just because I can do my job from anywhere does not mean that anyone can do my job from anywhere. Can someone learn to do my job? Sure, yours too. What happens to the business until that person gets up to speed? What are the trade-offs? Its probably cheaper to keep me, and keep me happy.
Re:If your work ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Domain knowledge and experience are meaningless. Right?
Not meaningless. Dangerous. Corporate doesn't want a couple of star employees who can just threaten to walk of the job whenever they want a big raise. Or get hit by a bus. Your work processes will be documented and standardized so that the average practitioner in your field can be pulled in off the street, handed the Company Requirements And Practices manual and be put right to work.
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Haven't you noticed that FAANG companies are explicitly predicated on hiring the best and the brightest? Half the Valley is predicated on hiring the best employees. These companies have the knowhow to outsource all their jobs to low-grade consultants, but they do the opposite. And that's how they create differential value.
What you are describing was true of many shortsighted mediocre companies in the 90s, but they also experienced short-term, mediocre profits. The firms that hired top talent are raking in r
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Haven't you noticed that FAANG companies are explicitly predicated on hiring the best and the brightest?
No. When companies can afford to bypass talent in favor of a culture fit [theregister.co.uk], they miss that 'explicit' mark by a mile. I've worked with people that had absolute shit personalities, or were culturally so far from myself that I'd probably never interface with them in the outside world. But they were highly skilled. I've also worked with some talented African Americans (including a manager who was among the best I've ever worked for) and other races. And so when I read stuff like the above, I figure that the comp
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Most companies are not anywhere near that organized and there is no substitute for things like product knowledge. They might be able to scrape by but the result is going to shit.
I've seen it happen many times when people leave or they think they can just get a contractor to come in and add some new feature.
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Investment in the company is valuable too. If employees see they have a future there and feel like they are rewarded the do better work. Part of it is knowing that they will have to live with the technical debt, part of it is taking pride in what they are doing.
Outsourced workers know they are there because they are cheap (i.e. under paid) and are disposable when someone willing to work for less comes along. Contractors just want to fulfil their contractual obligations as quickly and easily as possible.
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...can be done from home, it can also be done from Bengaluru, India.
Anyone who could be replaced with an Indian worker already has been. For the rest, that's not a realistic threat. The experiment has run its course, and the results are mixed (at best) to disastrous (most commonly).
will it be like you can choose to not work late bu (Score:2)
will it be like you can choose to not work late but it's bad to levee the office before the boss?
Surprising (Score:2)
Lots of companies have announced a shift to primarily working from home. What's significant is that this is Fujitsu. Japanese companies have been the most resistant in the world to give up their office culture. They want 12+ hour days followed by drinking with the team. It's so crazy they even have the word "karoshi" meaning death from overwork coined.
I wonder how this is going to play out everywhere. Agile/DevOps people seem convinced that you need to be staring at your team members stuffed in a team room
Already happening, likely to stay (Score:2)
It isn't even the office space itself. It's everything that goes behind it. I used to work at a fortune 50 that evaluated work from home at a fairly serious level years ago. They studied the TCO for having workers in the office vs having US based workers at home. They studied everything from agent productivity at home vs offices to internet costs vs janitorial costs.
Offices have a lot of costs that workers at home don't have; security, lunchrooms, maintenance, insurance, parking lots, real estate taxes and
This will kill your company. (Score:2)
Hey Fujitsu, you may be greedily thinking this will save you office costs, as rhe employees will use their own homes, desks, chairs, PCs, etc, not noticing the hidden cost of wear and tear that is now de-facto deduced from their salary.
But people *need* to be physically close, to feel empathy and put themselves in other people's shoes. This does not work online. Period. As should be very obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with people on the Internet only.
No, no p.c. delusion about enforcing a happy c