Comments by "Seven Proxies" (@sevenproxies4255) on "Are Japanese People Really Hardworking? | ASIAN BOSS" video.

  1. There's an inverse relationship between long working hours and productivity. The longer working hours you have, the more time each individual worker feel they have to complete the job, so they get encouraged to be less productive or slack off. The shorter time you have to complete a job, the more efficiently you have to use your time. And then there are factors like fatigue and bad motivarion increasing the more of your life you spend at work.
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  2. It seems to me that middle management in japanesw society need to speak up more often and tell their employees: "You've worked hard and done a good job today! Now go home and enjoy your free time!"
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  3. Omni Culture: That's true. In terms of productivity, "smart work" is a lot better than "hard work". Compare the following situations in unloading several sacks of concrete from a truck. Doing it manually is definitely HARD work because each individual sack weighs around 25 kilograms. But if the sacks were stacked on a loading pallet and you use a forklift instead, you're not doing very hard work at all, but you work much smarter and it takes a fraction of the time than doing it manually. The virtues of "hard work" is mostly obsolete and should quite frankly be discarded in favor of smart work in almost every industry. Because in the end it's usually both more productive and significantly cheaper.
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  4. Standard paid working hours in my country is 7 hours a day (although you're away for at least 8 hours because 1 hour is unpaid lunch break). But there are exceptions depending on the type of job (some require you to work for 12-24 hours per shift, but you get extra days during the week off to compensate, or you have long working hours one week but get the next week completely off) The umbrella organization for the labour unions have pushed through legislation that demands that the standard is to have at least 11 consecutive hours off per day, so working schedules that violates it is illegal. There's talks about passing legislation that reduces all standard working days to 6 hour work days, but it's a matter of debate how realistic that proposal is (certain jobs and industries would never be able to adapt to it so there's bound to be exceptions) That said, while 7 hour work days might sound short to some people. The corporate culture is that during these hours you WORK. I've been to other countries where "formally" the hours are 7-8 hours per day. But a lot of that time is either consumed by paid breaks, or people taking informal "coffee breaks" or stand around the water cooler for several minutes chatting. Whereas if you tried something like that where I live, you would be fired rather quickly. So workdays are short compared to some countries. But the time at work is spent in a pretty efficient manner.
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