Japan: a nation in love with its railway
NADDEM KARBHARI, Performance Reporting and Analysis Manager at MTR Crossrail, spends a fortnight with the Japanese Railway Group, three decades after the first annual exchange was organised by British Rail
It was a Sunday night at a quiet and emptying train station. Shifts were coming to an end, and few staff remained. I was met by a man in an immaculate uniform, looking as sharp as he would have been at 0900 on a Monday morning - more like an airline pilot than a member of a station team. He was taking the trouble to speak with the occasional passengers as they passed through.
This was Japanese Railways Group ( JR) in a nutshell; not just efficient, not just putting on a show, but comprised of people who felt every day what it meant to be part of the country’s railways and one of the world’s best organisations.
I was on a two-week exchange trip to look at the inner workings of JR. Since the privatisation of Japan’s railway system in 1987, the seven firms that took on the national assets and operations have managed to turn JR into the country’s most successful and admired company, one that’s become renowned globally. Famously, it handles seven billion passenger journeys each year, in a relatively small country, and does so with unwavering efficiency and remarkable punctuality.
Even when Japan was still in the early and messy stages of working out its privatisation strategy, British Rail ( BR) could see there were lessons to be learned for the UK. The first exchange was organised by Adrian Shooter CBE in 1986, when he was a BR senior executive and before he took on the transformation of the privatised Chiltern Railway.
The time spent on exchanges in Japan is split between the theory (lectures from each of the JR Group bosses covering HR, marketing and operations processes and delivery) and visits to see the principles being put into action at stations and depots, as well as research and education centres.
It was this holistic view that mattered most in trying to understand the organisation’s success. You can learn all you like about the technology that powers the services in the control rooms, but it’s the evidence from the wider environment - the policies, processes and people - that better explains how such a high standard has been maintained, and how all the cogs work in perfect unison.
Of the group’s 18,400 employees, a good proportion come from older age groups. The organisation is highly conscious of the need for continuity, and for retaining the knowledge and values garnered over the course of long careers. On-the-job training, therefore, forms an important part of the skills transfer among employees. The education and development of each member of staff is documented like a personal medical record, and all employees spend time at the General Education Centre in Nagoya. This isn’t the occasional day of update training, or even a special week for the top executives. Typically, people will stay for two months, living alongside the teachers. There’s all the facilities needed for an extended stay, including a canteen and gym.
The business doesn’t just pass on learning; it makes JR Group an important part of employee’s lives, embedding its culture and values. Staff learn together, rather than as competing individuals, and develop a sense of being part of a bigger organism and making progress as a whole team.
Self-development is offered online. Each year the JR Group has more than 3,000 staff studying 30 different areas of operations and business. I asked how they managed to incentivise staff to give up their time in order to do this - was it reflected directly in their pay packets or their future prospects? The answer was a firm ‘No’. Not letting the side down and not falling behind was all the incentive the staff needed to further their own development.
It’s the epitome of organisational efficiency, both in theory and in practice, covering every aspect of the operation, from maintenance and control rooms, to customer service and even the cleaning of the trains. Everybody knows exactly what’s expected of them, and they adhere to the standards not only because they want to, but because they believe that the paying customers deserve it.
Evidently, there’s a significant ‘East versus West’ cultural difference on show here, and it’s a powerful example of how important a sense of purpose is to JR Group’s workers. The success isn’t delivered through enforcement or overworking, but comes instead from the notion that people get greater reward from their sense of being part of something bigger than themselves and their individual career. It’s certainly a notion which UK operators would do well to embrace.
There’s no shortage of technical wisdom to be taken from the exchange, but the biggest lessons for the UK would seem to centre around passenger culture. We visited two of the busiest stations in the world, at Shibuya and Shinjuku. These are crammed to the hilt daily, and if people aren’t using the daily commuter trains, they’re in the stations doing their shopping. What makes
the potential chaos work so well is that the passengers understand how the service works, and that everything is being done to make it efficient.
On the UK’s rail network there’s a lot of activity and resource centred around the issue of delivering information, but what we don’t do nearly as well as the Japanese is engage passengers so that they feel it’s their railway, and that we’re all in it together. More screens in trains sharing real-time information, and more app-based content would help, but the main issue is cultural.
There’s also the level of attention given over to counter measures. The JR Group identifies any problems for services and maps all the factors that contribute to risks. They then look at ways to change or mitigate these risks so that they don’t grow. For example, in the UK drivers can turn up late for shifts, and this causes delays and a raft of problems for the operating company. In Japan, however, the drivers are able to sleep at the depot, meaning they can come off their shift and go directly to bed. The Group have looked at every detail of this facility in order to make it an attractive proposition, right down to the angle of beds being optimised according to the kind of sleep needed - a short power-nap as opposed to a night’s sleep, for example. Alarms are pre-set according to individual shifts.
This level of high detail extends to other areas, not least the cleanliness of trains. Special brooms that can detect moisture are used, so that if there has been an accident on a seat, the broom will find it and the seat taken out of commission and properly cleaned.
One of the great achievements of the JR Group is public perception. The Japanese still see the privatised services as their national railway (with any other providers labelled as the ‘private railways’). The country as a whole is proud of the quality of its trains, and this makes a crucial difference to the industry’s recruitment, operations and efficiency. Some of the conductors I spoke to said they’d joined because they’d always wanted to work on a Shinkansen.
The Dr Yellow phenomenon says it all. There are Dr Yellow branded T-shirts, hats, shoes and soft toys; parents will take their children to see Dr Yellow pass by. And it’s basically just a maintenance train that runs every 10 days.
The UK has a far stronger heritage in the railway sector, having pioneered it, and not so long ago a job on the country’s railway was also seen as a dream ambition for many. So if there’s one critical question we can take from Japan, it has to be: ‘How can we make the UK learn to love its railways again?’