Japanese companies warming up slowly to four-day workweek
1,000 employees who wish to use the system.
The second approach keeps the same number of hours per day and lowers salaries accordingly. Yahoo Japan launched a system with fewer hours per week in April 2017 for employees who look after children younger than elementary school age or elderly family members. Eligible workers can pick a weekday off in addition to weekends. The day they choose goes unpaid.
Technology company NEC Corp. also offers a shorter workweek for all employees caring for elderly spouses or parents.
What are the benefits?
For employees, it obviously allows for a more diverse and flexible way of working.
At least one case suggests that a shorter week makes for happier workers. Perpetual Guardian, the New Zealand company, found that its experiment led to lower stress, higher levels of job satisfaction and improved work-life balance among its 240 employees.
For employers, providing different work styles is a way to attract and retain talented employees, an important feature given Japan’s diminishing domestic workforce.
The population is projected to shrink roughly 30 percent to 88 million people by 2065, down from 127 million in 2015, according to the governmentaffiliated National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. The report, released in 2017, notes that people 65 or older are expected to constitute more than a third of the population in 2065 — versus 26.6 percent in 2015.
Hiroaki Nagai, the president of a job-matching service that focuses on four-day workweek regular positions — now mainly for pharmacists — said this demographic change makes it “important for employers to maintain employees’ vitality”.
“By maintaining it,” he said, “employers can prevent resignations, serious accidents and abusive behavior”.
Are there concerns?
Three days a week away from the workplace may sound good on paper, but there are potential drawbacks.
One is whether workers choosing the four-day week would receive discriminatory treatment in terms of pay raises and promotions, compared with those who work five days.
“I think it is imperative for us to monitor that employees using the system don’t receive significantly poorer treatment and, mainly through labor unions, call for balanced treatment,” said Jun Imai, a professor of labor sociology at Sophia University.
Another worry is whether a shorter workweek may not necessarily lead to more free time. Consider the example of an individual working four days a week for a total of 40 hours at an office in the Tokyo area, an hour away from home.
In this scenario, each workday would be 10 hours. Add to that an hour for lunch, as well as the two hours of commuting. The result is little free time on workdays, said Hiroki Sato, a professor of human resources management at Chuo University’s Graduate School of Strategic Management.
Also, “they would have to devote at least one of the three days off to chores like cleaning, doing the laundry and shopping to catch up — so that means they don’t have much free time on weekends, either”, he said.
Considering that, Sato said, a good work-life balance under this system can only be achieved if an employee’s workplace is within walking distance or total work hours are limited to 32 per week.
How many workers opt for the system where it is available?
So far, it would be a stretch to say the idea has gained traction in Japan.
A spokesman at NEC said the company does not expect many employees to sign up for the reduced workweek plan.
The system is ‘intended as a safety net’ to address the problem of employees having to give up their jobs to care for elderly relatives, he said. When it was introduced last October, just one employee expressed serious interest. As of January 28, there were only five employees working four days a week.
Metawater has not disclosed how many of its employees are taking part, but a spokesman said he feels “it will take time until the system becomes established”.
“Giving employees workstyle variations may boost their performance and make it easier for them to plan their lives,” he said.
“It’d be nice if that gets people to think they want to work for our company.”
Will the concept ever become mainstream in Japan?
The four-day workweek is more compatible with shift work and labor-intensive sectors where worker motivation directly affects customer satisfaction, Nagai said.
He added that medical and welfare services, restaurants and hotels are among such sectors.
Through his job-matching business, which fully debuted two years ago, he “sees the potential in the four-day workweek and at the same time is becoming keenly aware of the difficulty of popularizing it”.
“But the personnel shortage particularly in the medical and welfare industry is a pressing issue so the four-day week should be more widely available,” he said.
His Shizuoka Prefecturebased company, Shukyu Mikka (three days off a week), intends to expand the four-day week within the industry as a first step.
* Masumi Koizumi is a staff writer of The Japan Times.