NB: this is not a stab at japanese culture, I’m sure some japanese people don’t like it too. I just don’t see how it could improve productivity or wellbeing in the workplace.
Here’s my list of things I got used to but still find annoying or useless:
company wide morning meeting 朝礼,
Reciting company’s values and vision 唱和,
Another team morning meeting 朝礼,
Background music,
Making staff do cleaning chores,
Daily report 日報,
Horenso 報連相 when it’s supposed to be a concept to improve communication but it’s just another excuse for control and micromanaging
40 comments
Useless meetings, absolutely. The daily chorei – it makes sense on Monday, but by Tuesday we’re only saying “same as yesterday”.
The micromanagement. Holy shit, just let us do our jobs.
Prioritizing the company’s success over the needs of an individual, and a focus on style over substance.
Bullying.
Meetings about meetings, flow charts, pointless mail at 11:00 PM on Sat. night, office
drones who lose their shit over nothing.
Everyone discussing the tinniest, least important details ad infinitum with no consideration for other people’s time.
“Do you want A or B? It will take me literally 20 seconds to complete both of them, so how about if I do both of them *right now* and then you can decide later after I leave which one you want.” No, no no… we must stop all productive forward momentum and discuss *every aspect* of both options for *literally 10 minutes!!!* grrr…
> Horenso 報連相 when it’s supposed to be a concept to improve communication but it’s just another excuse for control and micromanaging
I actually find spinach to be quite a good standard for conducting myself, and communicating at work. But it has to come from within, and something you do for yourself to maintain transparency with client/company/team. If it’s “forced,” then it just becomes a waste of time.
I feel like Hourensou 報連相 is causing people to be more “gossip like” since they have to report everything that goes on, they can’t help but pass on unnecessary info about other co-worker’s personal lives.
Complete reliance on windows and Microsoft stuff….
Often not having the correct tools for the job..I feel like I have to hack my way through stuff all the time.
So many cost saving measures that make workflow so inconvenient and difficult it degrades the whole system and makes everything inefficient…
Reluctance to accept and implement new ideas and methods for no good reason…
Knowingly over pay for ridiculous things…askul etc. and penny pinch elsewhere
Always over planning for fringe cases and under planning for majority cases.
Having to use a Fax machine
Excel from hell…..
Flow charts and progress charts…. reports
To name a few…
I’m going for Excel for everything… financial spreadsheet? Check! Form to record lunch requests? Check! Meeting minutes? Check! Building map? Absolutely!
Being the last to know anything, if they bother to tell me at all
1) Miserable intra-team communication and lack of information management in general.
2) Disregard to employee well-being (in other words, bad workplace environment).
3) 健康管理, as expectation to somehow being responsible for falling ill.
4) Arrogance paired with next to no employee management skills, more often than the opposite.
5) Expectation to do overtime. Should have been the first.
6) Microsoft Excel
Working from home actually means you’re not really working.
Jerkoffs delaying my departure until an hour after closing on a Friday night just so they can look good to their supervisor when trying to deliver me a service where all paperwork had been completed the hour prior.
pre-pre-pre meetings
Forms that ask you for your name, birth date and address more than once on the same actual piece of paper.
“The password will be sent in a separate email.”
People clipping their nails at their desk like it’s a normal thing to do.
Employees who note our customer contract says we need to do a 議事録/minutes after every meeting and insist on spending 4 hours to make a perfect 議事録that the customer will never read or even glance at.
Open concept offices.
みなし残業, fuck that shit. Overtime included in salary ? This is pure bullshit. I haven’t worked overtime for the last three years.
Every little task being assigned high priority. Not every task is that important.
Also every time some tasks are delayed even just a few days instead of accepting some delays are inevitable let’s instead hire an expensive contractor to make sure there is no delays.
Also instead of hiring more full-time employees let’s hire a contractor who costs twice as much as our full time engineers and only works three times a week.
Rant over. I don’t get the obsession with contract workers instead of just increasing the headcount..
Double standards. This person can drive to work, this person can’t. This person can ride a bicycle to work, but this one can’t.
u/Inexperiencedblaster I heard you love double standards at work? And your boss was so excited when everyone drove to the work meeting but you (only) were supposed to take the train bc you’re a foreigner.
The yearly employee goal setting. I’m a manager and I hate it. It’s an excuse for poor or overloaded management.
The whole cheapness and contractor system. How they’d rather subcontract to infinity rather than hiring permanent staff to make a permanent dent. How they’d rather make employees waste weeks of time doing something manually vs paying for a program that’d reduce that time in half.
How everything is somehow high priority.
There used to be more, but complaints and changes over the years have thankfully reduced them at my company…
Old Japanese men who are literally useless, refuse to retire, and are given “head of X” department because he is just the oldest
Same worldwide – office gossipers. Totally unnecessary drag on office life.
Sadly all of these things describe a foreign company I work at with a Japanese boss.
The multiple layers of 下請け, with each layer of subcontracting company having even less competency than the one above it.
I used to work at a Japanese SI, and for one project we were installing switches for a new city-wide network at one of the Telcos. We had once subcontractor to rack the switches, one to connect power, and another one to connect the network interfaces.
As it sometimes happens, one of the units that was racked, powered, and connected was acting odd so we decided to swap it out and put a new one in. Took forever to get it done because each subcontractor onsite got so confused by the sudden change in plan.
I remember the power guy thinking that they pulled the wrong power source and they started looking how to pull in a 48V DC line to the rack. No dude, nothing wrong with the power supply and even if there was something wrong with it, you’re not going to fix it with DC power into a box that only has an AC PSU.
On another install for the same project, the subcontractor who was responsible for connecting the interfaces was going through their tasks, a very clear 指差し確認 for each port they connected. However I glanced at their instruction diagram and noticed that they connected one of the ports to the wrong patch panel port. What’s the point of 指差し確認 if you’re only checking that it’s connected, not that the connection is correct??
This one also took an annoying amount of time to resolve because of 報連相 since we had to report it through multiple layers of offsite management to get the ok to disconnect it and connect it back to the correct port. Luckily this was a new install so there wasn’t a maintenance window we were trying to finish within.
Everyone can’t make a decision without asking his/her supervisor, they just do what they are told to do and if something happens they need someone to tell them how to react
Meetings that could be/should be, emails.
Everyone knows they are doing it wrong (higher cost, crappy performance, etc) but because it’s comfortable nobody wants to change anything.
後輩を見下すこと.
The junior / 先輩 hierarchy thing is fucking toxic.
Micro management…people spying on you… overtime.. and meetings on useless times.
not enough holidays 😭 coming from a country with 35+ it’s just annoying lol
Workshops in which the “groupwork” is always writing something on post-it notes and then arranging the notes into categories on a whiteboard.
Can’t they come up with a more interesting groupwork?
Oh, and the “ice-break” activity is always just some lame-ass jiko-shoukai.
Being told we no longer need to fax in our timesheets, but the alternative is manually inputting everything into an excel spreadsheet
Micromanaging drives me mad
Daily report. It just sickens the work spirit and causes so many of the other issues:
1) Why drag out the meeting? Well I need to account for every hour worked, so.
2) Why bring up every significant detail and spread it out like it is a huge thing. Daily report
3) Why be paranoid about taking a risk? Need to report daily, so cannot give things a try to see if they work.
4) Why boss thinks things are going wrong? Daily reports are complaining about everyone but themselves.
5) Why paranoid to teach another person to do something? If I am not the only one with this skill, what will I write in my report?
I do not write one myself, but just seeing useless employees nestle themselves into stuff they know nothing about is so annoying. If they didn’t have to report anything they could just be lazy and let others do their job. Seeing toxic conniving employees push their agenda daily to their superiors as if it is fact…
What managers should do instead:
1) If you think an employee is not up to standards, test them and look at the facts. If they are not up to par, get rid of them.
2) If you think an employee is slacking. Engage them, invite them at random times, do some of their tasks together while sharing a screen. Set better goals.
3) Be positive and happy when things are normal, be angry when they are not. Be relaxed in time of stress and be excited in times of boredom.
4) Be present, ask for decisions to be made with tight deadlines (need an answer in 10 minutes)
5) Ask people when they will be ready and follow up when the deadline is there. Make them accountable.
6) Do not have shared responsibility and do not share info on process to people who have no role in the decision.
The complete disregard for any reason given as to why things are not as management wishes them to be.
No matter what you say, it is regarded as an excuse, laws of physics be damned.
The thing that annoys me the most is the old people at the top not willing to change even when the solution is staring them in the face.
Working for the sake of working
How the companies try and bend the rules. For example, you have ten personal holidays in the contract, but then they try and push you to take them on certain dates. In my case they forced us to write a reason why we wanted them if they were outside these dates. As far as I know all this is dodgy legally.