This is the time in history when people are so much more connected than their ancestors, never was it so easy to chat to a friend living next block in a blink of an eye, now we can just send a message to the person we love and get a reply back knowing their well being. But, this has also meant that now very few people go to actually visit their friend’s house to know his/her well being. This is much more ingrained in the Japanese society than any other. This is reflected whenever you take a train, almost all the people are glued to their phones and try hard not to have an eye contact with a stranger. Technology has made us so disconnected that we do not even want to have a simple eye contact with a stranger, we do not even want to give them the slightest of chances to express themselves.
While this problem is not centric to Japan, and has spread to almost all parts of the developed world, Japan is an extreme example of this. The social quotient has gone away completely and even before corona when people used to work in offices together, colleagues interacted mostly on chat and not in person. I have experienced such dry times of not getting a chance to talk to my manager sitting just across me because he chose a channel of communication which actually does not involve actual human connection. And now after corona, this has become the general norm and people have even stopped having a call or a meeting with their colleagues. I fear that even if the offices are opened, this lack of connection is not going away anytime sooner.
People are overburdened with work and while work from home does increase productivity to some extent, the absence of proper communication dents that productivity and overall happiness of the workplace degrades more than the productivity increase. I think going forward the new normal is not remote work but the decrease in the amount of work to allow families to manage their personal life in a better way. To tackle this the newly proposed change in workplace hours is the solution we should all look up to. If a person gets 3 holidays in a week, he/she will definitely have more productivity as was shown by a month long experiment conducted by Microsoft Japan. In their experiment, they found that 4 days work week increased the productivity by 40% thereby offsetting the 20% loss incurred by the loss of 1 work day and actually added 20% more to the amount of work done. Hence, this 4 day work week should stay with the same old pay that employees got. And the remote work should be removed, may be not entirely but something like 2 days WFH and 2 days work from office kind of a model.
I think that if 4 days work week is the new normal, we would be able to bring back the employees to office setting and on top of that increase their productivity as well as their happiness both professionally and in their personal lives. Keeping my fingers crossed for the exciting times to come in Japan and in the world post corona.