＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49) on X
The “Work Style Reform” introduced a discretionary work system, but it seems that the way we think about and evaluate the work of ordinary salaried workers is still preoccupied with “working hours.”
1. What is “Work Style Reform”?
Against the backdrop of a “serious labor shortage,” the “Work Style Reform” aims to address the challenges of “increasing the workforce,” “increasing the birth rate,” and “improving labor productivity.” Its three pillars are “eliminating long working hours,” “reducing the disparity between non-regular and regular employees,” and “promoting employment for the elderly.”
In April 2019, a portion of the “Work Style Reform-related Bill” came into effect, introducing a “penalized cap on overtime work.”
2. The Nature of Salaried Work
Not only highly skilled professionals, but even ordinary salaried workers should be able to leave work early, regardless of their scheduled working hours, as long as they efficiently complete the work assigned to them as their mission.
Since I have only ever worked for one company, I am not qualified to generalize, but in my experience, I have encountered the following issues.
(1) The Harm of Social Overtime
I believe it’s best to finish work quickly and leave early, but I’ve been met with scorn when I try to leave on time.
There’s a proverb that goes, “Lazy people’s holiday work（「怠け者の節句働き」）.” This refers to people who are usually lazy, but who work on their days off and make others think they’re hardworking.
There’s also the phrase “shiisosan（「尸位素餐（しいそさん）」）” . It sounds like something you’d see in a “four-character idiom quiz,” but it refers to “a person who, despite holding a certain position, fails to fulfill their job responsibilities and instead receives a salary for nothing, or a person like that.” It’s what we call a “salary thief.”
If you regularly plan your work schedule and work efficiently and ahead of schedule, you should be able to plan your work schedule by counting backward from your designated departure time.
However, there has long been a bad habit of regarding people who stay late as “hardworking” and those who try to leave early as “lazy.”
From my perspective, people who work a lot of overtime are inefficient and lacking in ability, and even worse, they seem like “overtime pay thieves.”
(2) The Unfair Problem of Work Concentration on Highly Skilled Persons
To ensure smooth overall work, superiors tend to assign backlogged tasks and urgent, difficult cases to highly skilled veterans. Zhuangzi also mentions the phrase “those with abilities often work hard.”
There are various reasons for this, including the lack of time to educate and train newcomers, inexperienced employees, and less skilled people, who often struggle to learn even after training.
However, this is a major problem that has created unreasonable inequality between highly skilled and less skilled employees.
3. How to Evaluate Employees
I’m not qualified to make general statements about employee evaluations, but there’s one question I’ve been wondering about for some time.
(1) Does the supervisor accurately understand the quantity and quality (results/finish) of the employee’s work?
(2) Does the supervisor accurately understand the reasons for the employee’s varying overtime hours?
(3) Is the supervisor not misled by the employee’s solo performance?
(4) Is the supervisor humbly open to the employee’s opposing opinions, criticism, and suggestions?
(5) Is the supervisor judging the employee based on personal likes and dislikes and favoring yes-men?
Even after the implementation of the “Work Style Reform,” I hope that companies will continue to strive for “fairness in work allocation” and “fairness in personnel evaluations.”