\u201cThe number of Japanese people who work overtime, more than 60 hours, is higher than any other country,\u201d says Yoshie Komuro, \u201cbut the contributing value of each individual is the lowest among the industrialized countries.\u201d Komuro (TEDxTokyo Talk: Life Balance<\/a>) is the CEO of Work Life Balance Co. Ltd.<\/a> in Tokyo, a consulting firm that argues the best way to improve productivity is to give workers a break. She admits it\u2019s often a tough sell. \u201cPeople worry that if we limit the working hours, it may lower productivity and diminish our will to compete,\u201d she says. But she insists that overwork doesn\u2019t just exhaust employees, it can also sap a company\u2019s profits and saddle taxpayers with hidden costs \u2014 and she has the numbers to prove it.<\/p>\n A long workday hides many hidden costs<\/b>. It\u2019s a fallacy to assume that the longer employees work, the more they\u2019ll produce. \u201cWorking hours and outcome do not correlate,\u201d Komuro says. In fact, she has observed precisely the reverse relationship among some of her hardest charging clients. As employees scaled back their hours, managers were surprised to see revenue increase. \u201cSome companies even have more revenue after cutting down their overtime hours by 30%.\u201d<\/p>\n The tireless worker is a myth. <\/b>\u201cOur brain can concentrate only for 13 hours after we wake up,\u201d says Komuro. \u201cAfter that, our concentration is as bad as drunk driving.\u201d Poor decisions and mistakes proliferate. Overworked employees spend more time in the office fixing errors that could have been avoided. \u201cYou are paying extra for the time when people tend to make more mistakes and have fewer\u00a0good ideas,\u201d says Komuro. \u201cThe more time they spend at work, the worse their results become.\u201d<\/p>\n The vicious cycle of exhaustion.<\/b> Companies fall into the trap of pushing their employees to log longer and longer hours as soon as revenues slip. It\u2019s only the beginning of a vicious cycle, Komuro warns. \u201cNo matter how much time they spend at a meeting, their lack of new ideas means the meeting won\u2019t go anywhere. Only poor ideas come up, so the meeting drags on; they can\u2019t go home; the products won\u2019t sell. This vicious cycle has no end.\u201d In the worst-case scenario, the employer begins to lay off workers, loading still heavier hours on the remainder of the workforce. \u201cCompany A keeps long working hours, laying off people in order to cut down the overhead. As a result, that imposes a burden on the people who remain in the company, and it turns out that the overtime costs more than the savings from laying off people.\u201d<\/p>\n The plight of overworked employees should concern all taxpayers. <\/b>The costs of overwork ripple out from the office to the home, as families struggle to find caretakers for children and aging parents. Eventually the pressure falls on taxpayers to share the burden, Komuro says. \u201cFirst, because we don\u2019t have time to care for our aging parents, we ask the government for 24-hour elder-care facilities, which puts more financial burden on the government. We ask to extend the time our kids can stay at the nursery, because we can\u2019t leave work to pick up kids before the school closes.\u201d The challenge of elderly care is particularly pressing in Japan, where the population is aging fast. \u201c23% of Japan\u2019s population are the elderly, the highest percentage in the world,\u201d Komuro says. But her nation is only at the forefront of an international trend: \u201cKorea by the year 2030, China by 2040, will follow us,\u201d she says. \u201cSo they will have to transform their business style into one in which they can be more productive in a short period.\u201d Champion efficiency, not perseverance.<\/b> \u201cI believe Japan plays an important role in showing other Asian countries a good example of how to go through this transition, for them to overcome the same problems they will encounter in the future.\u201d But change will only come slowly, with a cultural shift that champions efficiency rather than perseverance. \u201cHelp the people around you open their eyes to this idea,\u201d Komuro says. \u201cQuit working long hours and placing a financial burden on the government in order to solve our piled-up problems in Japan.\u201d And above all, get the message out to managers. \u201cYour subordinates\u2019 motivation will keep falling, unless you change yourself,\u201d she says. She speaks from personal experience. \u201cI have been running my company without overtime for the past six years. All the best employees in my firm are actually women who work on their limited schedules.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Never mind\u00a0workers\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Yoshie Komuro suggests\u00a0that if anyone stands to benefit from a sensible workday, it\u2019s employers. \u201cThe number of Japanese people who work overtime, more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2199,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,30,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-latest-posts","category-socio-cultural"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"ge","enabled_languages":["en","ge"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"ge":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2198"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202,"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198\/revisions\/2202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businessgeorgia.ge\/ge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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