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A story in the Wall Street Journal in 2007 noted that telecommuting is rare in Japan and Korea, and attributed this to a conservative corporate cultures and the high value placed on group effort in the Confucian philosophy that dominates in East Asia compared to a different culture in the US.
The article continued by saying that although countries from both regions access the same mobile technology, US employees use their BlackBerrys to reply to work emails, while Asians use them to play games and send messages to friends.
Asian companies put heavy restrictions on remote working, with the result that employees often work hard in the office until midnight and come in on weekends as well. For these workers, a good balance between work and life is a concept that’s far away.
Almost one decade after that article, the working culture in Asia has begun to transform.
Japanese companies, for example, have been promoting telecommuting this year. Car manufacturer Toyota announced a telecommute program to allow 25,000 employees to work at the office as little as two hours a week. The Mizuho Financial Group started to allow 23,000 employees to work from home and distributed tablets to all its employees so that they can communicate from home. In addition, the financial firm Resona Holdings introduced the ‘smart employee’ concept for those who have very young kids so that they can work shorter hours at the office.
Noritaka Udzi, the President of the Japan Telework Association, has shared his thoughts on some of the causes behind the rise of remote-working in Japan.
First, the widespread broadband infrastructure and its lower costs have made it easier for employees to work on their home computers or mobile devices and share the results with their company’s servers.
After the 2011 Japan Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, organizations have started to allow employees to work from home in order to save energy consumption. Also, companies have realized that a scattered workforce enables continuing operations in the event of an emergency.
In light of a low birth rate and decreasing population in the country, remote-working systems can make it possible for more females to join the workforce, while also allowing them to be able to do some tasks at their home.
According to the Japanese publication President, about 16% of Japanese companies have adopted some type of remote-working system, while in the US about 83% have done so. A survey by the Gallup organization indicates that 37% of US workers accomplished their jobs through telecommuting, up from just 9% in 1995.
Closer to home here in Taiwan, a government administrator has made herself an example of remote working. Audrey Tang, the youngest government minister, is a minister-without-portfolio who is in charge of managing information published by the government and communicating the policy goals. She works three days a week in the office, while working two days from her home.
Coming from a background as a software programmer, she told Business Next, she became very use to spending most of her working time at home rather than at the office.
Some companies might think that it is more difficult to manage remote workers, and that the system might harm working efficiency and performance. But Tang laid out a different point of view in our discussion with her.
First, remote working makes the working process more transparent. Taking software development as an example. If three engineers in a developing team all live in different countries, one in Taiwan, one in India and the other in Canada, they cannot work in real-time because of the time differences.
Therefore, everyone needs to translate their ideas into clear language before going to bed so that other team members can understand, reading only the text, the progress that was made. “With more experience, employees learn how to express themselves better,” she said.
Also, the remote-working process is often recorded and archived. For example, a remote Skype meeting within a team in which members are located around the world might be saved as a record. These resources, in the future, may be transformed into knowledge resources inside the company.
Data in Taiwan on remote-working does not seem to have yet been produced. Most companies still require employees to go to their offices every workday.
China, the biggest market in Asia, seems to be embracing telecommuting more quickly. Although China’s Internet infrastructure was built up relatively later than in other countries, the Chinese people have made rapid advances and have quickly adopted the latest technology. According to the Future Workforce Study published by Dell and Intel this year, 52% of Chinese employees said that they work outside of the office at least one day per week, and 18% of the respondents regularly work in public spaces, such as coffee shops.
From the survey, Chinese employees also hold open and positive attitudes towards new technology in the office. It reported that 79% of the respondents would like to adopt Internet of Things (IoT) technology to improve work efficiency within five years, and 88% would like to try out Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality at the workplace.
A professor of economics at Stanford University, Nicholas Bloom, conducted an experiment on telecommuting with China’s largest travel agency, Ctrip, in 2013. In a nine-month period, 250 employees were randomly split, with half told to work at home and half in the office.
According to the study’s results, home-based employees worked 9.5% longer and were 13% more productive than the office workers. The study also found that they felt happier, and this reduced the turnover rate by 50%. Ctrip found it could save $2,000 annually on office space requirements for employees who telecommute.
However, when the experiment was finished, 50% of the home-based workers asked to come back to the office because they felt lonely and they thought they would miss the promotion opportunities.
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