世論 What Japan Thinks

[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into internal electronic communications within businesses. Over three days at the start of August they interviewed 2,133 people in employment (full-time only, I believe) from their internet monitor group. The sex breakdown is not listed, but judging by other surveys’ demographics, a figure of over 80% male would not be unexpected at all.

This is a subject I’d love to talk about, but company confidentiality issues prevents me from feeling free to let rip. In addition, I still don’t fully understand Japanese working culture, so the exact reasons for some of the issues I experienced still escape me, although management control is one important factor.

One thing, though, that I thought would be good for many large companies would be something like the halfbakery, only with more serious ideas. I had an interesting idea last night regarding mobile phones but, as Q1SQ indicates, communication with other teams with more direct responsibility for phones is problematic, so the idea will just die.

First the basic demographics:
DQ1: In what business sector are you employed? (Sample size=2,133)

Construction, real estate	8.3%
Manufacturing	23.0%
Financial, insurance	4.1%
Communications	5.9%
Electricity, gas, water	1.3%
Export, distribution	6.6%
Service sector	22.5%
Civil service	9.2%
Other	19.1%

DQ2: How many employers does your employee have? (Sample size=2,133)

1 to 9	19.4%
10 to 49	14.9%
50 to 99	7.0%
100 to 499	18.2%
500 to 999	7.1%
1,000 or more	33.4%

Q1: How effective is communications within your company? (Sample size=2,133)

Sufficiently effective	10.5%
Quite effective	35.4%
Neither effective nor ineffective (to SQ)	27.5%
Not very effective (to SQ)	23.4%
Totally ineffective (to SQ)	3.2%

As one might expect, the smallest companies had the best-rated communications. Slightly supripising, however, those with 50 to 99 employees had the most people rating the communications as some degree of bad, but as company size increased, communications also seemed to improve.

Q1SQ: Between whom do you feel communication is insufficient? (Sample size=1,154, multiple answer)

Between workers in different teams	65.3%
Between management and workers	63.8%
Between boss and subordinates in the same team	40.0%
Between workers in the same team	26.8%
Between workers with similar problems or interests	23.3%
Between upper-level managers	22.2%
Other	1.3%

Q2: How well can information be shared within your company? (Sample size=2,133)

Can be shared very well	18.9%
Cannot be very effectively shared (to SQ)	65.5%
Can hardly be shared at all (to SQ)	15.7%

Q2SQ: What sort of information cannot be effectively shared? (Sample size=1,731, multiple answer)

Knowledge, know-how, etc	74.2%
Sales information, customer information	43.4%
Management’s vision, company policies, etc	43.1%
Procedures, manuals, etc	36.1%
Administration, accounting, etc information	28.9%
Other	1.1%

Q3: What IT communication tools do you use within your company? (Sample size=2,133, multiple answer)

Electronic mail (to SQ)	76.7%
Intranet (internal bulletin boards, etc) (to SQ)	49.0%
Groupware (Lotus Notes, Cybozu, etc) (to SQ)	34.8%
Company-internal blog (to SQ)	4.0%
Company-internal SNS (to SQ)	3.1%
Other (to SQ)	1.2%
None	18.3%

I wonder if the “Other” group includes wikis?

By company size, email use climbs as size increases, as does intranet and groupware, as one might expect. Company internal blogs and SNS (Social Networking Services) are most prevalent in companies with over 500 employees, but even then the figures barely climb to 5%.

Q3SQ: What problems do you have with using these communication tools for information exchange? (Sample size=1,742, multiple answer)

Don’t know who holds what information	53.2%
Sifting through information takes much effort	30.1%
Too much information, so wanted information isn’t easily found	30.1%
Too much intranet usage, so face-to-face communication tends to decrease	26.1%
Difficult to exchange information that is one-to-many or many-to-many	23.8%
System has too many features, so don’t know how to use	12.8%
Other	3.3%
None in particular	13.8%

The two most noticeable (and predictable) trends as that the larger the company gets, the more problems with information overload and finding who holds what information.

[part 1] [part 2]