世論 What Japan Thinks

I just spotted this quickie survey today and it suited my mood, so following up on a survey a few weeks ago on bad habits of spouses, here’s a look at bad habits in the office, courtesy of goo Ranking. The fieldwork for this survey was conducted between the 25th and 27th of September 2007.

My top three pet hates would be sniffing and slurping (both acceptable Japanese habits) followed by just too much chat, but since most of them are going to be in the office for 12 hours per day or so, idle chit-chat shouted across the desks helps pass the time, but still it GETS ME VERY IRRITATED!

A purely hypothetical situation, of course, but if the rest of your colleagues are sitting and standing around talking in loud voices and laughing, is writing blog posts no worse than taking part in the conversation yourself?

By the way, does anyone know about any experiments with cubicles or even private offices to see how they affect Japanese productivity? However, without changing the underlying culture, I can only see separate spaces being counterproductive.

Ranking results

Q: What can’t you talk about, but you wish your co-worker would stop?

Rank	Annoyance	Score
1	Talking to oneself	100
2	Not answering the phone	99.1
3	Too much chatting	91.1
4	Smoking	86.6
5	Messy desk	85.7
6	Lateness	58.0
7	Not wearing a mask when having a cold	56.3
8	Too much private email, telephoning	51.8
9	Strong perfume	50.0
10	Documents being dumped on my desk	46.4
11	Overlong breaks	44.6
12	Unconcious tapping, shaking of feet	42.9
13	Frequently coming to ask, talk	37.5
14	Too much personal stuff on desk	37.5
15	Lot of sneezing	33.0
16	Smelling of beer, garlic	33.0
17	Not taking mobile phone, but leaving to ring on desk	27.7
18	Leaving food lying around on desk	24.1
19	Always looking busy	23.2
20	Sweating buckets	22.3