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.
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If one hangs out at places like slashdot for too long one gets the impression that almost all the software engineers usually use free office suites such as OpenOffice.org, and only resort to Microsoft Word and friends under threats of physical violence from pointy-haired bosses. However, that is the USA; what about Japan and the average engineer? To find out, japan.internet.com reported on a survey recently conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into office suite software.

Demographics

On the 18th of August 2007 330 IT engineers involved in software development, system development and system management completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 96.4% of the sample was male, 1.2% in their twenties, 26.7% in their thirties, 59.1% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties and 0.3% in their sixties. This sample seems to have a definite case of “metabo” (”metabolic syndrome”, or more simply a lot of fat around the middle!); JR Tokai Express does have a middle management bias, but only 1.2% in their twenties seems extremely low.

Back in May I translated another similar survey on office suite usage in the public and private sectors, where we saw 97.1% used Microsoft Office, a very similar figure to the one reported below when looking at just the IT engineering segment, a perhaps counter-intuitive result.
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japan.internet.com reported on another small but interesting survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the use of office suites. this survey is timely with Nihon University recently announcing that from April 1st this year they would be using Google Apps, and Ashisuto have announced they are moving from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.

Demographics

On the 17th of May 2007, 330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor pool completed an internet-based private survey. All were employed in public or private industry, 73.6% were male, 13.3% in their twenties, 40.3% in their thirties, 34.2% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

This result is not particularly surprising, given that other surveys have shown a virtual monopoly by Microsoft in the workplace for browsers and operating systems.

I personally haven’t used either OpenOffice.org or Google Apps, and work has corporate licences for Microsoft Office, and given the rather heavy reliance on PowerPoint (if I were in management here, I’d ban it) in particular, I cannot see any prospect of change. Interestingly, perhaps, a couple of months ago we gathered together money-saving tips, but no-one suggested using open source office applications to save on licensing. However, given that all other departments would be using Office, without 100% compatability we couldn’t change. In addition, many macro-filled Excel spreadsheets are used within the company, so I suspect they would not be usable in other spreadsheet tools.
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Over two days back in October last year, goo Research interviewed 2,215 members of its business monitor community regarding office design issues. The particular aspect of office design that they were interested in is what might be called “functional design”, namely design with the aim of improving employee motivation or communication, or other such positive effects. The sample consisted of 14.5% in their twenties, 40.5% in their thirties, 32.5% in their forties, 10.7% in their fifties, 1.6% in their sixties, and 0.1% aged seventy or older.

Regarding employment status, 8.9% were at board level, 77.3% were regular full-time employees, 2.3% contract full-time employees, 1.5% were short-term contractors, and 10.0% had other status. 8.2% were in real estate, 23.9% in manufacture, 4.7% in finance and insurance, 6.1% in distribution, 1.3% in utilities, 5.3% in import/export, 22.8% in the service sector, 8.6% in the public sector, and 19.0% in other industries. 18.6% worked in companies or between 1 and 9 employees, 13.5% in those between 10 and 49 employees, 8.1% with 50 to 99 employees, 19.4% with 100 to 499 employees, 8.0% with 500 to 999 employees, and 32.4% in companies with 1,000 or more employees. The sex breakdown is not given, however.

My office is a pretty typical Japanese office; open plan with token partitions that barely hide you from other members, although looking around other parts of the building we have it lucky in having even just these token walls. I find that the offices are exceptionally noisy, as people just shout across the place, and sadly I dislike headphones of ear buds, so cannot get much respite from the din.
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