I attended the ICCJ’s breakfast presentation by Nambu-san, the president of Pasona, a major temp staff company in Japan. Mr Nambu gave us some interesting insights into how he thinks the Japanese attitude towards work is changing. Pasona with a turnover of 132 billion yen, sees the future as one where employees, rather than companies decide on how, where and when they want to work. Using the example of a movie production, he urged the attendants to focus on their strategic goals while turning to Pasona to take care of the staffing to achieve these goals. “If you tell us to improve sales by 15%, that is what we’ll do” he went on.
The major change in the attitude towards work came according to Mr Nambu by the so-called “Freeters” . He mentioned that the change of attitude towards work has been personified by Horiemon, the now troubled CEO of Livedoor, Horiemon mentioned that the last thing he wanted is to have a working life like his father’s, who worked day and night for no rewards other than the good of the company. Freeters today are not interested in comanies per se and place more importance on their personal well-being rather than a company and might work as “arbeitos”, (part-time workers) rather than a steady job.
Next year around 330,000 new graduates will enter the market of which around 100,000 will postpone their job entries, of the remaining 230,000 30% will leave their job within the first year of employment.
An urgent message to companies with such alarming turn-over rates of staff.