Work hard, play hard (part 1)

I was reading anthropologist Kate Fox's enjoyable 'Watching the English'. She commented that English people like to say they 'work hard and play hard', but the reality is they 'word moderately and play moderately'. I think it's probably the same in Australia.

In Japan, though, people do work hard and play hard.

If you know even a little about Japan, you'll have heard that people work hard, work long hours, often work a lot of overtime, etc. It really seems to be true. I knew many people who habitually finished work after 8pm, and went in on weekends. Some people even went in until midnight. Now, I know we have some workaholics in Australia, but not one person I know personally finishes work after 5:30, unless they work night shifts. In Japan I knew many people who complained of having to work really long hours.

From stories I heard, three common reasons for this are:
-projects are assigned with insufficient resources and time; the deadlines are set too soon, so that employees are under pressure to stay late and work overtime to complete them
-staffing issues (ie, not enough staff) - for example, an employee took stress leave and HR didn't organise anyone to cover their workload, so all existing staff had to pick up the slack
-a general culture of 'it's not professional to leave early; you should give your all to meet the company's objectives'

And I was often shocked by how little sleep people said they got. I'd say about 80% of my friends got 5 hours a night or less.

So that's 'work hard'. Next post, 'play hard'. ^_^