While it might sound like a great thing – lifetime employment is not always so if one hates the place of work. This is what a survey report in Japan has found out while in reference to the plight of Japanese “salarymen” and “office ladies.”

The new survey report by EY, the global accounting and consulting firm formerly known as Ernst & Young, conducted a study on the employment conditions among salaried employees in eight countries. The report found that compared to the average of eight countries surveyed, the number of employees who have “a great deal of trust” in their employers in Japan is was below the average of the eight countries surveyed at only 22 percent.

The report found that this aversion of the employees in Japan is not restricted to the companies that they work in but also towards their bosses or colleagues whom they do not trust and hence do not enjoy being at the work place. In contrast to this, in countries like India and Mexico, the trust factor of the employees on their employers is far greater and around two third of the employees in these two countries surveyed have expressed confidence and trust in their companies and bosses and colleagues.

In recent years Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been looking to shake up Japan’s hidebound corporate culture. However similar trends were reported in other reports about Japan’s working class that include Aon’s employee engagement survey and Edelman’s annual trust barometer and the EY study confirms such other research reports.

These reports tend to present a sharp contrast to what Francis Fukuyama portrayed about Japan in his 1995 book, ‘Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity’ here he described the country of the rising sun as a high-trust society.

However that presumption seems to be a thing from the past. The goodwill of trust about the Japanese society seems to have been worn away by Japan’s long economic slump which had already begun by the time Fukuyama’s book came out.

While emails were sent to Fukuyama, a professor at Stanford University, asking for a reaction to the recent reports, there was no immediate reply from him.

Japan has a very strict hierarchal structure at workplace and hence even if employees do not have any work at hand, they are often expected to linger in the office as long as the boss is still there in the office.

“This follow-the-leader ethic starts to look a little sketchy if your boss is not delivering,” says Marcus Noland, executive vice president and director of studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Noland said this after analyzing the survey findings for EY.

On the other side of the scale, a key reason why workers in India and Mexico feel better about their employers could be the economic growth there. Among the eight countries studied in eth report, the U.S. was close to the average.

The survey found that one of the worst destroyers of trust was employer failure to keep promises made to their workers, said Karyn Twaronite, EY’s global diversity and inclusiveness officer. Employers keeping their promises—and to “be transparent” when things aren’t going well is the obvious solution to this, she said.

(Adapted from Bloomberg)

Categories: HR & Organization, Uncategorized