Japan's NTT Wants Staff to Work from Home
Japanese telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) may soon be asking its employees to work from home every day.
On September 28, the company, which has over 320,000 employees, announced that it plans to make remote work its new standard.
As well as having employees work from home, NTT wants to move its business away from large centers like Tokyo, and toward smaller cities in other parts of Japan.
It says it will increase its number of satellite offices from about 60 to more than 260 by March 2023. This will allow employees to choose where to work when they do need to go to an office.
NTT said this system also means it will no longer need to move staff between different locations — something that's common among large Japanese companies, where new employees can often expect to be moved to a different location every few years.
However, a July survey by the Japan Productivity Center found that people in the country were already feeling "telework fatigue" after being asked by the government to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic.
Only about 12% of employees in Japan were still working from home every day in July, down from nearly 19% in April. The number who said they were more productive at home had also decreased since April, while the number who said they were less productive had increased.
Not all companies are happy with employees working at home, and some want them to start coming back to the office. Google, for example, has said it might even reduce the pay of employees who choose to work from home every day.
