Blogs and Articles from Third Way Forum Membrs

・Some people find it difficult to distinguish work time and private time at home.

・Many single people tend to feel lonely. It is easy to feel isolated from the company, and it could increase the anxiety level of employees.

・For those lonely people, it may be helpful if the manager starts online meetings by small talks asking about their life before jumping into the agenda.

・Many people with family have the opposite problem. As other family members are also working or studying at home, it is so difficult to find an isolated time and space to focus.

・There are also so many people who love to work at home, spending more time with family and feeling much less peer pressure than in the office.

・So there seems to be a divide between the lonely-at-home people who would rather work in the office and the happy-at-home people who would rather work at home forever.

・Building online groups were you share and confirm your weekly goals might be a good idea to keep motivation and discipline.

・As we can imagine, if the manager and the subordinate belong to different types, there will be some frustration and issues. It is important to be aware of the different preference of each individual employee and show mutual respect.

・COVID-19 helped the Japanese break their mental barrier toward remote working and made them realize that it is absolutely possible to do pretty much everything online.

・The Japanese society will probably never go back to the old norm of everyday-rush-hour-commuting & everyday-working-late-in-the-office any more However, As a fairly large group of people are eager to come back to the office, many companies will end up having a hybrid model of remote working and office working to accommodate everybody`s needs.

・When you work at home, it is essential that you have healthy routines to stay fit both physically and mentally.

・There is a large group of people who do not want to come to the office but do not want to work at home either. We can find so many of them working at coffee shops every day.

・Many older Japanese still feel difficult to build trust online with those whom they never worked with before. They can virtually trust them but the trust developed virtually is still regarded less satisfactory than the trust developed over a series of physical interactions. However, young generations feel differently. Young people feel much more comfortable to work online than face-to-face. Their problem is that they can express themselves professionally online as they are digital natives, but many of them feel less comfortable when they have to handle issues face-to-face. They are not experienced yet in the physical world where the appearance alone is not good enough and they have to face those who try to dig them deeper.

・Should a corporate executive have a personal assistant, even when working from home? Shouldn’t they do more stuff on their own? Probably rather than assigning an assistant for individual executives, it may be more helpful to have a team assistant who could assist the whole team virtually and organize and coordinate people`s schedules and technical issues etc.

・Big company older executives are often spoiled in terms of online works as their secretaries take care of them. Probably working from home is a good time for them to learn to be more independent because they have to do everything on their own once they retire. The more incompetent they feel online, the longer they try to cling to their current positions and/or the more they want to make employees work in the office.

・Working-from-home will show more clearly who are delivering values and who are not. It is mandatory for everybody to review how we work and find a way to improve more effective ways of working constantly.