Putting a woman in charge may boost productivity

Women managers could be the key to fixing deadening corporate culture

If you’ve never tried a Japanese snack called Jagariko, I highly recommend it. When I visited the Tokyo offices of Japanese snackmaker Calbee Inc, I made sure to ask if I could have a free pack of my favourite snack. “Maybe,” the managers hedged.
 
I wasn’t at Calbee to talk about their potato sticks, but their corporate culture. Calbee is famous in Japan for a progressive, female-friendly workplace. Japan’s government has scaled back its ambitions to put more women in corporate management roles, but Calbee is pushing ahead full steam. The company has increased the share of female managers from 5.6 per cent in 2010 to 22.1 per cent in 2016, and is aiming for 30 per cent by the end of the decade.
 
But Calbee managers explained to me that gender equality is only a small facet of the company’s attempts to transform the company’s management style. The real goal, they told me, was to shift from a culture that valued input of effort to one that rewarded results, efficiency and productivity. They asserted that female managers are actually more productive than men — where men feel social pressure to stay at work even if nothing needs doing, the Calbee folks said, women feel pressure to finish their tasks quickly and efficiently so they can get home to spend more time with their kids. My interviewees therefore argued that work-life balance, gender equality and results-oriented management are all just aspects of a unified whole.
 
A shift from long hours to efficient, goal-oriented work is exactly the right medicine for white-collar Japan. Almost alone among developed countries, Japan has actually seen its total factor productivity — a measure of overall business efficiency — fall rather than rise over the last four decades.
 
Though the country’s factories are top-notch, thanks to rapid adoption of automation and other technologies, its service sector lags badly.
 
One big reason is that service industries depend less on robots and more on human office workers. And there’s evidence that Japanese office culture has been badly broken for quite some time. Japanese workers put in famously long hours — so much that death from overwork is a well-known concept. But many companies are still using antiquated technologies like fax machines and cassette-tape recorders.
 
Failure to care about upgrading ancient technology is a sign that many Japanese companies aren’t placing a high premium on the amount of work that actually gets done in their offices. Instead, punishingly long hours are probably a way that workers signal their loyalty to their bosses and employers. Signalling, as every economist knows, is a costly, even wasteful process. If Japanese companies trust their workers so little that they force them to sacrifice much of their personal life just to prove their commitment, that lack of trust is holding back the economy. It’s probably decreasing fertility too, since long hours at the office make it much harder to raise children.
 
That’s why results-oriented management, which might seem obvious and natural to an American, represents such a revolution in Japan. It calls into question the whole idea of what work means.

© Bloomberg