Working culture and differences between the countries

In the last class we talked about the working culture and how it changes depending on the country, also we ranked the most important things when looking for a job.

The most important factors were:

- Salary

- Oportunities

- Work/Life balance

- Company values

- Personal Interests

Most people agreed that the most important thing when looking for a job is the salary because is the main reason why people work, but also it was interesting to see that some people prefer personal interests or company values above work/life balance. Then we discussed about what do you think is the most important when hiring people? Is it work performance, titles and degrees, race and diversity or maybe seniority?

Also most people agreed that the most important quality in order to hire someone is the job performance because you want your employee to perform as needed regardless of their degree, although, even if I agree I also think that it is important to look into someone’s CV, to review their degrees and experience because when you hire someone only for their performance it’s kinda gambling because you’re just believing their word and maybe some recommendation letters but there’s no degree or documented experience that can guarantee they’re going to have a decent performance. Talking about diversity, I think it shouldn’t even be a topic because why would someone care there’s black, asian, latin people in the company? We should just care about their performance and qualities. 

Seniority was also mentioned in the group and most people didn’t agree that this is an important matter, but me and someone else agreed that even if it’s not important when hiring people, it’s a good thing to have some senior loyal employee to trust and rely important tasks that you can’t rely on other people, no matter if you pay them more, in some cases seniority should be valuable, depends on the company.

To summarize, I think japanese working culture is still too conservative,  even if they have good salary there are some social aspects that make the working life extremely unfair, specially when people do unpaid overtime just in order to be loyal. I think western cultures have a more specific and desire-based job hunting, although it’s something good I still believe we should learn some things about japanese working culture and discipline culture.