13% of employees in Japan teleworking due to virus

used the pandemic as an opportunity to introduce and trial remote working.

Perhaps "Companies have been forced to introduce and trial remote working." would be more accurate. The old-guard, upper management, doesn't think anyone they can't see is working. Not just in Japan, but there are fewer managers like that elsewhere.

Plus, companies that actually make stuff to physically ship need employees to show up, make the widgets, then package and ship the widgets to their customers. If your company makes 100% digital stuff, like software development places do - or groups inside the company just doing software, they could have been teleworking for 20 yrs if the old guard wasn't in charge.

Almost 100% of companies are still forcing their employees to come in. Apart from essential services, everything else should be done remotely.

Other countries have closed down schools and businesses, but not in Japan. The Japanese mentality dictates that first, they'll have a series of in person meetings about which teleconferencing software to use, make a manual, distribute it, hold more meetings on changes to the content, then finally hold training sessions on how to use software. Then limited trials will start.

They then still can't go full tilt since they also worry about people working from home getting viruses on their computers, how to protect private information, and all kinds of other things that could he solved if people were just told to take responsibility and solve the issues themselves. By the time they sort out all the potential kinks, it will be too late.

Furthermore, 4.4 percent said that their company had enforced staggered working hours to avoid packed rush-hour trains

I was under the impression that more companies were doing this. Mine gave me the choice of telework or staggered hours, which was a no-brainer for me, but believe it or not a few people choose to go to the office anyway..

Been teleworking/self-employed since came to Japan in my 20s. A real waste of quality of life to travel every morning in jam packed trains to go somewhere to do exactly the same thing you could be doing at home/cafe/library/car.

Trains are less crowded here in Tokyo but I guess the number of cars increased during peaking hours, the same destination that usually took me 40min. now is taking 1h

*peak hours

I've been working from home for the last 5 weeks, but my wife continues to go work which sort of defeats the purpose. She works for a small Japanese company, and last week she worked from home for a day as did some others in her company as a test. The trouble is, the companies IT infrastructure was unable to handle a few people working remotely, and her connection to work kept dropping, meaning she had to reconnect every 30 minutes. I suspect many other similar sized companies have the same issues.

@nonu6976

I wouldn't say it defeats the purpose. If there are only two of you, you've cut your household risk in half. Better than nothing. I'm in similar situation, wife expected to show up on time as per usual. My company has encouraged remote and staggered commuting. Unfortunately, 95% of our employees continue to show up at the office as usual, even though I'm sure many don't want to. Overcoming ingrained work culture is a difficult thing...

I've been working from home for the last 5 weeks, but my wife continues to go work which sort of defeats the purpose. She works for a small Japanese company, and last week she worked from home for a day as did some others in her company as a test. The trouble is, the companies IT infrastructure was unable to handle a few people working remotely, and her connection to work kept dropping, meaning she had to reconnect every 30 minutes. I suspect many other similar sized companies have the same issues.

May depend on the setup, but in my case I found that by default everything was going through the VPN, when really only a fraction of what I need to access is on the company network. So even Google drive downloads would just fail randomly, etc. On Windows, I got around this by changing the VPN properties as described here: https://superuser.com/a/12093

My company has been great with this. Teleworking was previously possible, but the infrastructure only allowed for a small number of people, and it was generally only available to upper management, but they were able to upgrade and expand it to allow people with all sorts of roles to work from home, and we're still being told to work from home even though a lot of companies that DID allow staff to stay home are now asking them to come in again.