Between Redundancy and Growth

2020/12/07

The word "company" carries many different nuances. The expression "I have company (work) on Monday" has a weary but honest ring to it, while the phrase "I started a company" hides the bravery of taking a risk. Saying "That person doesn't seem like they belong at Company X" is an easy way to gain common understanding, and "I heard Mr./Ms. X changed jobs" is (depending on the person) big news.

The word "company" has its etymological roots in "breaking bread together," but in modern Japan, it has become more than just a place to work; it is a place for character building, self-actualization, and for some, it holds more meaning than one's own relatives. This is natural, considering that for many Japanese people, companies provide internal transfers, career opportunities, and systems such as healthcare, pensions, and welfare. In terms of the recent framework of self-help, mutual help, and public help, companies have moved beyond mutual help to even provide the role of public help. For students, the act of choosing a company to join—or being chosen by one—and terms like "spouse block" or "parent block" regarding employment, speak to decision-making with the same weight as choosing a community.

However, as everyone has already felt, the sense of distance between the company and the individual changed throughout 2020 as we were hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. With restricted office attendance and prohibited business dinners, the physical disconnection from the company acted to weaken the aforementioned communal ties. I have several acquaintances who experienced "spending this much time with my family for the first time." Even before this, with the lifting of bans on side jobs becoming a trend even at large corporations, we are beginning to find a different distance and evaluation between ourselves and our companies than before.

This year was also a year in which having a large buffer in case something happened held great value for companies. Looking back to when the state of emergency was declared, we were concerned about whether various company operations would collapse or whether socially significant accidents would occur. However, as a result, compared to the hardships faced by the service industry and essential workers, it seems that an almost unfairly calm situation has continued to this point. One reason for this might be that modern companies possessed abundant resources relative to their operations.

In terms of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) during an infectious disease crisis, it is considered important to: 1) ensure multiple people can perform essential tasks, 2) secure personnel for shift work, and 3) enable mutual support between companies. Since this cannot be achieved if all management resources are spent on essential tasks daily, it is a concept close to surplus, but this functional overlap is also called redundancy.

In normal times, redundancy was a word with a negative nuance, suggesting a surplus of management resources. If you search for management content regarding "Redundancy," frighteningly, most of it is about "layoffs of surplus personnel." However, in an emergency, its value was greatly reversed. While a company's continuous provision of services is a major source of trust in society, this year was one in which redundancy was evaluated positively, as if it were a sign of foresight.

Fortunately, the evolution of IT infrastructure and various applications has also significantly reduced the need for traditional redundancy. The fact that various software has become remote and virtual, allowing for the reproduction of a pseudo-work environment even from home, has greatly improved the productivity of remote work and, as a result, led to a reduction in the demand for redundancy. The combination of these factors likely managed to prevent the initially feared "collapse of office work."

Money Forward, where I am one of the co-founders, provides services that realize the automation of accounting and household budget management on the cloud, and as an IT company, it is a company that is highly compatible with remote work. Thanks to the efforts of the infrastructure construction team, we quickly established a system where everyone could work remotely after the state of emergency was declared.

However, it is also true that there were a hundred different situations for a hundred different employees. While some employees saw their productivity increase as the stress of commuting disappeared, others experienced health issues. Furthermore, various opinions clashed within the company regarding the ratio of office attendance after the state of emergency was lifted. Even among the management team, through repeated discussions and conversations with employees while the answers remained unclear, some things have come into view.

One is that remote work is a system friendly to the strong, and it becomes a virtue under circumstances where strategic success continues. On the other hand, it becomes a very fragile mechanism when people cannot raise their voices to say they are struggling, or when strategic errors occur in the first place. This is happening while the world is already overflowing with dark messages. Normally, we could receive SOS signals through office attendance or facial expressions, but now that those are gone, how to provide inclusion as a company is an ongoing concern. I am also continuing to experiment, such as broadcasting internal programs so that employees living alone don't feel lonely during their lunch breaks (Photo).

While we have seen above that there are merits to securing redundancy during the current crisis, the implications this holds for the future are, in fact, quite troublesome.

Besides the extremely poor image of redundancy in normal times, large corporations have a history of operating redundancy based on the assumption of human goodness. The book "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" (Iwanami Shoten) by the British anthropologist David Graeber, who passed away suddenly this year, addresses "meaningless work" as a social issue. It strongly questions the situation where people in management positions do work that feels meaningless, while those providing socially valuable work settle for low wages. If you look at redundancy with a cynical view of human nature, nothing about it seems good. This is a feeling that I think no one can deny.

In particular, while the Japanese economy already faces the social challenge of escaping low growth, as we enter the post-COVID era, various industries will be forced to pivot at a strategic level. Meanwhile, the redundancy of management resources is carried out based on existing strategies. Since the profitability of many companies is not high enough to continue operating both these elements, individual employees must personally take a dual-perspective approach to growth and securing redundancy. In common terms, this means requiring a high level of ownership from organization members, but whether an organization can be built to withstand such commitment is a heavy challenge for leaders of all sizes.

On a personal note, as a member of the management team, I always think that the one thing I don't want to do is simply demand "ownership" verbally. Part of it is my contrary nature—the more I'm asked for it, the more my heart drifts away—but it's also because I believe ownership isn't something that can be cultivated at the level of tactics or communication; it can only be conveyed through the level of strategy, organizational purpose, and embodiment by the leader.

Through the pandemic, there were several moments that reinforced this thought. For example, at my home during the state of emergency, a dual-income situation arose while facing a two-year-old—the most unpersuadable of opponents. While my perceived productivity was cut in half, the only time I could concentrate on work was late at night after putting the child to sleep. This was truly exhausting. For the management of a venture company, hard work is daily life, but as it became difficult for the first time, I realized a certain kind of power I had enjoyed precisely because I always held various decision-making rights. This was also something I felt when I took a month of childcare leave previously. In the world, there are situations where time, a resource given equally, is taken away unequally according to organizational hierarchy. While being conscious of that point, I also want to be an empathetic leader who can make proper decisions.

Speaking of the near future, a society has already begun where tasks requiring specialized knowledge or operations seeking correct answers will eventually be computerized. Even in such an era, the work said to remain until the end is that which faces contradictions and anxiety. Currently, as society faces great contradictions and anxieties, companies must challenge themselves to provide value by solving such issues while also putting more heart into the aspect of management.

The 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire stated that work has an aspect of saving humans not only from poverty but also from vice and boredom. As mentioned at the beginning, this means that companies are entrusted not only with value as a mechanism for mutual help but also with a role as a society. As both the securing of profits through growth and redundancy in a good sense are required, I hope to live through this era so that I, as an individual, can create a philosophy and axis for a new way of working.