Essay 2 pages

Solution Preview

MANAGING EMPLOYEES IN JAPAN
Laying off people is especially difficult in Japan, where cooperation between management and unions has been prized. The outplacement industry particularly well suited to the challenge, providing professional mediators to assist company managers in the thankless task of restructuring.
The cause of most outplacement requests in Japan isn't the lack of performance by the individual, but rather the lack of performance by the company. Thus companies feel a lot of responsibility towards employees being laid off and they want to make sure those employees can find another job as soon as possible. So the role of the HRM manager is not only to counsel the person about how to react to job loss, but also to help them find a new one quickly.
For many people, it is the first time since they graduated that they have had to look for a job. Indeed, for most of them it's even the first time that they have had to write a resume! So they're really ill-equipped. Otherwise quite competent people are thrown into a severe state of confusion when they discover they are going to be jobless.

In a situation that is possibly unique to Japan, companies normally decide the careers of their staff and "good" employees just follow along, doing what they're told to do. So these people really have no clue about what their value is going to be on the open market. Trying to help them assess their real market worth--which is sometimes a lot lower than the candidate's self-assessed worth--can be a real challenge.

PREVAILING SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS AND THEIR VARIOUS CULTURAL ORIENTATIONS AND DIFFERENCES

If a manager is asked what characterizes Japanese society as a whole today, he can definitely say that it is the six grand reforms that are proposed in the political agenda and supported overwhelmingly by public opinion. People are watching to see what will be accomplished. The six reforms are budget reform, economic reform, financial reform, welfare reform, educational reform, and administrative reform. Prime Minister Hashimoto has publicly stated that achieving these reforms is his highest priority.
These reforms all relate to various aspects of government activity. They aim to review the relationship between government and the marketplace and to overhaul the structure of government. These reforms are also intended to reduce the work of government through deregulation, decentralization, privatization, and cuts in government spending as well as to reorganize the surviving government ...