by Noriyuki Morimoto
In a company, many employees end up not being promoted to senior management positions. Under Japan’s seniority system in the past, such sidelined employees were allowed to spend their time in idle positions, for some reason seated by the window, without a great disparity in compensation between them and senior officers. The term used to describe such workers, “window-side people,” has gone obsolete in recent years.
When I say that some employees were sidelined from promotion, I’m taking the perspective of the employer. This employer-centered mindset, which positions the “window-side people” as losers in corporate promotion, is the basis for them to be considered unfortunate, both from the employee’s own point of view and for those around them.
Giving this treatment must have been extremely dissatisfactory for the employer, and it must have been undesirable in terms of HR policy, as it obviously lacked rationality and negatively impacted the company’s culture. In other words, the “window-side people” were, oddly enough, undesirable for both the company and the individual.
However, if the system were centered on the workers’ perspective, in which employees could become “window-side people” at their own request, they could have been happy to be in a position of extreme bliss, and they would not have been dissatisfied even if their financial compensation worsened to an extent. This would have been a benefit for both the employer and employee.
In today’s corporate HR systems, the seniority-based element has become less prominent, and it is not unusual to find cases of its complete elimination. The window-side people have gone extinct, in both name and reality. Those who are not selected for promotion are not relegated to an idle position but are assigned appropriate duties based on their experience and ability, and are compensated in line with the performance of their duties. But does that mean such people are happy? Even if the company has rationalized the compensation structure, does this bring out the maximum value of the worker’s abilities?
The happiness of workers is based on their ability to make their own choices, and working happily boosts productivity, which benefits the company. For the work-style reform to become a productivity revolution, the key factor is the initiative of the workers. The problem of the “window-side people” was not in the irrationality of their treatment, but in the unhappiness of the workers.
[Category /Work-Style Reform]
Chief Executive Officer, HC Asset Management Co.,Ltd. Noriyuki Morimoto founded HC Asset Management in November 2002. As a pioneer investment consultant in Japan, he established the investment consulting business of Watson Wyatt K.K. (now Willis Towers Watson) in 1990.