Gotta love the Japanese for finding names for everything.
Looks like the hikikomori — young slacker — rudely forced out of their bedroom after COVID have become hatarakanai ojisan — the slack uncle — whose working day consists of:
The most common explanation for why ‘uncles’ get lazy at work is lack of supervision.
In other words, their output isn’t measured thus they’re not motivated to be productive. Neither intrinsic nor extrinsic carrots are dangled, so they’re just killing time.
And to answer the question you’re all asking — yes, it’s women too. The same study found 47.3% of companies had hatarakanai obasan — slack aunties — browsing for Black Friday bargains all day rather than working.
But before we savagely pile on, has anyone considered whether some of these slackers may in fact be ‘mobbed’ — workers subjected to systematic campaigns of harassment andd bullying by their co-workers and bosses, and thus disinclined to do anything?
Who hasn’t seen this happen. The outcast, isolated and unhappy worker who is excluded from the ‘coffee club’ and not invited into workplace social circles — but where is this mentioned in the statistics?
I’d argue that ‘mobbing’ is a major reason why sidelined older employees become hatarakanai, and that the ones who complain most publicly about it are probably the ones trying to push them out.
In hierarchical organisation where seniority is still directly proportional to your pay cheque, how better for the young guns to get rid of the dead wood than to set them up as being ‘lazy’.
So what you’re seeing might also be ageism.
There’s nothing more frustrating than a worker you can’t wedge. Increasingly lippy and defiant, older employees know the system and how to play it.
So ‘mobbing’ them suits their bosses too, because managing-out is easier than managing. It’s also MUCH cheaper to retire a worker than to sack or retrench them.
And the best way to give the older worker that nudge is to make their working days long and pointless.
Trust me (ex-HR), this is probably happening in your organisation right now.
So before you criticise the old guy in the corner for not pulling his weight, ask yourself who put him there, and why.