Life Beyond Covid-19
Professionals, graduates, and new hires share how workplace expectations have changed
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Since the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in Japan in January 2020, the world as we know it has changed in many ways—not least of which has been a transformation in how we study, work, and socialize.
In light of this, The ACCJ Journal spoke to professionals in business and education, as well as soon-to-be-graduates, to learn about the challenges they’ve faced—and the solutions they’ve implemented—in a period defined by the pandemic.
They said work and study will not return to pre-pandemic methods, and agreed that employees and students in the so-called new normal era have different expectations than before about the future of work and education.
Flexibility Is Expected
For universities, the pandemic has led to changes in how they deliver courses and engage with students.
Matthew Wilson, dean of Temple University, Japan Campus, said that before the pandemic “remote work was not an option,” because all instruction was carried out in person. That has changed. Nationwide, social distancing rules encourage online instruction. In some cases, at Temple, teaching has been conducted from offices repurposed for remote lecturing, with some students—especially those overseas—being restricted to remote participation.
How has the university implemented the new rules? They began by identifying which departments could work remotely and which were better suited to on-campus work.
They settled on a hybrid strategic plan according to which some staff and faculty work from home while others remain on campus, depending on the needs of particular departments. Students have been studying exclusively from home, while others have been in the classroom.
Remote study, Wilson added, has been particularly challenging for the 1,400 students on the campus, all of whom suddenly were faced—for the first time—with having to learn online.
Looking back, he acknowledges that things will not completely return to pre-Covid-19 ways. “We realized how, in this environment, stability is key, and flexibility has almost become an expectation.”
Foreign Engagement
Like Wilson, Stephen Zurcher, dean of the Asian studies program at Kansai Gaidai University, faced severe challenges when Covid-19 hit. In his case, that meant facilitating hundreds of study-abroad students at the university on semester- or year-long programs.
Following a schedule common at institutions outside Japan, Kansai Gaidai University had started its winter semester when nationwide calls for remote work and teaching began in early 2020.
At that time, the university had only a handful of days to transition to online—and mostly remote—instruction, Zurcher recalled. By the next semester, when their foreign students had left Japan, instruction became fully remote.
One challenge was how to instruct students who were living across different time zones. To this end, some courses were delivered in real time while others were pre-recorded and made available on demand.
In hindsight, Kansai Gaidai University was ahead of the online learning curve: before the pandemic, they had incorporated remote instruction and study in collaboration with partner universities under a program called Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), a cross-border learning initiative involving institutions, faculty, and students.
“I don’t know how, but in the end, it all worked out,” Zurcher said. “We did a mid-semester survey of the students and, to my great surprise, the ratings of the classes and their interactions with the professors had jumped 15 points.”
While students, naturally, would have preferred in-person classes on campus, by some measures, student engagement with instructors had increased, he added, as had their level of satisfaction with remote learning.
Serving the Underserved
Zurcher’s experience is largely shared by Tom Mason, executive director of the United States–Japan Bridging Foundation (USJBF), a non-profit that provides sponsorship to underrepresented students so that they can study in Japan for a semester or a year.
Due to pandemic-related international travel restrictions, the USJBF exchange program was put on hold for about two years. But, rather than end it, the organization began online training programs, and these became a hit with students.
“We ran a webinar series called ‘How to find Japan-related careers.’ The purpose of that was to connect students to people who not only have found jobs in Japan, but also Japan-related jobs in the United States,” Mason explained.
Between 200 and 300 undergraduates participated in each seminar, suggesting that interest in Japan had not waned, despite the pandemic and restrictions on international travel.
However, Mason admits that most participants would have preferred in-person events. And industry experts acknowledge that, although remote learning—including interactive webinars and COIL—has expanded, it can neither fully replicate nor totally replace in-person cultural exchange.
“A lot of language learning is done by observing how people speak in real life,” he said. “And then there are the accidental interactions, which don’t really occur online.”
As the pandemic abates and international travel restrictions are set to be relaxed, the USJBF has launched online recruitment initiatives for its next batch of candidates.
“In the past, what we did was send them the finances and send them abroad. But now, we are able to run pre-departure orientations, as well as networking and mentorship opportunities, online.
“And, when they are in Japan, we can deliver supplemental infrastructure programs in person. Our students are based across Japan, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, so they’ll have networking programs in major cities—and we’re able to build that out because of remote working technologies.”
University Challenge
For students, the Covid-19 pandemic upended studying in ways previously unimagined. That was the case for Toshimasa Hatori, a fourth-year international business student and former student government vice-president at Temple University, Japan Campus.
Luckily for Hatori, he entered the university in fall 2019, just before the pandemic spread to Japan, and thus was able to enjoy some on-campus life, if only briefly.
Were there challenges when remote learning began? There were many. One was adjusting to online classes.
“Another was test-taking: the professors were concerned about plagiarism, which is a valid concern,” he explained.
And students were not really able to enjoy life on the university’s new campus, which had opened in August 2019, or use its facilities. “I was playing basketball, and I was the captain, but we couldn’t use our brand-new gym.”
Hatori recalled being a freshman. “Social gatherings were constrained; I couldn’t go to regular restaurants, nor could I hang out with my friends at a house party. We couldn’t even go to a supermarket at the outset of the pandemic.”
Without the opportunity to socialize in person, students chose, instead, to maintain friendships online via video platforms such as Zoom and the messaging app LINE.
However, this way of socializing has come at a cost. Jun Ikeda (not his real name), a fourth-year student based in Tokyo, said: “All conversations are now online, making it difficult to feel the other person’s emotions. This is especially true for people you meet for the first time.”
New Generation at Work
The so-called new normal has altered Hatori and Ikeda’s expectations of the workplace. When they start their jobs later this year, both expect hybrid options to be the norm, a change from their pre-pandemic expectations.
“Many friends of mine want a hybrid work experience,” Ikeda shared.
Despite the disruption that many students have faced during this period, some have found a silver lining in the Covid-19 cloud.
Miku Hashimoto (not her real name), a fourth-year student, told The ACCJ Journal: “I stayed in my hometown for a year with my family, thanks to the pandemic, and found that I like living in the country, where I can enjoy my hobbies and be close to family.”
Mark Davidson, director of government and external affairs at Amway Japan G.K., is sympathetic to the experience of students such as Hatori, Ikeda, and Hashimoto. Davidson’s own daughter had to navigate her university career during the pandemic.
“I have a daughter who is a university student. She did an internship in New York last summer, and it wound up being—except for two days—all online. That was not the best experience for her.”
A co-chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) Education Committee, Davidson believes that first-time hires will be challenged in new ways in a post-pandemic world. To succeed, they’ll need a diverse set of skills.
“More than ever, students will need a broad-based liberal arts background,” he predicted. “While they’ll need technical skills, more than anything else, they’ll need resilience and an analytical mindset to figure out problems—especially in this remote environment—that they may not have seen before.”
Young Professionals
But it’s not only students who have been challenged during the pandemic. Young professionals, too, have faced difficulties.
John W. Carlson III, for instance, transitioned to a new role at Novartis Japan in the summer of 2021, when the pandemic was raging. Carlson is co-chair of the ACCJ’s Young Professionals Forum (YPF) and the Healthcare Committee.
He is the new commercial partnerships lead and a senior strategic assistant at healthcare company Novartis Japan, where most of his work has been remote.
For new transplants like him, the early days in a company can be the most challenging. “Orientation is actually the hardest part, because you have to get people engaged with the company,” he explained.
“And the big challenge is not working within a department, but working collaboratively with colleagues—whom you would have met if you were working in the office—in other departments.”
Due to the pandemic, Novartis Japan began a redesign of the office, complete with remote-work technology which facilitates hybrid workstyles, according to Carlson.
“Essentially, employees get to choose which workstyle or format they wish to use.”
While the final redesign is yet to be seen, the expectation is that employees will split their work between office and remote locations.
“The office has become a place for collaboration, which requires more in-person work, while individual tasks, such as writing and analysis, lend themselves very well to remote work,” Carlson added.
In-Person, Remote, Hybrid
Despite the advent of new workstyles, challenges remain for young professionals. As many of them do not have a developed social network, feelings of isolation are common, as was the case with the students above.
“Mid-career professionals tend to have a house, children, family, and are more engaged with the business community, whereas young professionals are cut off from their university and have a relatively narrow network,” Carlson explained.
As a result, some young professionals in the YPF have had their health—in particular their mental health—adversely affected. It is a goal of the YPF to mitigate such isolation via in-person or hybrid networking events.
That said, Carlson recognizes that some young professionals have thrived under the prevailing online networking events held by the YPF.
Co-chair Anna Kimuro agrees.
Speaking personally, Kimuro, who is a client leader at IBM Japan, noted that remote work has allowed more young professionals than before to join online YPF events. One reason for the increase is that being remote negates the need to commute to a physical venue, leading to more time—and more opportunity—to participate remotely.
In a recent online event, members discussed how to expand their network informally within the ACCJ. One suggestion was to hold speed dating-style networking games where committee members meet chamber leaders.
But with the pandemic potentially waning, there has been a growing clamor for in-person events—or, at least, multichannel, hybrid ones—Kimuro added.
The New Normal
For companies, the pandemic caused major changes to internal and external processes. At Amway Japan, for example, all recruitment shifted to online-only processes from around March 2020, explained Hiroyo Aihara, the company’s human resources director.
“Everything changed: candidate meetings, job interviews, actual onboarding, orientation meetings with division heads, even how we present our company to candidates. All went online,” Aihara said.
The transition to digital-only was not easy for staff and new hires. In-person onboarding, for instance, became a singular affair conducted during a one-off visit to the office to receive key items, such as a work computer. And even then, the visit was socially distanced.
What’s more, there was a sharp learning curve to be navigated by staff, especially mid-career professionals experiencing remote work for the first time, Aihara admitted.
Which is not to say that remote work has been a cakewalk for recruits; it has not. That’s because many of Amway Japan’s new hires are returnee Japanese, or Korean and Chinese graduates settling in Japan from overseas.
For them, remote work was a double blow. “They usually live alone and need to find an apartment in Japan,” she explained. “But then, once they were ready for work, we had to tell them, ‘Please work from home.’”
That said, the transition to remote work was made easier because, even before the pandemic began, the company already had in place flexible workstyles, including some remote work.
“We were already allowing some employees to work two days per week from home, and we had initiatives such as dress-your-own-way,” Aihara added.
Her colleague, Davidson, who is also chair of the ACCJ’s Government Relations Committee, agrees. In the future, he said, companies will have to ensure that remote work feels personalized.
A version of the proverbial water cooler—the glue that holds companies and society together—will be required to garner comradeship among colleagues and students, whether that’s in person, online, or via hybrid solutions, Davidson concluded.
