A recent article on bbc.com confirms how problematic it can be to think that even all of those living in the “developed” world (whatever that means anymore) work as people in the United States do.
Mark Johanson (“The Countries Resisting Remote Work, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220511-the-countries-resisting-remote-work) reports on the return to work at corporate offices in countries worldwide: “while many countries march head-first into a work-from-anywhere future, workers in locations including France or Japan are often returning to the office full-time, rejecting the notion that a five-day in-person work week is a relic of the past. . . . [In France, employees are] ‘really attached to the physical office – to the place where they were working – because it was a sign of identity and of belonging to the organisation’ [Levillain, IESEG School of Management quoted] . . . Social interactions are also a key tool for decision-making in the French office. Because they’ve traditionally happened quite informally, that’s been hard to replicate on a computer screen. . . . [Haghirian, Sophia University, Tokyo] explains there are a lot of unspoken messages in the Japanese workplace – such as subtle body language cues or ‘reading the air’, . . . and these just couldn’t be examined on a screen.”
While workers in the United States also link their identity to their employer (and did so much more vigorously before the psychological contract between employers and employees was reworked based on changes in expectations of continued employment with good performance and pensions, etc., after retirement) and communicate (as all humans do) with “lots of unspoken messages,” worker identity and communication are rarely discussed in the United States. They could be reasons that employees would choose to return to work five days a week in corporate offices in the US, just as they are in France, Japan, and elsewhere.
Decades ago, Hofstede identified the factors that can be used to distinguish one national culture from another, and research confirms that these parameters remain pertinent today. Cultures are more individualistic or collectivistic, for example, more or less concerned about quality of life, and have differing approaches to pertinent timelines for decision making (they’re more long-term or short-term thinkers), for instance.
As international organizations are potentially returning to in-office work, implementing return to in-office work programs, with their natural extensions to workplace design, multinational firms need to consider “how things get done around here” for each country where they have offices and not plan globally without considering national culture issues. Each country’s cultural system is important and useful in its context and can’t be overridden based on prevailing sentiments in the United States or any other single country.
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com). Research Design Connections reports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009), Designology (Mango, 2019), and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.