A Survey of Home‐Based Workers in Japan: Emerging Health Issues

Abstract

A Survey of Home‐Based Workers in Japan: Emerging Health Issues: Wendy A. Spinks. Department of Management Science, Science University of Tokyo—Changes such as the greater diversification of work arrangements, either the result of or enabled by the rise of information communication technology, are testing many long‐standing practices and assumptions in the workplace. The emergence of the virtual organization and telework raises serious management questions including work organization, worker evaluation and knowledge management. These changes, however, also have a growing but little understood impact on health management. The aim of this paper is to explore attitudes to health management and the incidence of illness for home‐ based teleworkers. After a brief outline of major changes in organizational and management practices as well as research trends in the area of health and telework, it presents a set of field data on home‐based workers in Japan, and links the findings to a future research agenda. The survey data indicate that health management issues do exists for this group of workers and that a worrying proportion of respondents experienced health conditions detrimental to work performance that went untreated. Additionally, a somewhat cavalier attitude towards safe work practices indicated either low worker awareness of, or low priority for, minimizing health risks. This was often compounded by the lack of a traditional mitigating third party such as a regular employer. These findings suggest that conventional organizational criteria for sickness may be being replaced by more elastic concepts of health and sickness in the virtual workplace.

A systematic review of working conditions and occupational health in home office

“…The time spent on the telephone per day was also twice as long at home (mean 38 minutes) than at the office (mean 19 minutes) [4]. These results are supported by further studies in present review [20,44,46].…”

“…As shown in Tables 2 and 3, there were two studies of high quality [4,40]. Ten studies had a moderate quality [2,20,21,28,[41][42][43][44][45][46]. The percentage of agreement was between 86% and 100%.…”

“…Seven studies collected data on ergonomics-related outcomes regarding workplace design and furniture [4,20,21,28,42,43,45]. Four studies have shown that most home-based teleworkers do computerbased work [4,20,44,46]. Six studies evaluated the current space condition which home-based teleworker experienced [20,21,28,42,43,46] and three studies examined the changed working conditions after a longer period in the home office [4,42,44].…”

“…Some workers develop their own ergonomic strategies, such as moving as much as possible; using special chairs, sitting balls and seat cushions; working in a standing position and using height-adjustable tables [42]. Spinks [44] found that teleworkers also take regular breaks, improve their lighting, ergonomics workstation design and safety (e.g., stumbling blocks).…”

Examining the macroergonomics and safety factors among teleworkers: Development of a conceptual model

“…Even though telecommuting and alternative office workplace changes are growing, little is understood about the impact on the safety and health of teleworkers [25]. Few studies have examined the effects of telework over time on objective safety measures, such as accident rates, lost work days, absenteeism, and sick leave [2].…”