Early in my career I worked for the US division of a giant Japanese company. On the occasions that executives from Japan would come visit, we were expected to periodically stop working (programming) and carry papers to and from other cubicles and manager offices.
This apparently gave the impression that we were working very hard, when of course it was really making us less productive.
The company's business analysts started tracking everything in dashboards, including our Slack messages. Apparently they would pull up charts of things like messages sent by team or by person, and charts showing when people sent Slack messages.
They tried to claim it was just for fun, but then someone slipped up in a meeting and said that they didn't think a team was working much because their Slack activity was low.
After that, managers asked us to move more conversations into Slack channels, send morning and evening updates, break up long messages into smaller messages, and other things to get our numbers up. You could tell the managers hated it as much as everyone else, but I guess they were doing us a favor by telling us how to play the game.
Y'all should've written some automation to send random buzzword paragraphs and system diagrams at a regular, random cadence.
ie It's important that the big bosses know who you are and think you are productive, and sometimes that means being less productive in order to show that you are productive.
It's always a good thing to strive towards (like achieving 100% or 0), but never possible. And class mobility (in both directions) is a great attribute to have - resists classes turning into castes.
"There will always be something to envy"
I'd compare it to multi-dimensional clustering analysis.
Like they’re fixing workplace culture by careening rotary aircraft around the room?
another way to make sure nobody gets hurt by the robots flying randomly around the space is to not set robots flying randomly around the space
Nowadays many organizations have overtime pay caps, monitoring, and enforcement/encouragements - e.g. MDM on laptops, SSO login histories, or by turning off lights and HVAC. It is improving at a rate and in that kind of spirit, perhaps just not using glass breaking drones.
In Japan, it's not about doing things in the most efficient way. It's about being on the same page as everyone else. The mindset is that even if this way is less efficient, if everyone does it the exact same way every time, you can guarantee quality and consistency. Hard work is also held in high regard even if it's dumb work, because you're signaling to everyone that you're a team player-- as opposed to a rockstar who wants all the credit and recognition.
The upsides to this are what Japan is famous for-- quality and consistency. It's why the train is always on time and the convenience store is always around the corner. The downside is that you're often punished for innovating or thinking on your feet. I personally think this is why Japan is famous for quality products rather than innovative ones.