Working-practice reform and a change of president after a new employee’s death from overwork (2016)

The author’s view

The weight of Dentsu’s working-practice reform lies in the fact that, prompted by the death of a single first-year employee, it reached the value system itself of a company that had put growth above all else. The process by which President Ishii Tadashi took responsibility and resigned and President Yamamoto Toshihiro raised a plan with numerical targets carried the colour of self-repudiation directed at an advertising industry that had treated long hours as the guarantee of quality. The change at the top and the symbolic measure of shutting off the lights across the entire building can be seen as the trigger for a change in the culture.

Still, the structural wall inherent in being an agency is hard to clear through internal reform alone. As long as the trading conventions that translate a client’s requests directly into the burden on the working floor go untouched while numerical targets run ahead, the concern remains that the strain simply persists in a less visible form. Whether the reconsideration of growth built on the price of overwork reaches as far as a redesign of working practices across the whole industry is something that has to be judged alongside the later global restructuring and the swings in performance.