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As part of an interview, the managing director of Studio Deen explained how he has established a new working time policy within the company since his inauguration. We summarize below.
Shocking working conditions
Studio Deen celebrates his 50th anniversary this year and looks back on a successful past, which, among other things, produced the first anime adaptations of “Urusei Yatsura”, “Ranma 1/2” and “Rurouni Kenshin”.
They were almost at eye level with the very big anime studios, which of course aroused the interest of various investors, whose offers could no longer be ignored at some point. In 2011, the takeover was finally announced by the IMA Group, which also brought a change in the leadership.
From then on, Shinichiro Ikeda headed the fortunes at Studio Deen. And this would have quickly had his first official act in mind – to improve the horrendous working conditions that he would have seen before his inauguration:
“When we discussed the takeover, I asked when I could come over to see how things are going. The previous owner told me: ›How about 1 and 3 in the morning? People work best and are energetic. ‘When I heard it, I wanted to get rid of these practices immediately. ”
Working time regulation encounters resistance
For this reason, he would have wanted to introduce working hours until 6 p.m., which are in stark contrast to the industry -customary night work hours. However, he would have seen himself faced with violent resistance from the other managers.
According to Ikeda, this feared that the working time regulation could no longer be observed by the specified deadlines and that the studio would go bankrupt. In the end, this would have caused the plans to be put on hold.
However, he remained stubborn and would have initially introduced the new working time policy at the headquarters of the IMA group, before he had later extended it to Studio Deen-despite the resistance.
Employees after changes
As expected, the sales had broken down after the introduction. After a while, however, the employees had got used to the new working hours and have been working much more efficiently since then, which Ikeda explained as follows:
“If you go to work at 9 a.m. and work into the night, everyone will think about how they can divide their perseverance and work rather sloppy in the morning. But if you come home at 7 p.m., you will work three hours in the morning, take an hour’s break and then work hard for the rest of the day. As soon as this habit has prevailed, it works well. “
It was his vision to create an environment in which the employees can be productive within a reasonable working time and receive fair wages. Because for him it would not be a real profit for the company if one would only achieve this through the overtime of the employees.
Otherwise, Ikeda would give his employees a lot of freedom and keep out of creative planning in the anime productions, since he was convinced that an excessive interference of management would suffocate creativity:
