We are working on correcting long working hours, in order to allow the participation and advancement of diverse human resources, and to promote WSI. Each employee promotes activities to increase productivity by changing their working styles and methods.

We are improving and expanding a variety of support systems and enhancing their flexibility in order to help all employees work with enthusiasm and fulfillment to carry out their responsibilities at work while living healthy and prosperous lives that enable them to have time for childrearing, nursing care and other personal matters.

Since July 2015, we have implemented the Mutual Understanding Program for Childbirth and Child Care to help employees prepare for life events such as childbirth and child rearing at ease and continue to work for a long time after these events. This program is intended to develop an easy-to-work environment where supervisors and employees have periodic interviews to deepen mutual understanding during the period before and after maternity/child care leave.

After the launch of the program, we had the first male employee take childcare leave in 2015. Since then, more and more male employees have applied for this program, with 17 male employees taking childcare leave in fiscal 2022.

We conduct an employee awareness survey (the TEAM Survey) to solicit the opinions of employees. With the purpose of improving employee engagement, we understand their awareness and measure the performance of the organization to identify problems and the gap in recognition, to bring improvements in management style and corporate culture. Based on the survey results, we hold dialogue with employees where the company president and other top management members can confirm all employees’ opinions and thoughts in order to deeply assess the true issues to understand the awareness level, then formulate and execute the optimal action plan.

In order to instill a culture throughout the company where diverse individuals can think outside the box and take on challenges together to pursue an ideal vision, we are implementing measures to foster a corporate culture that provides job satisfaction. We consider it important that every employee thinks independently and proactively, engages in honest discussions instead of keeping a polite face, and takes action, thereby expanding companywide team activities across the hierarchy to address business challenges through vertical and horizontal collaboration. Executives and each business group held a number of meetings to engage in serious talks for team building in a relaxed atmosphere. We aim for a corporate culture that allows the management team and employees to have frank discussions on substantive matters, develop understanding together, and take action to achieve their visions. In fiscal 2020, we also introduced a program called “Self-Biz” as one of the systems to enhance independence of employees and another called “T-POT (Peer Bonus),” in which employees express gratitude to each other. In fiscal 2021, the company-wide one-on-one interview system was introduced as a communication tool to support growth of employees and maximize performance of the organization. Our attempts also included a “10-percent Thinking Time” as a scheme to allow employees to spend 10% of their working hours on what they want to work on, apart from their regular duties, with the aim of promoting independent initiatives of employees.

A meeting scene