New Work Styles to Match the Times: Putting Diversity into Action for Fresh Work Approaches In a rapidly changing world, it is no surprise that work styles continuously change as well. Recruit is doing its part to build a society where all people can work with happiness and pride, making it one where individuals can live their lives to the fullest. As part of these efforts, we are promoting diversity and creating ways to work that can serve as models for Japanese society. In particular, for women in the workforce an area where Japan has fallen behind its international peers we are proposing diverse new forms of work that will allow women to put their talents to work and play leading roles in society. Making the Shift to Higher Productivity with Smart Work Recruit Staffing Co., Ltd. p1 Helping Employees Work in New Ways Introducing Telework to Help Employees Develop Sustainably Recruit Management Solutions Co., Ltd. IT to Enhance the Environment for Remote Work from Home Recruit Marketing Partners Co., Ltd. p2 p3 Building Workplaces to Maximize the Creativity of Engineers Indeed Tokyo p3 Stakeholder Collaboration to Enhance Awareness The Eijo College Program for Saleswomen A Manual for Reducing White-Collar Work Hours p4 p5
Diversity at Recruit: Helping Employees Work in New Ways Making the Shift to Higher Productivity with Smart Work Recruit Staffing Co., Ltd. One major factor interfering with women s ability to thrive in the corporate setting is a culture that views long work hours as the norm. In the past, the Recruit Group, too, shared this culture that expected workers to put in long hours if they wanted to succeed. As a company aiming to provide individuals with more choices so they can choose a style of work that best matches their needs and preferences, Recruit saw that it needed an updated corporate culture for the modern era. Recruit Staffing s Smart Work Project was one of the first results of this new understanding. We define Smart Work as working intelligently, diligently, and with focus to maximize results in a limited time span. There are only so many hours employees can work in a day, but we are developing a companywide consciousness of time as a limited resource, aiming for work approaches that make the most effective, efficient use of it. To ensure that these efforts are pursued wholeheartedly throughout the entire organization, Recruit is carrying out activities along two main axes: commitment by top executives and promotion on the front lines of the work done by employees. Yukiko Nagashima, president of Recruit Staffing, has stressed repeatedly to her workers that bringing about lasting change in work styles is their company s most important business strategy. Smart Work officers have been tapped in each Group company to enhance awareness at the employee level; they meet at regular intervals to report on their results and to create a shared knowledge foundation for the Recruit Group as a whole. In fiscal 2014, these efforts produced solid results: a 4% reduction in the average hours worked per day, a 5% rise in revenue per hour worked, and dramatic improvement in employee awareness. Sales divisions in particular reported dramatic leaps in productivity, noting that working mothers who once seemed to sneak out of the office, abashed about leaving work early to care for their families were now able to compete on pure productivity, in a tremendous boost to their motivation. Male workers, meanwhile, were able to leave their long hours behind and go home to see and play with their children before bedtime. All of this contributed to considerable productivity gains. At the foundation of Smart Work is Recruit s philosophy of maximizing people s capabilities by achieving more diverse forms of work. Smart Work is not simply something to do because work hours are too long. Our goal is to promote broad understanding that people capable of Smart Work are talented at their jobs; that organizations capable of Smart Work are ahead of the curve. More important, though, is what lies beyond the Smart Work approach: the decision on how to use the time that it frees up. Studying a foreign language, taking lessons to obtain a qualification, enjoying hobbies, and spending time with family are all uses of time that can provide valuable hints to add value to work as well. Smart work allows people to invest their time in their future, leading to new ideas and approaches and laying the groundwork for personal development. 1
Recruit is looking into providing iphone 6 Plus handsets to employees, letting them perform tasks when out of the office, and implementing a work-from-home system. A new office to promote business process reengineering, established in April 2015, is working to increase the efficiency of back-office divisions. To reduce overwork, we have set a target of 0% of employees who work more than 2,300 hours per year; the time freed up by shorter hours will be the focus of a new push toward lifelong career learning. Introducing Telework to Help Employees Develop Sustainably Recruit Management Solutions Co., Ltd. In October 2013, Recruit Management Solutions rolled out its telework program, making it available to 198 employees to begin with. The aim is to provide these workers with the time they need for the input, or learning experiences, that will help them to grow sustainably as professionals. A survey shows that 78% of these teleworkers saw productivity rise thanks to the focus they were able to bring to their duties, and both the teleworkers and their superiors in the company reported that the quality of their work had gone up. Teleworking has led to a high degree of satisfaction for both the employees making use of the program and the managers they report to. Workers with shortened weekly hours have no limit to the number of days they can devote to telework, making it easy for them to handle their duties flexibly and be there for their children s special events or illnesses. Teleworkers are pleased that the scope of their tasks has not been unreasonably limited in this program, which allows even workers on reduced hours to continue making steady progress in their career development. In 2014, the Japan Telework Association presented its prize for excellence to Recruit Management Solutions in the fifteenth Telework Promotion Awards. We are taking part in the 2020 Work Style Special Research Project organized by the Japan Telework Association. Through this project, we will provide our own insight to other participants and learn from the groundbreaking approaches seen in other companies as we find ways to make still more effective use of telework in our business. 2
IT to Enhance the Environment for Remote Work from Home Recruit Marketing Partners Co., Ltd. Building Workplaces to Maximize the Creativity of Engineers Indeed Tokyo Recruit Marketing Partners aims to be a company where individuals can work in ways that match their diverse lives. Toward this end, we have set out to revolutionize our people s work styles. As the first step in this plan, in 2014 we carried out a feasibility study for a work-from-home system. This was followed by a trial scheme allowing flexible work on the basis of trust between company and workers. In this scheme, we actively rolled out a video teleconferencing system accessible from workers homes and tried web-based communication methods to let people handle more of their job tasks remotely. We also used internal information channels to promote use of this new work style, and the company president himself broadcast messages on the scheme to show how seriously Recruit Marketing Partners takes the task of innovating ways of work. During fiscal 2014, a total of 141 employees from 20 company groups tried working from home, making this a valuable trial run on the way to our full-fledged rollout of the system. Recruit Marketing Partners won an incentive award in the fifteenth Telework Promotion Awards for this endeavor. During this fiscal year we will look beyond the topic of remote work to the greater challenges of finding ways of work that increase productivity and creativity alike. This will involve identifying issues in many areas, including necessary systems, infrastructural environments, and organizational frameworks, and considering ways to address them. Indeed, Inc. operates its web-based job information service in 55 markets around the world. Since acquiring the company in 2012, Recruit has worked to maintain its engineer-oriented corporate culture, essential for providing an environment where developers want to work. Desks arranged in hexagonal formation make it easy to talk with fellow developers just by turning around, thus helping to accelerate the development process. And by limiting meetings to one per week, the company lets its engineers dedicate more hours to the key tasks of coding and code review. Indeed s office spaces come with ping pong tables and video game terminals so workers can take a break and clear their minds from time to time. When people are getting their work done well, they should be free to approach that work in whatever way they choose. An engineer-centric corporate culture like Indeed s is essential to creating work environments that let engineers maximize their creativity. Indeed Tech Talks are a monthly fixture at the company s office in Austin, Texas, where developers share their various approaches to application design. We will be holding these talks at the Tokyo office as well as part of efforts to share views on the future of engineering and to create a network of engineers. 3
Diversity at Recruit: Stakeholder Collaboration to Enhance Awareness The Eijo College Program for Saleswomen The Recruit Group has filled more than 20% of its midlevel manager positions with women a relatively high ratio for Japan. But a look at our sales and marketing divisions shows that progress remains to be made in fostering and appointing women to managerial posts. Eijo College is a program to promote active participation by women in the sales field in various industries, making them the next generation of eijo short for eigyo joshi, or women in sales. In this project, diversity promotion officers from Recruit Holdings reached out to six other companies Kirin Beer Marketing, KDDI, Suntory Holdings, Nissan Motor Co., IBM Japan, and Sumitomo Mitsui Bank to gain the participation of a total of 29 female members of the firms sales forces. One aim of this project is to analyze the reasons that women have not made much headway in the sales field to date, clearly defining the issues to address. The end goal is not only to change the actions taken by the participants themselves, but also to deliver messages on the need to make greater use of women throughout the participating companies and across society as a whole. In a survey taken after the project ran its roughly half-year course, fully 96% of the participants responded that they had seen real change in themselves. Real-world results seen so far include numerous cases of women returning to the sales force after taking time off for childbirth and child care and women obtaining promotions to sales management positions. The participants also crafted proposals that were presented to around 20 executives responsible for sales and human-resource activities in their companies, thus deepening understanding among top managers of the basic issues facing women who are prevented from making their mark in the sales field, in particular issues related to work styles or corporate management approaches. The project members also worked together with PR teams at each company to gain newspaper, magazine, and television coverage of the project s background and achievements. It is clear that the way women are put to work is one of the fundamental issues hampering their full participation in the work force. Delivering this message to the public was a significant outcome of the Eijo College project. The seven companies continue to participate in Eijo College activities in 2015. During this fiscal year, managers from the division head level will take part in training sessions to further enhance mutual understanding of the issues. 4
New Work Styles to Match the Times: A Manual for Reducing White-Collar Work Hours We will be sharing the outcomes of our work with partners outside the company. In April, we introduced the results of our research project on shorter hours with HR officers in other companies. In May, we followed this up at the annual Works Symposium with a session titled How to Begin Smart Work: What Prevents Companies from Lowering Total Hours? White-collar workers at Japan s companies are known for their long work hours. What does the Japanese corporate world need in order to reduce these people s hours while also boosting productivity? What must be changed to bring this about? The Recruit Works Institute is posing these questions to Japan s companies and workers through a research project exploring ways to bring the number of white-collar work hours down. The research is focusing in particular on ways for organizations to change that will have more impact than effort at the individual level and on the skills and capacity of managers who lead teams in those organizations. To help companies in this task, we produced a manual on reducing work hours, available in three volumes: one each for human-resource officers, midlevel managers, and employees. The manual for HR officers offers guidance on how to respond to claims from within a company that long working hours cannot be reduced, including a seven-item checklist to work through the process of addressing these concerns. The manual for managers, meanwhile, describes a seven-step process to pursue at the workplace level as the beginning step toward lower work hours. And the manual for employees who find themselves unable to go home early includes a diagnosis sheet to determine the reasons a worker performs overtime work, arranging these factors in five categories and presenting methods to deal with them. 5