Employee Communication

Social: Employee Communication

Basic Concepts

We are aiming to foster an open and easy-to-communicate organizational culture in which it is possible to create value through varied experimentation with members who have different values. The purpose of that is to be a company that creates new value by extracting the value of diversified human resources and solving social issues in 2030.
We will look to entrench a culture of experimentation where all employees respect each other and can easily access the information they need. It will also be one where value is produced through repeated trial and error in our Third Medium-term Plan. Our goal with that is to change the way of working at KOKUYO into one of hybrid work and project-based work.

Systems

Employee satisfaction survey

We conduct an annual employee satisfaction survey with a view to providing an employee-friendly workplace.
Based on the responses, we interview employees to identify their concerns and provide guidance to help them resolve issues themselves. For example, we use instructional videos showing examples of how other employees resolved similar issues.
Besides the annual survey, we conduct a monthly pulse survey to get a “pulse check” on the state of the team and resolve issues through dialogue.

Pulse Survey

We began a pulse survey to be able to rotate through the PDCA cycle at a high pace of once a month in KOKUYO Co., Ltd. and Kaunet Co., Ltd. One purpose of the survey is to grasp the state of teams and workplaces and to then use it as the impetus for discussions between members and dialogue between superiors and subordinates. Another purpose of the survey is for management to grasp the state of sites and employees even more timely and accurately while taking various measures such as new ways of working and initiatives to realize our long-term vision. We are aiming to foster an easy-to-communicate corporate culture in which employees can think and talk with each other about the company on an equal footing regardless of their position through establishing a habit to always be aware of the condition of their teams and organizations by continuing this survey every month.

Initiatives in 2021

Employee Town Meetings

We announced our long-term vision of Change, Challenge, Create (CCC) 2030 and updated our philosophy to “be Unique” in February 2021. We hold employee town meetings (meetings to think about our philosophy) as forums for dialogue to deepen understanding with all employees in the KOKUYO Group: “Why did you update our philosophy?” “What does ‘be Unique’ mean?”

President’s Award

The President’s Award is an award system that we newly established in FY2020. It serves to recognize activities that have contributed to an improvement in the value of KOKUYO. The Starbucks Campus Ring-bound Notebook was the rewarded with the first prestigious President’s Award.
The Starbucks Campus Ring-bound Notebook came into existence as a result of a collaboration between Starbucks Corporation and KOKUYO in 2019. It started with KOKUYO endorsing a endorsing a milk carton recycling initiative that has been ongoing since 2010 as part of Starbucks’ efforts aimed at contributing to a recycling-oriented society. The notebooks are made using paper recycled mainly from milk cartons developed by KOKUYO on the front and back covers. More than approximately 1,000 tons of milk cartons are washed, dried and collected one by one annually in more than 1,400 stores across Japan. The notebooks, completed after undergoing many challenges from processing and printing to mass production, continue to keep on attracting attention. For example, stores kept on selling out of them shortly after their release with limited color versions then put on sale even after that.
The ceremony was finally held online after being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, it was an occasion brimming with the smiles of the participating President Hidekuni and everyone else involved.

An ice-breaker activity: Participants share pictures that they drew based on a given topic

Dynamism Challenge

A strategic priority in our previous medium-term plan (2019–2021) was to turbo-charge workplace productivity (“doubling the speed of operations through variety”). In 2019, we launched an initiative to help cultivate a workplace culture that rewards employees for thinking independently and taking the initiative. The initiative is titled Bottom Up, Top Pull (“bottom up” means frontline employees raising concerns or suggesting ideas, and “top pull” means the management taking up these ideas).
In FY2021, the third year of the program, two prizes were offered:
Top-Pull Prize: This prize honors leaders who helped their team achieve growth or improve their performance. Entries are nominated by others.
Dynamism Prize: This prize honors individuals and teams who push the envelope with bold initiatives for turbo-charging workplace productivity. Entries are self-nominated or nominated by others.
Prizes were awarded at a business unit and regional level. For the top prize, the corporate officers then picked one individual (or team) from among the organization as a whole. The winners of the two prizes were then announced to employees in the company newsletter.