GOVERNANCE
EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABILITY
We provide education and training and host internal events about sustainability and creating social value to raise awareness of sustainability in our workforce and to achieve our 2027 materiality target for 100% of employees addressing socioeconomic issues through their job.
The Sustainable Academia initiative we launched in 2021 provides opportunities to learn about these issues mainly through discussion sessions involving KOKUYO Group managers and outside experts. We aim for participants to take ownership of sustainability and to think about what solutions we, as the KOKUYO Group, can provide.
The Sustainable lab initiative we launched in 2022 provides a platform for employees to put the solutions they have devised into practice, and many employees take up this challenge every year.
CASE
Sustainable Academia: The Wellbeing of Society
We held an educational event comprising a range of activities, including discussion sessions, workshops and exhibitions, on the theme of supporting innovation based on an understanding of disability and awareness of social barriers.
Activities included an “ABC of HOWS” exhibition explaining the background to, and letting employees experience, the stationery, office supplies, furniture and other products developed through our HOWS DESIGN inclusive design process; a hands-on workshop with experts, including Professor Shinichiro Kumagaya of Tokyo University’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology; immersive training to understand the world from the perspective of a person with disabilities, led by Heralbony Co., Ltd; and a boccia ball game session for all, whether able-bodied or disabled. Around 800 of our employees participated in this event.
This was an opportunity for our employees to understand what kind of society we are aiming for and to discover how to act. 88% of participants said they felt they had learned something from the event.
CASE
Sustainable Academia: Circular Economy
Because our business activity connects with recycling in so many ways, it is vital that most of our employees understand what is meant by the circular economy and know what they need to do in their own job areas to realize it. To this end, in 2024 we held three educational events on the theme of thinking how we can continue as a business sustainably, which delved into this issue more deeply than ever before and enabled our employees to experience recycling for themselves.
We invited ECOMMIT CEO Teruyuki Kawano to our “thinking about recycling from a business perspective” event, where he had a discussion with the head of our logistics division about how and why we should recycle resources. The other events were an office away-day to visit an industrial waste processing site and a workshop on how to design a circular business. A total of 540 employees participated across these three events.
CASE
Sustainable lab
Sustainable lab is a platform for employees to develop and implement their own plans towards solving the KOKUYO Group’s material issues. During FY2024, a total of nine teams throughout the group challenged themselves to find solutions in areas such as improving wellbeing and contributing toward a circular economy, and shared their results. This provided a forum for employees to take ownership of and rethink familiar issues and for related parts of our business to benefit from new insights into issue resolution.
CASE
Survey Implementation
We carried out a survey to understand the current level of awareness among our employees and to provide a reference point for future initiatives towards achieving our 2027 goal for 100% of employees addressing socioeconomic issues through their job.
A total of 41.5% of our employees responded “agree” or “somewhat agree” to a question asking whether they believe they can create social value through their own job. We will implement measures to achieve the 2027 100% target and carry out further surveys to understand how far awareness of addressing socioeconomic issues through their job has permeated our organization.
