HEALTH AND PRODUCTIVITY

Goals for Employee Health and Productivity, Results in 2024

As part of our commitment to health and productivity management, we have set the following KPIs and targets, taking into account the latest circumstances.

Processes in Place

KOKUYO Health and Productivity System

In FY2022, we established the Health Management Taskforce within the Subcommittee for Building an Organizational Framework for Sustainability and Promoting Wellbeing in order to expedite efforts to build a healthy workplace. The following bodies collaborate in managing employee health and engagement: the KOKUYO Group Central Safety Health Committee, Risk Management Committee, KOKUYO’s health management staff (including occupational physicians), group company members involved in building a healthy workplace, KOKUYO Health Insurance Association, the KOKUYO Labor Union, and the Health Management Taskforce (HR).

View data on health-promotion performance here.

Strategic Roadmap for Health and Productivity Management

As part of our strategy for promoting employee health, we set out goals, tasks, expected outcomes, and investments.

Actions

• Selected for Kenko Investment for Health 2025
• Showcasing Our Expertise in Health and Productivity Management through The Campus, a Space for Experimenting with New Workstyles and Lifestyles
• Reducing Overtime with a New Approach to Employee Management
• Women’s Health Matters
• Linkage with Employee Welfare
• Promoting Employee Health Enhancement Activities
• Program to Ensure the Full Use of Regular Screenings
• Workplace that is Smoke-free or with Segregated Smoking Areas
• KOKUYO Health Insurance Association: Collaborative Health Promotion
• Mental Health Action

Selected for Kenko Investment for Health 2025

Showcasing Our Expertise in Health and Productivity Management through The Campus, a Space for Experimenting with New Workstyles and Lifestyles

In February 2021, we opened The Campus in Shinagawa, Tokyo. The Campus is a space for experimenting with new workstyles and lifestyles. The Campus is a space in which people from different professional backgrounds gather to explore and test new ideas to identify the values of the future. It is tied in with KOKUYO’S Next Experience, a project to engage in tasks for solving long-term social issues. We will continue to use The Campus to widely showcase to society the knowledge and know-how of health and productivity management that KOKUYO has put into practice and proposals to protect the mental and physical health, safety and security of employees and visitors.

• Reducing Overtime with a New Approach to Employee Management
• KOKUYO-Style Hybrid Work
• Working Hours, Paid Leave Take-up Rate

Reducing Overtime with a New Approach to Employee Management

In FY2023, we recognized that we could only achieve growth over the medium and long term if senior and middle managers take urgent action to reform our approach to employee management. With this strategic awareness, we launched a new approach to employee management, one that emphasizes accompanying the employee. Under this approach, we began trialing 1-on-1 meetings between managers and employees for addressing issues that arise in the course of business operation. Guided by the insights from the trials, we finalized an official 1-on-1 format for KOKUYO along with a work follow-up process for fixing imbalances in work assignments and making the workplace conducive to high-market-value work.
Each hierarchical layer has a defined set of roles and responsibilities. The senior leadership engages actively with team members, enabling the management to predict man-hours and obtain timely insights. In this way, the issues employees experience are dealt with quickly. The new approach to employee management has proved effective. Overtime hours have significantly reduced and that has led to changes in how time is used.
We will work to entrench this initiative in FY2024. At the same time, we will engage in such efforts to lower the barriers to taking vacations.

Women’s Health Matters

Context
Previously, we had not done enough to build a women-friendly workplace. Employees complained that the workplace was women-unfriendly and that many more women than men had childcare or eldercare commitments, making it harder for women to balance work with family commitments. With young women making up a relatively large share of our workforce compared to that of the average company in Japan, more employees than before have experienced life events related to women’s wellness (such as hormonal disorders, maternity, and motherhood).
Accordingly, in 2023, we made a concerted effort to address these concerns. We committed to helping women balance their work and private life and to supporting women’s health and wellbeing. We also made a focused effort to build a more women-friendly workplace.

Actions

• We provided a health advice service led by an occupational physician with expertise in women’s health.
• We established the Wellness Station to improve contact between a public health nurse and employees. We also provided a channel whereby employees can easily reach out to occupational health professionals.
• To address the health-related obstacles to empowering women in the workplace and make the workplace more gender inclusive, we organized a seminar led by an inhouse occupational physician. The seminar was about women’s health matters such as premenstrual syndrome, menopausal challenges, cervical cancer, and breast cancer). Male employees were also encouraged to actively participate in the events.
• We organized events (seminars, workshops, and a get-togethers with mentors) for employees with concerns about life events such as childbirth and parenting.
• Providing for women’s sanitary needs: With the support of Kao’s Laurier in the Workplace project, we installed sanitary pads in the restrooms of the head office.
• For women aged 40 or above, we expanded breast cancer screenings and established a subsidy program through KOKUYO Health Insurance Association.
  In the screening program, a mammography van and a ultrasonographer visit the Shinagawa head office and the Shibayama and Mie plants to screen employees there.

Linkage with Employee Welfare

Health is the key principle in Play Work Mileage, our choice-based program of employee welfare. Play Work Mileage supports employee health in the following ways.

It encourages employees to invest in their own health
Employees can redeem points against expenses they incur in promoting their health, including expenses for optional examinations for comprehensive medical checkups, medical bills, and the cost of various health supplies. In FY2024, our employees redeemed a collective total of approximately 211 million yen in points.

Promoting employee health enhancement activities

We operate a program that records employees’ health-promoting actions and allots points according to such records. The points can be redeemed for subsidies under the aforementioned choice-based program of employee welfare. The aim of this program is to encourage employees to make a habit of engaging in light exercise, walking, and similar routines with an awareness of their health in their daily lives. We have also been running the Walking Campaign for a limited time to encourage even more employees to participate in the program such as by competing over which team walks the greatest number of steps. We ran a wellness program which provides seminars, surveys and individual guidance by trainers in a set to improve and enhance the health literacy of employees about physical ailments.

Program to Ensure the Full Use of Regular Screenings

This is a program to support employee health. We hold seminars with occupational physicians before and after employees undergo their regular health checkups so that the results of those checkups can lead to improvements for the next time. We hold these seminars online so that the families of employees can also participate in them.

Workplace that is Smoke-free or with Segregated Smoking Areas

Data from Japan Tobacco’s annual Japan Smoking Rate Survey indicates a high rate of smoking among male employees in our corporate group. On April 11, 2020, Japan banned indoor smoking with some exceptions. In conjunction with the ban, we banned smoking on all KOKUYO sites in Japan. We continue our efforts to raise employees’ awareness of the risks of smoking.

KOKUYO Health Insurance Association: Collaborative Health Promotion

The KOKUYO Health Insurance Association collaborates with KOKUYO in supporting employee health.
This collaboration includes delivering health checkups and cancer screenings.

• The association uses the network health checkup service to enable its members to receive health checks (including a general health check known as a ningen dock) at medical institutions nationwide. Members’ families can receive a health checkup at the same medical institution.
• In 2022, the association started providing KOKUYO with a subsidy for colorectal cancer screenings. We integrated the subsidized screenings into our health checkup program so that all employees have the screenings.
• The association has raised the maximum amount of subsidy for cervical and breast cancer screenings.
  - In 2020, it raised the maximum amount of subsidy for actual expenses incurred in breast cancer screenings.
  - In 2023, it raised the maximum amount of subsidy for actual expenses incurred in cervical cancer screenings.
• In 2023, the association started subsidizing prostate cancer screenings.
• In 2023, the association started mailing HPV and PSA test kits.
  These test kits are for members who do not receive a subsidy for cervical or prostate cancer screenings.

The association works with KOKUYO to provide a round-the-clock counseling service for physical and mental health concerns. It also provides counseling services related to general health, medical care, long-term nursing care, parenting, and mental health. In 2023, it launched a health app that encourages health-promoting activities (regular exercise, healthy diet, sleep hygiene).

Mental Health Action

We conduct an annual stress check as required by law.
To promote a culture of self-care, in which employees feel comfortable asking for help after the stress check, we have introduced the Employee Assistance Program. This externally run program encourages employees to recognize the warning signs and symptoms of stress and to seek preventive health services at an early stage.
We have been conducting the pulse survey monthly since 2021. The purpose of this is to promote fixed-point observation of issues in ways of working and workplaces and to encourage dialogue in teams to build even better organizations.
We identify issues that we will tackle with priority and measures to deal with those issues by business and human resource departments engaging in dialogue while comprehensively looking at the survey results and personnel and organizational data.

• Social Actions