SocialHuman Resources Development
The current era is often described as an era of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), where social conditions and the business environment are changing more rapidly and intricately than ever before. As conventional wisdom and models of past success are no longer effective in an increasing number of situations, business management requires more flexible and prompter responses.
In such an era, a company’s sustainable growth is founded on its employees. We regard each and every employee as a human asset who creates corporate value and believe that integrating human capital with our business strategy is essential for further corporate growth.
Accordingly, the Sawai Group focuses on creating a workplace environment in which employees can fully demonstrate their capabilities by implementing measures such as promoting flexible workstyles, enhancing training and education programs that support career development, and advancing diversity. While we actively support employee growth, we also expect our employees not to be complacent about the status quo, but to always try to identify challenges from a fresh perspective and take them on to improve the situation.
Furthermore, in addition to traditional collective training, we provide employees with a wider variety of self-selected, self-directed training opportunities to support their upskilling, thereby accelerating our human asset development.
Training system
The Sawai Group has developed a documented set of definitions of competency requirements to specify the capabilities and role behavior expected to be demonstrated by employees in each position or grade. Based on these defined requirements, we provide tiered training to employees grouped according to their year of entry and grade. In addition, we offer a wide range of elective (optional) training programs, including a Sawai Web School online learning program and a Sawai Open School program for external training, as well as correspondence courses. By broadly informing employees of this overall training system, we strive to support their self-directed skills development. (Figure below: Schematic diagram of the training system)
Number of Participants in Training
In recent years, we have significantly expanded and improved our company-wide training offering, including online training programs, which offer greater flexibility in terms of learning location and time, which has led to a significant increase in the number of participants.
For more details about the number of Participants in Training, refer to the ESG data “Employee Growth”.
Appraisal and Assessment system
The Sawai Group believes that It is most important to create an environment in which each employee can demonstrate their capabilities in order to achieve sustainable growth in the future. Therefore, our HR systems for evaluation, grading, and promotion, treatment, placement and transfer, and human resources development are designed to encourage employees to develop their own skills, based on “the definition of competence requirements”, which defines the skills that the company wants its employees to develop.
Performance appraisal
Performance appraisals are conducted twice a year, once in the first half of the year and once in the second half of the year, and are based on 1) the degree to which business objectives have been achieved (objectives evaluation) and 2) the degree to which expected competence are demonstrated (competence evaluation).
For objectives evaluations, the “theme to be worked on this fiscal year,” “goals to be achieved and how to achieve them,” “weight,” and “difficulty” are set at the beginning of the first and second half of the year. At the end of the period, the evaluator decides on an evaluation based on the “content of the actions taken and the degree of achievement” and the “self-evaluation” declared by the person being evaluated.
For competence evaluation, the competence demonstrated by the person being evaluated during that period is evaluated on a 5-point scale for each item based on the “the definition of competence requirements”.
With this system and the idea that the individualities and abilities of our employees are our greatest assets, we provide motivated and capable human resources with the opportunity to fully demonstrate their abilities, and we evaluate and treat them in a transparent, fair and equitable manner. We not only conduct questionnaires on personnel evaluations and analyze the results, but also conduct employee opinion surveys and use the results to improve issues.
Career development support
The Sawai Group provides employees with career development support in various forms to enable every one of them to proactively build a career that reflects who they are and what they want to be. They can receive not only day-to-day support from their workplace and supervisors but also the personal growth and career development support the Group offers from multiple perspectives by actively leveraging the expertise of external specialists.
Career interview
We regularly provide employees with opportunities for one-on-one career interviews with their supervisors about their own performance and career development. In these interviews, each employee can candidly share with their supervisor the career they aspire to pursue and the capabilities and skills they wish to develop, while their supervisor listens attentively to them and in turn offers them advice on their future growth and potential career paths. By promoting this kind of dialogue, we enhance employees’ work satisfaction and engagement and foster a transparent and open workplace atmosphere. Career interviews also help deepen trust-based relationships between employees and their supervisors, thereby making it easier for employees to consult with their supervisors about the challenges and concerns they face in their daily work. Through this initiative, we create an environment in which employees can take on new challenges with a feeling of confidence.
Early-career follow-up interviews
We provide employees in their first and third years at the company with the opportunity to have an in-depth one-on-one interview with an external specialist skilled in attentive listening about the concerns and issues they have faced since they joined the company. Through this kind of interview, we increase employee motivation and identify organizational challenges.
Early-career development training
We implement an early-career development training program to help early-career employees understand the fundamentals of career development and, based on that understanding, develop a clear vision of the capabilities and behaviors they need to strengthen toward the future. The training program is designed to allow trainees to increase their own motivation for proactive career building within the company, develop a personal future vision, and define the growth and action targets they must achieve to realize that vision.
Career counseling service provided by external specialists
To ease employees’ career-related concerns and support their efforts in considering a detailed career plan, we have established an external counseling desk that they can contact to consult with independent specialists. This service supports each employee in their endeavor to realize their own career vision.