Human Resources Management

In April 2023, we launched "Hashimoto Radio," in which President & CEO Hashimoto speaks on specific topics one at a time, responding directly to employees' opinions and questions. The concept is to "connect with employees through the voice of the President & CEO." He discusses a wide range of topics, from casual matters to the future of the company and career advice, sharing his thoughts and ideas directly with employees.

The radio content is also shared in English and Chinese, ensuring the president's voice reaches the entire Group. Additionally, the CHRO engages in dialogues on "Cultures to Keep and Cultures to Change" using company history at various business sites and overseas sites, while the sector president of the Research Center hosts roundtable discussions. Cross-departmental project promotions, encouragement from the top management to employees, and employee-driven initiatives for transformation are also being implemented. By enhancing the connection and communication between management and employees, these efforts effectively advance corporate culture transformation.

Even before the launch of the Promotion of Women’s Empowerment team, the Mitsui Chemicals Group had been working to actively promote women in its business activities by assigning female employees to Works and actively hiring women in career-track technical positions. Since establishing this team, the Company has been working to enhance its systems, and has focused on fostering a corporate culture in which women can build their careers. As a result, the Company has reached a point where very few women leave their jobs due to lack of systems to support childcare.

Following the establishment of a support framework for work-life balance in the first phase, our efforts to promote women's empowerment have focused on fostering understanding and integration of diversity in the second phase. We are currently in the third phase, where increasing the number of women in decision-making positions has become a major challenge. To address this, it is essential to systematically develop and appoint female managers who are candidates for such roles. Therefore, we have set the ratio of female managers and the ratio of female hires as indicators for the empowerment of women, and are promoting these initiatives.

We have set short-, medium-, and long-term targets for the ratio of female managers in the Company, and are promoting efforts to achieve them. Specifically, the goal is to raise the rate to 9% by the end of fiscal 2025 and to 15% by the end of fiscal 2030. 

To achieve these goals, we believe it is essential to further deepen accurate understanding of diversity in management and communication, particularly among managers, and to ensure that the ratio and speed of promotion to manager-level positions for women—currently lower than for men—do not differ by gender.

Based on this belief, we have conducted training and activity on the theme of unconscious bias for department managers and newly appointed line managers to promote correct understanding that, even during childcare, opportunities for advancement should be given based on communication with the employees on childcare leave and that appropriate consideration should be given not only to women but also to men during the childcare period. We are striving to spread correct understanding about this. Other lectures on the theme of empowerment of women in the workplace are given by responsible officer for human resources and outside directors.

In hiring employees with disabilities, the Company goes beyond achieving the statutory employment ratio and is committed to maintaining an environment in which people with disabilities can play an active role while accumulating their skills, and feel accepted as members of the organization. Before assigning an employee with a disability into a certain position, we select the most appropriate place for the employee so as to avoid putting under pressure on the employee to adapt to the work environment. In addition to conducting training sessions at sites that accept employees with disabilities to help other employees understand what a disability entails, we set incubation periods and adaptation/learning periods for a certain period after hiring, and introduce measures suited to the employee’s particular disability to enable them to work smoothly. We also provide regular interviews for both employees with disabilities and their superiors to help to retain employees with disabilities in the workplace. Listening to difficulties and issues from both sides helps to improve the workplace environment and work styles and creates a comfortable work environment.

We also offer subsidies for learning skills that are useful to employees with disabilities in their work, such as language and computer skills, to help improve their skills in a way that is suited to their individual talents.

In fiscal 2024, we provided safety education to headquarters employees who had no prior experience working at plants or R&D sites.

The Mitsui Chemicals Group Human Rights Policy prohibits all forms of discrimination whatsoever, including discrimination against sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2021, we launched a project involving business sites and began studying initiatives to improve the ease of working for the LGBTQ community, leading to the current measures. Many of the early project members are promoting the initiative as LGBTQ contact persons at their business sites.

In November 2020, we endorsed the LUX Social Damage Care Project announced by Unilever Japan Customer Marketing K.K., by abolishing the requirement for gender description when applying for a job.

In order to build a pipeline that extends to the appointment of female employees as directors, we provide training on unconscious bias to general managers based on the belief that it is important for executives to understand unconscious bias and face the challenges of organizations for which they are responsible. In fiscal 2024, the fourth year of this training, a workshop was conducted for newly appointed general managers, following their participation in e-learning designed to help them recognize their own unconscious biases, to consider challenges and solutions.

The New Line Manager Training Program is mandatory for all newly appointed line managers who will be responsible for other staff members. The program will teach them about the roles and necessary skills of a line manager and nurture their work awareness. As part of this training, a diversity seminar is conducted. Running for approximately two hours, the seminar consists of two parts: the first is a lecture on the importance of diversity in organizations and unconscious bias, while the second involves a workshop where participants discuss harassment issues. During the workshop, participants are divided into groups to discuss how they would respond to harassment-related consultations from subordinates, such as SOGI harassment or paternity harassment, learning from each other's perspectives.

Training is provided for women in key technical positions who work as operators at Works, with the aim of providing opportunities to interact with female operators at other Works and to think about their careers. In March 2023, the training was held in person for the first time in four years. To emphasize on-the-job learning, the training was conducted at Nagoya Works, with participants gathering from across Japan. A new feature of the training was a program where participants engaged in active discussions with Works executives about career paths and challenges. It was found that many female employees working in shifts have concerns regarding menstrual leave, so in fiscal 2024, we created and distributed a handbook designed to make it easier to discuss menstruation in the workplace. We will continue to explore and implement measures and initiatives to address challenges in this area.

Every year, Mitsui Chemicals dispatches 10 to 20 employees to external training programs designed to improve the management skills and motivation of female employees who are aiming for managerial positions, as well as programs designed to help female candidates for general manager and director positions learn about business management and building external networks. Exchanges with other business women in similar positions from different companies give employees an opportunity to meet women who can become a role model and raise their career awareness.

Since fiscal 2014 we have provided Global Business Skill Training, which teaches the skills needed when working with multicultural teams. This training program is targeted specifically at employees who have been assigned abroad and engaged in overseas business, and involves managing multicultural teams and negotiating with business partners from different cultural backgrounds. About 30 employees are selected to participate in this program each year. Participants learn about the religions, cultures, and ways of thinking of people in various countries and regions, and their backgrounds, through specific case studies under the theme of business communication.

The Mitsui Chemicals Group is promoting the visualization of organizational issues using various HR-related data, including employee engagement surveys, overtime hours, competency assessments, and recruitment data. We aim to strengthen organizational capabilities by utilizing this data and applying statistical data analysis methods to formulate solutions.

To effectively promote various measures for the human resources strategy, the Mitsui Chemicals Group has been operating Workday Human Capital Management (Workday HCM), provided by Workday Inc. of the U.S., on a group and global basis since February 2023.

Using Workday HCM to centrally manage organizational and human resource information within the Group will enable us to meet the growing need to disclose information about human capital, which is an intangible asset, in a timely and appropriate way while promoting the study of assigning the right people to the right roles across the entire organization. In addition, we will provide support for autonomous career development through information dissemination from management to employees within the Group and globally, as well as visualization of positions and duties.

The global business that Mitsui Chemicals Group conducts is based on its business strategies, including its Long-term Business Plan. Alongside, we are also monitoring the status of our Group employees.