Creating a Comfortable Workplace

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• Work-Life Balance
• Initiatives to Improve the Corporate Culture

Work-Life Balance

Basic Approach

The UACJ Group has several systems intended to promote a healthy work-life balance by enabling all employees to properly meet work responsibilities and have quality time off to be with their families, study topics of personal interest, enjoy hobbies, or do whatever else they would like.

UACJ Systems for Balancing Work and Family Responsibilities

Child-Care Leave System and Systems for Diverse Workstyles

At UACJ, employees who are eligible to take child-care leave are encouraged to do so, and in fiscal 2022, 100% of women who had taken maternity leave also took child-care leave. During the fiscal year, 7 women and 81 men were eligible to take child-care leave, and all of the women and 57 of the men actually did so.
All employees who took child-care leave during fiscal 2022 returned to work, and 91.7% of employees who have returned to work following child-care leave have stayed with UACJ for at least three continuous years.
UACJ has taken various steps to encourage employees to return to work after a period of leave. In April 2015, the Company established a system for rehiring former employees who left because of reasons such as the birth of a child, the need to provide child or nursing care, or the transfer of their spouse. (*In April 2023, we added to the system a rehiring recruitment program for all retired employees.) And in March 2017, we introduced systems for providing child-care subsidies and enabling employees with child- or nursing-care responsibilities to work at home, and adopted a coreless flextime system. In April 2018, we launched online services to help employees on child-care leave balance careers and child-care.
For employees who need to relocate their residence because their spouse has been transferred, a system introduced in May 2018 enables domestic transfers for employees to accompany domestically transferred spouses and leaves to accompany spouses transferred overseas. In addition, we introduced a remote work system in April 2023 allowing employees who are relocated to continue working at their current location and place of residence, under certain conditions.

Encouraging Male Employees to Take Child-Care Leave

UACJ encourages employees to take childcare leave by confirming with an employee superiors at the start of the fiscal year all employees who are intending to take childcare leave. For the work site to prepare an operating plan to execute during the leave of absence, we request employees intending to apply for leave to prepare and submit pre-application in advance.
The Human Resources Department then confirms the status of the pre-applications throughout the year. UACJ’s child-care leave system encourages men to take child-care leave. It allows expired paid holidays to be used and, following a revision in rules covering leave for weddings and funerals, allows men to take a total of five days of leave in increments during the first month after a child is born. Following a revision of the applicable law in October 2022, we updated the system so childcare leave can be divided into up to six segments, and we are creating a work environment that makes it easy to take childcare leave. As a result of these and other initiatives, approximately 69% of eligible male employees took child-care leave during fiscal 2022.

Appropriate Management of Work Hours

To properly manage work hours and prevent the working of excessive hours, the UACJ Group has implemented a work-time management system to accurately record and verify the times when employees begin and end each day at work. Employees who exceed overtime standards are asked to see an industrial physician. In addition, for employees who are regularly consulting an occupational health physician, upon the physician’s recommendation, a supervisor also attends the consultations.
UACJ has made every Wednesday a no overtime day to reduce overall work hours and promote work productivity and efficiency. And, through steps such as having each employee specify at the beginning of the fiscal year when they will take three consecutive paid days off (5 days every fifth year), we are systematically creating conditions that make it easier to take time off.
In February 2017, we introduced Premium Fridays to encourage employees to leave the office at the designated end of the business day, to use the hourly paid leave system, and to use the flextime system to leave at 3 p.m.
In addition to the above, we distribute a message by our President to enhance employee awareness of work-life balance during the month we have designated for that purpose, appropriately hire and assign people to prevent overwork, have lights turned off automatically at our head office, and automatically issue email alerts to employees and their supervisors when the employees are working excessive hours.

Preventing Unpaid Overtime

The UACJ Group strives to maintain a corporate culture that does not allow for unpaid overtime. Overtime work that employees cannot refuse to perform and the performance of overtime work without payment are viewed as forced labor.
As a measure for properly managing hours worked, we began in fiscal 2018 to ask all employees in Japan, including those working for subsidiaries, about their performance of overtime work. In collecting this information, we interview employees and managers. We make clear the definition of work hours, and, when unpaid work hours are identified, we process payments and take steps specifically to prevent a recurrence.

Promoting Work Reform

To help bring about innovation in work productivity and create environments where employees can pursue their work with even greater positivity, UACJ embarked on a work reform project in fiscal 2017.
In fiscal 2018, we developed an activity plan emphasizing time management to help employees have a greater sense of the worthwhileness of their work. We then held kickoff briefings and work-efficiency skill seminars at all of our business locations.
In fiscal 2019, we undertook department-level self-reform activities targeting productivity and better engagement as work reform objectives. Productivity initiatives focused on setting KPIs in individual departments and achieving greater efficiency in meetings and the preparation of supporting information. Engagement initiatives targeted improvements based on the results of the very first engagement surveys conducted for UACJ’s indirect departments.
In fiscal 2020, improvements in employee engagement were used as an indicator in expanding our engagement surveys to cover UACJ affiliates in Japan and include direct departments as well. This effort was undertaken to take our engagement-related activities even further. To improve engagement, we conducted management seminars and one-on-one seminars for each managerial class, and career and other types of seminars for employees. In addition, while advancing telework to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, we also conducted seminars on topics such as telework job skills, the use of ICT for telework, and health maintenance in a telework environment.
The Workstyle Reform Project came to an end as planned in fiscal 2020. The next year, in fiscal 2021, we broadened the scope of the engagement survey to include some affiliated companies overseas and, with the aim of continuing to improve productivity and engagement, each UACJ Group worksite implemented reform programs and awards were presented to recognize outstanding programs. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic conditions, in fiscal 2021 the head office and other locations introduced free address workspaces and a personnel system enabling a hybrid structure for telecommuting and working and working on site. We will continue modifying our work style structure in fiscal 2023 and going forward.

Volunteer Leave System

In 2013, the UACJ Group implemented a system under which employees can take up to 60 days a year of expired paid leave to participate in social welfare, disaster recovery, local community, environmental conservation, or other company-approved volunteer activities under the auspices of the national or local governments, or quasi-governmental non-profit organizations.
In fiscal 2022, one employee used this system.

Approach to Employees Holding Second Jobs

Beginning in April 2023, UACJ supports employees who participate in second jobs to advance their careers, improve their skills, and develop their expertise on the premise that the activities do not interfere with our business. UACJ does not permit employees to participate in second jobs based on our duty to consider the risk to occupational safety, such as from long working hours and to the employee obligations for confidentiality, non-competition, and to act in good faith.

Initiatives to Improve the Corporate Culture

When we redefined the Group philosophy in February 2020, we also created a department dedicated to disseminating the philosophy and creating a new corporate culture. Originally created as the Corporate Culture Reform Promotion Department in April, the department was renamed the New Corporate Culture Creation Department in August 2020 and brought under direct control of the president in April 2022.
In February 2020, the president, general managers of the manufacturing sites, and other senior management began holding meetings to discuss the corporate philosophy and ways to disseminate and improve engagement with the philosophy. The Group held 174 meetings in fiscal 2020 attended by 970 employees, 253 meetings in fiscal 2021 attended by 1,436 employees, and 470 meetings in fiscal 2022 attended by 2,644 employees.
We have completed the first two steps of corporate culture reform begun in 2020. In Step 1 we identified and objectively assessed the conditions and in Step 2 we took action based on the Group philosophy. We are now implementing Step 3 to make fulfilling the Group philosophy a natural part of all of our activities and to become an attractive company where employees work with enthusiasm and high energy.

Learn more

• Dialogue on Corporate Culture