The Company has been working to secure days off for employees at project sites as part of its work style reforms. We will create a shorter hours policy document to promote voluntary initiatives for shorter working hours at project sites, introduce and use IT tools to reduce the workload at project sites, reduce the volume of documents and promote online documentation, and review division of work before launching effective measures at all offices. In fiscal 2020, we promoted “six-day or longer closure per four weeks” with a target implementation rate of 100% at new projects sites, and achieved 83.6% implementation (including ongoing projects). For fiscal 2021 onward, we will further strengthen the initiative to achieve 100% implementation of “two days off per week (eight-day or longer closure per four weeks)” at new project sites.

■ Holidays at new project sites

We are aware that the promotion of female participation and career advancement is a driving force for corporate growth from the perspective of sustainability, and it is an urgent business challenge for us to make it happen. We are making active efforts to sweep away the conventional image of a construction company and support the advancement of women in the industry from both tangible and intangible aspects. The efforts from the tangible aspect include building more female restrooms and changing rooms and saving labor through the use of machines and IT devices, whereas those from the intangible aspect include achieving work-life balance, developing systems to support work-life balance and increasing the ease of utilizing such systems. Through such efforts, we are aiming to create a comfortable workplace so that all employees regardless of gender can fully demonstrate their abilities.

We also provide training to improve skills of female employees and raise awareness among employees, especially among managers. Further, we have been implementing measures that lead to increasing the motivation of female employees with reference to the findings of employee engagement surveys. As such, we will develop more female manager candidates early on and actively appoint female managers.

As for recruitment, we recruit people regardless of gender or nationality, aiming to be an organization where diverse human resources can play active roles. In 2020, we hired 130 additional employees including 25 females and four foreign nationals as part of regular recruitment. With an overall target of achieving 20% or higher percentage of female employees among all newly hired employees, we have set a target for each job category: civil engineering 15%, building construction 20% and office work 40%. We hired more female recruiters and are promoting the attractiveness of the Company as a potential employer to female students, telling them that we have various systems for providing work-life balance support more than legally required and offer a working environment where they can work for a long time.

To promote female participation in the workplace, it is necessary to raise awareness not only among female employees but also among all employees, including managers. We therefore offer various training to establish such a corporate culture. We will continue to make a creative effort to provide educational programs tailored as necessary.

• Diversity training for managers (with a different theme for every occasion)
• Training for managers in charge of female employees
• Career training for female leader candidates
• Career training for general office employees

During a period between fiscal 2016 and fiscal 2018, the number of female managers increased from 12 to 25, and 16 female general office employees were promoted to career-track positions under a system that allows general office employees to change their employment category. Under the Action Plan based on the Act on Promotion of Female Participation and Career Advancement for a period between fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2022, we have set a target of achieving 2.5% or higher percentage of female managers and successfully increased the percentage from 1.96% in fiscal 2019 to 2.2% in fiscal 2020. We will continue to actively promote general office employees to career-track positions. In April 2021, two female employees were promoted to the position of Department Manager for the first time. We will systematically appoint female employees to the positions of key management personnel.

As part of initiatives undertaken by the Female Participation Promotion Subcommittee, we held an opinion exchange meeting among female engineers and female career-track employees. We facilitate communication among female employees, and thereby provide opportunities for them to reflect on their own careers by continuously undertaking such cross-sectoral initiatives.

At study group meetings called to discuss workwear and safety belt, female members of the Female Participation Promotion Subcommittee and volunteer female employees repeatedly discussed to create functional workwear with excellent design and made a proposal of redesign of existing workwear. Based on this proposal, we redesigned and adopted new workwear clothing in 2018.

As the number of female employees hired for career-track positions increases in recent years, female employees, who expect to experience life events such as marriage and childbirth, have voiced their concerns about their future ways of working. In response, we have set up a consultation service for female employees to offer advice on work and life careers in fiscal 2020. The service provides consultation not only for female career-track employees but also for female general office employees and contract employees. Also, when visiting a branch or project site, our officers arrange an opportunity to talk with female employees and ask their opinions and requests on life events and future career development. Such opportunities have helped female employees develop their careers as well as contributed to creating a working environment to realize a work-life balance.

With respect to the reemployment of employees after their retirement, we are targeting to achieve the reemployment of 90% of retired employees. Also, in order to encourage them to thrive with higher motivation, we are working to review existing systems to create a framework that allows them to continue working for a long time even after their retirement by introducing shorter working hours and days, improving the wage level and restructuring the wage system to make it commensurate with their workstyles.

To promote diversity in human resources, we recruit new foreign national graduates according to the plan. We pay adequate attention to new foreign recruits by preparing the English version of materials used in internal training for new recruits and assigning them to workplaces where they can work with colleagues with experience of working abroad so that they can easily adapt to their working environments.

In January 2017, we held a meeting to exchange views among foreign national employees for the purpose of promote interchange among them and solving problems they have about working in a different country. Experienced employees gave younger employees advice on how to deal with problems they come across in daily work because they have to communicate in non-native language. They also made a proposal of how to deal with such problems to the Company. As such, the meeting gave us a good opportunity to talk about such issues. In October 2018, we launched a consultation service for foreign national employees and their families to provide consultation for problems that cause anxiety and worry. We also provide language training to teach business Japanese to support foreign national employees working in Japan and foreign students who have job offers from the Company.

We proactively hire people with disabilities to achieve the statutory employment rate by expanding their scope of work, creating a comfortable working environment and introducing job applicants with disabilities, especially to departments with lower employment rates, to encourage employment. As a result, our employment rate is expected to exceed the statutory employment rate of 2.3% in 2021. The Company decides where to assign people with disabilities according to the individuals’ careers from the perspective of normalization and provides the necessary consideration and support.

The Company has long been promoting the use of childcare leave among male employees by setting conditions better than legally required, such as providing 10 days of paid childcare leave; and allowing the extension of childcare leave up until the child reaches three years of age for special reasons. However, the utilization rate hovered around 10%. In fiscal 2020, the utilization rate improved dramatically to 76.6% as a result of adding a new condition that allows employees to take a second childcare leave under any circumstances, while actively making approaches to the superiors of male employees to encourage the utilization.

We have also raised the maximum age of children at which parents are eligible for the exemption from non-scheduled work and child nursing care leave so that more employees can utilize these programs. We raised the maximum age of children at which parents are eligible for the exemption from non-scheduled work from the current “up until the child reaches three years of age” to “up until the child enters elementary school,” while, for child nursing care leave, from “up until the child finishes the third grade of elementary school” to “up until the child finishes the sixth grade of elementary school.” As such, we have striven to provide our own support for employees to balance child care and work.

To achieve the 100% utilization of childcare leave among male employees, we revised our Action Plan to change the target in April 2021 (the target under the Action Plan was set at 80%, given the difficulty of taking childcare leave in the same month as the birth of the child in March).

Major systems

• New shorter working hours program
• No overtime day (Wednesday)
• Granting of site-change leave at the end of construction period
• Diversified working arrangements and systems compatible with a range of different lifestyles and life events
• Job return system
• System designated to support change of work location
• Maternity leave for spouses
• Distribution of Work-life Balance Support Handbook
• Introduction of the work-at-satellite-office system
• Work-at-home system

Our employees’ flexible ways of working during pregnancy and after childbirth are introduced in the “Maternity Health Management Guidebook in the Construction Industry” (Japan Association for the Advancement of Working Women) (Japanese only).

• *2: Starting from the fiscal 2019, we have hired an external consulting firm (Sompo Health Support Inc.) to strengthen our occupational health system by clarifying the Company’s concept of Health and Productivity Management and creating a network of public health nurses for all branches.

The Company has cited “S: Developing an attractive workplace environment (work style reforms, diversity promotion, Health and Productivity Management)” as an initiative for ESG management set forth in 11. Management Foundation Strategies of the Medium-term Management Plan 2019-2021. In fiscal 2021, the final year of the Medium-term Management Plan, we will strongly promote our efforts for Health and Productivity Management, aiming to be certified as a “White 500” enterprise, as follows.

Meanwhile, we collaborated with the Health Insurance Society to promote the health management of employees by introducing a health management system to start the shared use of physical examination result data in fiscal 2019. To solve employees’ lack of exercise and facilitate communication among them amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we have encouraged employees to actively participate in sessions of a health promotion event “Let’s Walk Together!” sponsored by the Health Insurance Society. The Company has been working to raise the awareness of health promotion among employees by holding our original events in conjunction with the said event (one in every four employees and officers, including top management and members of Executive Management Meeting, participated in the fall session of “Let’s Walk Together!” in 2020).

To prevent health problems and address mental health issues induced by long working hours, we have newly assigned an industrial psychiatrist to the Head Office in November 2020 to strengthen our occupational health system, in addition to ensuring that occupational health physicians provide face-to-face guidance and health consultation to detect employees with a higher health risk, so as to adequately respond to employees with mental health problems.

For the assessment and improvement of Health and Productivity Management issues, we outsourced the analysis of the health conditions and the risk of lifestyle diseases of employees to an external consulting firm using the physical examination results data and created visual representations of employees’ health issues. We are currently working to strongly promote a PDCA cycle for Health and Productivity Management by undertaking various measures to promote employees’ health with an improvement target set for each physical examination item based on the analysis results (e.g., zero untreated patient with level-3 high blood pressure).

The rate of smokers in the construction industry is said to be higher than the general population. We therefore believe that, to prevent passive smoking and also in terms of the health of smokers themselves, it is important to reduce the smoking rate. The Company has been making efforts to prevent passive smoking by preparing the “Passive Smoking Prevention Handbook” in fiscal 2018. As part of such efforts, we are working to help employees quit smoking by establishing a system to provide financial aid for costs to visit tobacco cessation clinic as a measure to ensure the reduction of passive smoking. As a result, the smoking rate reduced from 31.9% in fiscal 2016 to 29.8% in fiscal 2019 partly due to the above measure.