Over 30,000 employees from many different backgrounds work at BellSystem24. Traditionally, we have been richly diverse. We defined our material issues1 last year. The top issue is the diversity of people and workstyles. This is our biggest characteristic and will be positioned as the power that enables us to grow with society.
The Diversity Promotion Group2 was established in 2016. It has the important role of expanding diversity. The Group engages in important activities such as empowering women in their organizations, promoting the understanding of sexual minorities and encouraging telecommuting to support workstyle reform and a healthy work-life balance.
Meanwhile, in 2019, we established our Human Rights Policy3 which states our determination to respect the basic human rights of all employees and external people involved in our business activities and transactions. This policy should be the basis to "build diverse workplaces where our employees can work with peace of mind, good health and can work as themselves" as stated in our Sustainability Policy.
We also established the HR Policy, a code of conduct for all employees with the goal of familiarizing them with our corporate vision. Three slogans, grow together, take on challenges and keep improving, are laid out to enable employees to convert our corporate vision into specific actions.
Further, a new personnel system has been introduced for the communicators working at our sites every day under the HR Policy. The personnel system is designed to proactively evaluate communicators' efforts every day: they receive a lump-sum payment biannually in accordance with the results of their evaluation. A specialist course is provided to help them maximize their specialized skills. Now, even colleagues with short work hours may be promoted, earn rewards and seek career advancement. In this way, we are building an environment to organizationally retain diverse people and enable diverse workstyles while every employee can work comfortably. These efforts will be reinforced and will encompass safety and hygiene at workplaces, a social issue that urgently requires action.
Because of the nature of our business, our operations span over 30 locations all around the country. However, our recruiting activities are effectively rooted in their respective regions. For this purpose, we have established Field HR, an organization dedicated to recruiting all over the country. Since 2017, we have provided the SUDAchi4 pre-training program through which we temporarily hire human resources that we would not otherwise employ based on our conventional criteria, to enable them to receive special training before being assigned to a workplace.They learn how to use a computer and how to do tasks and also acquire other necessary skills. We support them to ensure that they are able feel secure working for the Company for the long term. This initiative is effective in two aspects: relieving the employees' worries before they are assigned tasks and achieving organizational improvements in terms of recruitment and the retention of employees. It also received the Japan HR Challenge Awards Recruiter Award in 2019.
Today, telecommuting is increasingly encouraged. We will proactively work to expand our use of telecommuting. This will help employees balance many different circumstances such as caring for children or parents and relocation. We will achieve a high level of diversity in our workstyles insusceptible to time and location constraints. We will speedily develop the system and technologies to make this happen, and will also organizationally reinforce our competitiveness in terms of the retention of human resources.
