Global Digital Transformation Partner

In a society where diverse talent is fully engaged, it is important to create and offer a healthy work environment equipped with an organizational structure that promotes work-life balance and supports flexible work arrangements. transcosmos defines well-being in the scope of DE&I, as assisting employees in balancing their work and parenting/caregiving. To ensure the well-being of employees, we will drive initiatives towards creating a workplace and systems that allow employees to continue to play an active role in their workplaces.

As our clients’ BPO partner, we not only perform operations on behalf of our clients, but also offer various IT solutions that support their businesses.
We believe that we can grow together with our clients as their strategic partner through our offering of value added services that are localized to meet the needs of each market. We also believe that the more profitable our clients’ businesses become, the higher our corporate value will be.
The challenge we have is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to reduce overtime since each center and office has differing workplace environments, each with its own work patterns arrangements, operational processes, delivery time, and workflows.
To address the challenge, each center and office is taking creative approaches to increase operational efficiency taking into consideration their specific characteristics. As part of our initiative to achieve workstyle reform, we are making a concerted effort to “deliver higher quality & productivity.” To that end, we have an award system in place through which we gather best practices for driving productivity including tools and case studies from our centers and offices, rigorously assess the cases, recognize centers and offices with outstanding cases, and share their success stories across the company so that all can utilize the best practices.
At the same time, we are taking measures to maintain both mental and physical well-being of our employees. To that end, we have a mandatory policy that our employees whose overtime hours have significantly increased due to a high level of work demand must see our HR representative, and, must be checked by our industrial doctor or clinical phycologist.

To offer systems that help each individual employee continue self-motivated growth and achieve a healthy work-life balance, we are working towards creating a workplace environment that ensures flexible workstyles free from time and location constraints.

• Diverse & Flexible Shift Work Arrangements
  We are making efforts towards creating pleasant workplaces that lead to higher productivity by applying diverse and flexible shift work arrangements to our centers and offices tailored to their differing operational needs.
• Flextime
  We have a flextime system in place, including full-flextime without core hours, to enable our employees to choose their working hours that best suit the business requirements of each department.
• Mobile Work
  Our basic principle is to have our employees work at a designated business location. For departments where their job requires members to step out of the office frequently, we have introduced a mobile work system so that they can work flexibly without a location constraint.
• Work-From-Home
  For employees whose work can be performed remotely, we offer a work-from-home system to enable them to work from home with the Company’s permission. We provide a work-from-home allowance for employees on this system to cover their home-office expenses including utilities.
• Regional Full-Time Employee
  To support employees in achieving a healthy work-life balance and to offer a comfortable work environment, we offer a regional full-time employee system to enable people to choose a workstyle that allows them to work in a region they wish without any relocation requirement.
• Second Job
  With the purpose of respecting our employees’ diverse values and ensuring flexible workstyle options, we have introduced a second job system. The system allows employees to take on an external second job opportunity, with the condition of complying with rules and regulations for the second job including maximum working hours. Making the most of this system, our employees are upskilling themselves, acquiring new knowledge, and contributing to society.

Our main office, centers, and offices have their own unique workplace environment. To accommodate these differences, we have been developing a system under which our employees are provided with more opportunities to work and take leave without being restricted by time and places as much as practicably possible.
With regard to annual paid leave, we are encouraging our employees to take five consecutive days off in summer. With those employees who have taken only a small number of annual leave days, in consultation with our labor union, we interview them and set up a plan for them to reduce a number of unused annual paid leave. We constantly engage in workplace improvement initiatives with our labor union.
In addition, we are running a campaign to change the way our employees take annual leave, and to create an environment where our employees can take time off much more comfortably. As part of campaign activities, we put up posters in all offices and centers across Japan, and distribute leaflets to our employees.
We will continue to increase productivity through our workstyle reform initiatives that include the way our employees take their annual leave.

In 2008, our organization that is dedicated to supporting our female employees’ career development laid out “create a healthy workplace for our employees” as one of the “3 Pillars” of its initiatives. Since then, we have been carrying out activities under the pillar. We have shifted our initial focus that is to offer “childcare support” primarily for our female employees to encourage them to continue working after experiencing life events unique to women, to “work-family balance support” to encourage them to “stay active and involved” regardless of their major life events. Today, with the aim of creating an environment where all of our employees, not only female employees, can perform to the best of their abilities whilst striking a healthy balance between work and life, we are driving the initiatives in parallel with our initiative towards achieving workstyle reform.

We believe it important to raise male employees’ low take-up rate of childcare leave (FY2020/3: 12.5%) to promote a healthy work-life balance. With the goal of achieving a 40% or higher combined take-up rate of childcare leave/shared parental leave of our male employees by FY2024/3, we are pushing forward initiatives that assist our male employees in being more involved in childcare. The initiatives include offering programs that encourage our male employees to take childcare leave (add more content to the work-family balance handbook, increase role models, enhance e-learning courses for managerial employees, etc.) and holding seminars and events for our married employees (including spouses working at other companies).

With the aim of fostering a corporate culture that ensures our employees have a smooth return to work after maternity and childcare leave, and to allow them to continue developing their career, we offer a variety of support programs for the employees, and managerial employees.

• Paid special leave: Up to five days (excluding weekends and holidays) to care for a spouse giving birth/for parenting. *Can be split into separate blocks.
• Family caregiver leave: up to 10 days a year *can be taken in hourly increments
• Staggered commuting hours policy: Eligible employees are entitled to change their start and finish times, if deemed necessary, for care responsibilities including childcare and family care.
• Accrued leave policy: Eligible employees are entitled to accrue their annual paid leave up to 40 days that would expire as stipulated by the Labor Standards Law, and take the accrued leave days as necessary.
• Extended reduced working hours for childcare: Eligible employees are entitled to reduce their agreed working hours for childcare per qualifying child until the child completes the sixth grade of primary school.
• Other: Due to the diversified operational need and location of work, each department has the discretion to offer a variety of flexible work arrangements for their members including shift work and teleworking (including work from home).
• [Kiitos,] an on-site childcare facility on the first floor, at Marketing Chain Management Center Naha.

We are making an effort to create a pleasant and cheerful working environment that our employees find comfortable to work in.

To increase communication among our employees, and to provide their families with information on what we do, we are hosting a variety of events.

In order to ensure that our employees feel highly satisfied with their job while living each day to the fullest, we offer diverse employee benefit programs in addition to those stipulated by law. In support of our employees’ self-development and learning, a wide range of programs and systems are made available, such as a reward system for obtaining a qualification where an employee is awarded with a one-time allowance if they successfully obtain a qualification that relates to their job, and e-learning courses from which our employees choose and take classes of their interests. To assist our employees in accumulating their financial resources, we adopt an employee stock option plan, asset accumulation savings, education endowment insurance, and a matching contribution plan, a defined contribution plan option under which an employee can receive some tax benefit. In addition, our employees are also able to benefit from other schemes provided by the company such as a group accident and health insurance coverage, housing loans with preferential interest rates, and a discount service for real estate brokerage fees. We also make available to our employees “Karuizawa Villa,” which is a recreation facility owned by transcosmos health insurance society. The Villa is located in a popular resort area in Karuizawa in Nagano prefecture and is an ideal location for our employees to spend time with their family and friends to relax and refresh. By adopting these various types of programs and systems for our employees, we support our employees’ well-being and self-development and learning.

■ Workplace Safety and Health Management

We recognize that our employees’ occupational health and safety is a top priority. Therefore, we are committed to create and maintain a safe and healthy working environment. Our Compliance Codes of Conduct stipulate that our employees must familiarize themselves with and comply with applicable laws and regulations regarding safety at work; they must take measures to prevent spreading the damage arising from a workplace accident if it occurs, and must implement measures to prevent the recurrence of such an accident. We also implement other types of workplace accident prevention measures such as deploying an industrial doctor service in our offices that require such service by law, and setting up an Occupational Health and Safety Committee in which workplace safety and health issues are discussed. In addition, we have created a risk management manual for our employees and workplaces abroad in order to address their occupational health and safety.

■ Mental Health Support

We believe that nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our employees and their families for their work and living. As part of our support for mental health, we, in collaboration with transcosmos health insurance society, operate a Health Consulting Center. The center is made available for consultation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with mental health professionals (nurse, public health nurse, midwife, registered dietician, doctor, etc.) being present to provide advice ranging from illness, health issues and mental health related concerns to childcare or nursing care for their family members. In addition, we have a consulting center dedicated for our female employees where they can raise issues and concerns without any consultation fee.

■ Employee Health Management and Collaborative Health Programs (collaboration with Health Insurance Society)

To manage our employees’ health issues effectively and efficiently, we have been promoting collaborative health programs (which are carried out in collaboration with our health insurance society). By working together with transcosmos health insurance society, we can make effective and secure use of our employees’ periodic health assessment results to protect our employees from the risk of illness or to encourage them to be more conscious of wellness, and can also provide healthcare advice tailored for each individual needs. The collaboration with the health insurance society enables us to follow up on our employees after their periodic health assessment with advice on wellness or on further check-ups. In addition, we are in the process of developing a health management system, which we hope that in the future this system would allow our employees to fully understand their own health issues and proactively take up health improvement activities.

■ Infectious Disease Prevention and Control for Employee Health and Safety

We believe that our initiative to prepare for possible outbreaks of infectious disease such as influenza is an important measure to take to protect our employees’ health and safety. As part of such measures, we, in collaboration with transcosmos health insurance society, offer flu vaccinations (group vaccination) at our main office and each center to prepare for the flu season. In addition, for our employees and their families (dependents) who cannot participate in our group vaccination, we offer them the vaccination at our affiliated medical facilities. For those who receive vaccination at facilities other than our affiliated ones, a subsidy for the vaccination is made available. Furthermore, for our employees on international assignments and on international business travels, we offer medical checkups prior to their departure for the assignments and provide vaccination guidelines specific to the countries they are visiting or staying in to work as part of the measures to protect their health and safety.