Funai Soken Holdings Inc.

Diversity & Inclusion

Diversity in business management—not the least of which is empowering women to forge meaningful careers—is the bedrock on which inclusivity, value creation, and improved productivity are founded. We endeavor to maintain rewarding, diverse, inclusive workplaces.

Helping Women Forge Meaningful Careers

At the Funai Soken Consulting Group, we have a variety of initiatives in place to help us reach our targets for women in our workforce and women in management.

Women in Our Workforce & Management Groupwide

In 2023, Because our efforts to increase mid-career hires resulted in an influx of male consultants and engineers, this had the effect of diluting the percentage of women in management positions and our workforce in general. Meanwhile, departments with more women in management tend to have higher median employee satisfaction and productivity scores. Recognizing the importance of this factor for sustainable growth, we are dedicated to proactively hiring and promoting women.

Gender wage gap disclosed in ESG data

Evening Up the Gender Balance

  • The Overriding Importance of Human Capital; Aiming for 30% female managers
    For a consulting business like ours, consultants are capital—it’s as simple as that.
    Our Mid-Range Business Plan sets a target of increasing our workforce—especially consultants, who have a direct bearing on the bottom line—by 10% per year on average by 2025. We also aim for 25% of management positions to be held by women by 2025, and 30% by 2030. Already 22% of directors are women, and women are increasingly tapped to serve as group company presidents and directors as we strive for more female representation in the upper ranks.

  • Career Navigator Café
    Funai Consulting’s Career Navigator Café is a triannual in-house training program in which role model female employees share their experiences in career development with their first-year and second-year colleagues, and participants can workshop career and life planning strategies.

  • Better workplace environment and systems
    ・ HR framework and career enhancement program designed to increase women in management
    ・ We encourage flexible working arrangements to suit different lifestyles, e.g., remote work, flex-time, career track changes
    ・ Projects to help women forge meaningful careers
    ・ Workshops and forums for female consultants
    ・ Training for managers to encourage better empowerment of female staff

  • Promoting and embedding diversity
    ・ “L-Star” certified as a proactive provider of career opportunities for women
      (Funai Consulting 2 stars)
    ・ Female Talent Empowerment Committee (training by department heads on strategies to help women forge meaningful careers)
    ・ Post-childcare-leave Reboarding Programs (ensuring staff on childcare leave are get back up to speed by the time they return)

  • Harnessing the business’s unique characteristics
    ・ Assignments and development that take advantage of the business’s characteristics

Childcare Leave: Uptake and Return

  • Encouraging Uptake of Childcare Leave by Male Employees
    We are endeavoring to build an environment that encourages male employees to take childcare leave. Male uptake of childcare leave in 2023 was 68.6%.

Pick Up　Funai Soken Holdings

Akiko Nishimura
Head of Group Accounting Department
Director, HR Force

I’m Grateful to Have Such Supportive Colleagues

The Finance Department’s staff is 70% women, and everyone works in a way that suits their stage of life. I have taken (and returned from) childcare leave twice, and returning was made much easier through options such as remote work, staggered start times, sharing information with those on leave (e.g., through loans of computers and mobile phones). Most of all, the support of my colleagues during and after my childcare leave meant I could rejoin the fray with confidence.

Pick Up　Funai Soken Digital (since merged to become Funai Consulting)

Yuko Tasaka
Consultant

Women Blazing a Trail in New Business Areas

At Funai Soken Digital, women make up almost 80% of management positions and the workforce in general. That means we are active in a variety of fields, such as:

  • Business process outsourcing (e.g., list-based sales calling, seminar operations)
    Putting in-house admin expertise to use for customer-facing departments.
  • Back-office consulting
    In the typically female-majority field of back-office operations, our experience in streamlining and making improvements has led to the creation of back-office consulting services to help users extract greater value from workplace operations.
  • From RPA operator to back-office consultant
    Some 9,000 hours of robotic process automation (RPA) over four years yielded far more output than achievable by human staff (typically female, non-technical employees). One of the RPA has graduated to back-office consulting work.

Career Opportunities for Mid-career Hires

  • Pre-hire Support
    Prospective hires work with managers to create a Career Vision Map before committing to a final interview so as to ensure they can join us with confidence in their direction and hit the ground running.

  • Post-hire 1-on-1 Meetings
    New hires have one-on-one meetings with Human Resources Development Department managers to discuss concerns and pointers for career development.

  • Workshops and Discussion Forums
    We hold workshops, discussions, and training to help mid-career hires learn more about the company and its work, and forge stronger ties with colleagues.

Career Opportunities for People with Disabilities

  • Funai Consulting Diversity & Inclusion Office
    We are constantly looking for ways to be more inclusive in hiring and work opportunities. For instance, in 2015, we established a team to handle cleaning duties for our Osaka Office, and a second team was formed in 2020 to provide assistance for consultants in Ehime.

  • A Rewarding Workplace for All
    We strive to maintain workplaces that allow people with disabilities to work in a way that suits their abilities and career vision.
    Working with colleagues in different departments and achieving outcomes, they have quickly become indispensable and ensured the system has become firmly established.

  • Leading the Way on ESG
    The Diversity & Inclusion Office is leading the way on ESG initiatives, with staff speaking at all-in morning meetings and conferences about rewarding workplace and promoting diverse working styles.

Working Hard Behind the Scenes

Making productivity improvements to boost work outcomes (transcribing output almost tripled, direct mail numbers almost doubled) and working with consultants to create solutions, every day we are working to help behind the scenes.

Online Award Ceremony

A special event to share the positive feedback received by the Diversity & Inclusion Office.

Helping Non-Japanese Employees Forge Meaningful Careers

The more diverse our workforce, the more strengths and characteristics we can call on, thus making us collectively more competitive. That’s why we welcome employees of all nationalities.

  • Communities for non-Japanese employees
    Examples include: Global workshops for non-Japanese employees (workshops, forums, get-togethers)

  • Training and education
    Examples include: Diversity training for managers (covering the basics of diversity and points to be aware of when hiring foreign employees)

  • Support for non-Japanese new hires
    Examples include: Translations of documents and written procedures required upon hiring

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Funai Soken Holdings Inc.