Human Capital Initiatives
Human Resource Strategies Aimed at Supporting Our Pursuit of Value Creation as well as Employee Well-Being
The Resona Group has formulated human resource strategies centered on the concept of “resonance” and based on its Purpose and Corporate Mission with the aim of realizing its Long-Term Vision “Retail No. 1.”
Our human resource strategies feature three pillars; namely, (1) engagement (resonance between employees and the Company, (2) professionals (resonance among diverse expertise and (3) resonance for co-creation (between the Company and external partners). Based on this, we aim to create a positive and continuous cycle for value creation and well-being.
The Resona Group’s long-cherished organizational culture values integrity, promotes diversity & inclusion and embraces the challenge of reform. Building on this foundation and taking into consideration the constant evolution of management strategies and people’s perception of work, we have identified the six strategic drivers that will ensure that our culture is always up to date and relevant into the future. These drivers are (1) Leadership, (2) Transcending boundaries, (3) Specialty, (4) Employee autonomy & support, (5) Job fulfillment and (6) Worker friendliness. We have set goals for each of these drivers and are currently promoting initiatives accordingly.
Overview of Human Resource (HR) Strategies
Goals We Aim to Achieve through the Power of Six Drivers
| Drivers | Goals | Initiatives |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership |
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| Transcending boundaries |
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| Specialty |
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| Employee autonomy & support |
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| Job fulfillment |
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| Worker friendliness |
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- *1Individuals equipped with strong specialist skills enabling the resolution of issues customers are confronting and with a personal dedication to enhancing customer happiness
- *2LMS: Learning Management System; TMS: Talent Management System
Indicators and Targets*3
- *3Of companies in the scope of consolidation, applicable to Resona Holdings, Resona Bank, Saitama Resona Bank, Kansai Mirai Bank and Minato Bank. The figures of FY2021 and FY2022 include those of Kansai Mirai Financial Group.
- *4Individuals in overseas assignments or dispatched or seconded to external entities
- *5Number of individuals with high-ranking certification acquired via in-house specialist training courses or similar certification
Human Resource Strategies (Six Drivers)
Leadership: Nurturing Diverse Leaders
We are striving to secure a diverse portfolio of human resources who can serve as leaders and, to this end, nurturing candidates with varying attributes in terms of, for example, gender, experience and age. These endeavors are aimed at facilitating a greater degree of entrenchment of diversity & inclusion (D&I) in our workforce and promoting the co-creation of value among diverse human resources from within and outside the Group.
Specifically, we provide job rank-based training programs designed to help employees enhance their management and leadership skills as well as similar programs for selected candi dates. We also enable employees to work in tandem or interact with those with different cultures through secondment and external training. Moreover, we conduct 360-degree feedback sessions that provide multifaceted assessments aimed at improving employees’ self-awareness and updating their perception of their duties. In these ways, we offer a diverse range of training opportunities in a way that gives due consideration to each employee’s competencies and aptitudes.
Also, as part of efforts to secure specialist human resources and promote D&I, we are focusing on recruiting mid-career hires. As a result, we have seen a steady increase in the number of mid-career hires who leverage their skills and experience accumulated at external corporations to play active roles as managers. Going forward, we will strive to empower these human resources to find even greater success at the Resona Group by upgrading the content of onboarding programs and otherwise developing an environment that allows them to assume leadership roles.
In addition, our targets for the development and promotion of female leaders are included in our Long-Term Sustainability Indicators. We consider women’s empowerment a matter of particular importance and therefore provide female workers with ongoing career development assistance.
Our specific initiatives to this end include a mentoring system through which female employees who have been newly appointed as senior managers are given appropriate support touching on aspects of their duties and emotional health. We also offer leadership training to foster our female employees’ career awareness. Furthermore, we introduced a trainee system designed to prepare them for the challenge of handling unfamiliar operations.
Meanwhile, the “Resona Women’s Council,” has been active since 2005 as an advisory body operating directly under management. This council consists of female employees chosen from business units across the Group. Each of the council’s members has taken the lead in developing workplace environments, assisting women’s career development and otherwise proposing a variety of measures. The council is now considered a symbol of women’s empowerment at Resona Group.
Results of and Plan for the Recruitment of Mid-Career Hires
| FY2020 | FY2021 | FY2022 | FY2023 (Plan) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 persons | 72 persons | 135 persons | 360 persons |
Transcending Boundaries: Familiarizing Employees with Diverse Value Systems and Developing Interpersonal Network
We aim to enable employees to acquire fresh perspectives and expand their openness to different cultures while helping them develop diverse interpersonal networks that promote co-creation. Accordingly, we offer them opportunities to gain experience that transcends boundaries of the business units they belong to and interact with peers within and outside the Group.
For example, we implement secondment programs that place employees at external corporations and government agencies or enroll them in university graduate schools in addition to conducting co-creation activities involving collaboration between Resona Group employees and human resources from different sectors to help them gain experience in the development of new businesses. When determining where we will send an employee, we take into account that employee’s competencies and aptitudes. In addition, as part of efforts to assist employees in their pursuit of self-motivated learning, we introduced an in-house posting program that sends employees to external business schools. These and other programs are intended to offer opportunities for employees to autonomously interact with people from external corporations.
Furthermore, a growing number of Group employees are now seconded to Group companies other than those they initially joined. Through the robust exchange of human resources, we are giving employees opportunities to gain new experience and achieve personal growth even as we strengthen the integrated management of the Group.
In summary, we encourage employees to proactively take on new challenges outside the Group to help them achieve professional growth that goes beyond the framework of finance. In addition to enabling them to gain new experience and interact with an even more diverse range of external human resources, we are currently planning to introduce measures to facilitate the in-house sharing of such employees’ takeaways from participation in boundary-transcending activities via roundtable talk events attended by individuals who can serve as role models and otherwise expand the scope of our initiatives in this area.
Specialty: Nurturing and Securing Professional Human Resources Capable of Addressing Diverse Issues
The Resona Group is striving to enable all employees to become professional human resources, namely, individuals equipped with strong specialist skills enabling the resolution of diverse issues customers are confronting and with a personal dedication to enhancing customer happiness. To that end, we maintain a multi-path personnel system consisting of 20 distinct career courses and have established training systems aligned with each course to help employees enhance their strengths in their fields of specialty via On-the-Job (OJT) training and other in-house and external training programs. These initiatives are annually reviewed and updated to ensure that they dovetail with our management strategies and other initiatives to address organizational issues.
In addition, we assist employees in their efforts to acquire certification, especially that recommended to employees in light of skills expected of them due to their chosen career course. In FY2022, we expanded the scope of such assistance available to employees in order to support their pursuit of further professional growth.
Also, as we aim to help them acquire necessary skills to align their mode of operations with changes of the time, we implement various initiatives to support reskilling. Currently, we strive to enable employees to obtain DX, SX and AML knowledge as well as to raise their practical capabilities to handle these matters. At the same time, we provide them with learning and training content on liberal arts.
We believe that genuine professionals need to have not only business knowledge and skills but also the ability to build relationships of trust with customers, deeply understand the issues they are confronting and propose solutions to such issues. Based on this belief, we offer a program that involves in-house posting and that provides selected employees with a broad range of cultural literacy education. In these and other ways, we strive to help employees raise their social skills.
Along with the initiatives described above, we have been expanding the number of mid-career hires as well as new graduates earmarked for specific specialist courses, with the aim of raising the proportion of these specialist human resources to 30% of overall hiring. By doing so, we aim to secure a diverse range of human resources even from the hiring stage.
20 Courses Offered Under the Multi-Path Personnel System
Stepping up Investment in Human Resource Development
We are stepping up investment in human resource development from the perspectives of supporting value creation and enhancing employee well-being. This investment includes that aimed at empowering employees to develop as professional human resources via, for example, the expansion of the content of learning programs involving boundary-transcending activities, the proactive utilization of external insights, the enhancement of career development support extended to individuals who take on the challenge of pursuing self-determined career goals, personal growth and career fulfillment. Looking ahead, we will strengthen investment in human resource development to enhance the corporate value of the Resona Group.
Funds Invested in Education and Training
- *Figures show the sum of actual investment and opportunity costs (personnel expenses incurred in connection with hours spent on education or training); total of Resona Holdings, Resona Bank, Saitama Resona Bank, Kansai Mirai Bank and Minato Bank. The figures of FY2023 and before include those of Kansai Mirai Financial Group.
Employee Autonomy & Support: Assisting Every Employee in Their Autonomous Pursuit of Career Development
To encourage employees to autonomously pursue career development, we instituted a comprehensive career support system in conjunction with the 2021 introduction of the multi path personnel system. This career support system aims to help employees navigate through various career development processes (learning about available career options, seeking consultation on career development and taking action to realize career goals). To accommodate the needs of those who want to learn about available career options, we host biannual Career College programs. As part of each round of these programs, roundtable talk events and workshops are held by more than 30 departments, and, over the course of FY2021 and FY2022, a cumulative total of approximately 3,000 employees participated. For those seeking consultation on career development, we provide career design training, while business unit managers and other supervisors stand ready to provide support. In fact, all employees in supervisor positions undergo training to enhance their career counseling capabilities. For employees about to take action to realize their career goals, we have developed career course-based training systems and organized the means of acquiring the necessary skills and certification for each course. Employees engaged in this process are thus able to assess gaps in their current status vis-à-vis their goals and formulate their own skills development plans that, in turn, are shared with their supervisors and will inform their career development initiatives thereafter. We have also made available tools that support employees’ self-motivated learning efforts and have instituted a trainee system. In these and other ways, we assist employees in their autonomous pursuit of personal growth.
In FY2021, we renovated our in-house job-posting system and updated it to create a Career Challenge System through which employees can apply for transfer to their desired career courses. Thus, in addition to extending career development assistance through the aforementioned comprehensive career support system, we offer abundant opportunities to pursue autonomous personal growth as well as diverse career options in order to provide employees with an environment in which they can spontaneously take on the challenge of career development.
Empowering every employee to pursue autonomous career development and work with a sense of fulfillment is key to securing sustainable improvement in corporate value. We will continue to enhance the content of the career development assistance available, provide even more abundant opportunities to take on new challenges and otherwise step up efforts to empower our employees to realize their own career visions.
Job Fulfillment: Securing an Open-Minded Workplace Environment That Allows Employees to Thrive in Their Jobs while Discovering a Sense of Fulfillment
Enabling Each Employee to Spontaneously Choose from among Career Options and Take on the Challenge of Career Development
The business environment surrounding banks is expected to evolve radically going forward. Cognizant of this, the Resona Group revised its human resource system in April 2021 in line with its aim of securing an environment in which all employees are empowered to realize their full potential irrespective of their gender, age, job category or other attributes. This revision was also intended to develop a system designed to enable each employee to develop as a professional.
As a result, a multi-path personnel system has been instituted, with 20 career courses now available to employees to promote the transition to a human resource portfolio with a greater focus on securing diverse workers boasting strengths in their areas of specialty. At the same time, we are encouraging employees to take on the challenge of career development in a way that lever ages their unique strengths, to this end enabling them to make spontaneous choices regarding career options. Moreover, a number of the individuals recruited as mid-career hires and new graduates are earmarked for specific career courses. In this way, we strive to develop an environment in which individuals can fully leverage their competencies and strengths in their areas of specialty and earn success in their chosen business fields.
Furthermore, we are providing employees with options regarding retirement age, which can range between 60 and 65, and have made available a “senior smart employee” system that allows individuals in this age group to cut back on their working hours and days. By doing so, we ensure that each employee can spontaneously select their work style in their 60s. In October 2019, we also decided to allow those past retirement age to continue working until they are 70. We are thus striving to empower employees to remain active members of the workforce over the long term.
In addition to offering equal opportunities for employees regardless of gender, age, job category, etc., the revised human resource system is aimed at better positioning our diverse human resources to pursue business success. This is one way the Resona Group promotes D&I and enhances its corporate value via the incorporation of diverse thoughts and ideas while ensuring that individual employees find their jobs rewarding.
Developing a Workplace Environment That Respects Diversity and Ensures a Robust Sense of Psychological Safety
To ensure a diverse workforce of active and engaged employees, it is essential to develop a workplace environment in which they respect each other’s diversity even as they feel a robust sense of psychological safety. Such an environment will, in turn, enhance organizational resilience, facilitate vigorous discussion and create a culture supportive of individuals taking on challenges, thereby improving corporate value.
Advocating for the Understanding of Diversity and Respect for Human Rights
Every year, we implement various training programs for all employees to facilitate mutual understanding among employees and create an open-minded workplace environment. In FY2022, these programs were focused on countering unconscious biases and ensuring respect for human rights, with heads of each workplace unit serving as lecturers to help employees gain a deeper understanding of these topics.
We also provide all employees with annual e-learning program aimed at preventing the occurrence of sexual harassment and power harassment and teaching how, if such an incident were to emerge, to correctly handle the situation before it escalates and provide remedy for the victim.
Invigorating Communications
We introduced one-on-one meetings to create an open minded workplace through the further invigoration of communication between managers and their staff and to assist the latter in their autonomous pursuit of personal growth.
In FY2022, we also provided training for managers looking to enhance the quality of one-on-one meetings as well as improve employee engagement among their staff and better motivate them to pursue personal growth. Furthermore, since 2003 we have hosted town hall meetings in which employees and members of top management exchange opinions. These meetings provide opportunities to ensure that employees and top management share the same vector while encouraging the former to develop a sense of ownership regarding business management and otherwise acquire new perspectives.
Meanwhile, Kansai Mirai Bank and Minato Bank introduced the new communication tool “Mecha!” in April 2023 as part of its efforts to create an organizational culture that encourages employees to commend one another and to foster an atmosphere that ensures psychological safety.
Worker Friendliness: Developing an Environment in Which Employees Can Work with Confidence and Strike a Work-Life Balance while Promoting Health Management
As part of efforts to create an environment in which employees can work with confidence, we are providing them with diverse work style options aligned with their lifestyles and life stages while promoting initiatives to help them improve their emotional and physical health.
Helping Employees Strike a Balance between Work and Family Duties
To develop an environment supportive of employees striving to strike a balance between work and child rearing, we maintain childcare-related leave programs while enabling eligible employees to opt for cessation from work or to shorten their working hours for child rearing. At the same time, to aid in the smooth reinstatement into the workforce of employees returning from childcare leave we have introduced a program that includes various seminars. Also, in FY2022 we introduced a childbirth support programs to help employees undergoing infertility treatment strike a balance between work and treatment. Simultaneously, we established a postnatal paternity childcare leave system to step up our efforts to encourage male employees to play a greater role in child rearing.
In addition to designating the first 14 days of postnatal paternity childcare leave as paid leave, we formulated a “cessation schedule plan” document format designed to lay out the tim ing of relevant leave and the content of tasks to be handed over to other employees. Through the use of this format, employees who are about to take paternity leave are able to share these details with their immediate supervisors. The format also serves as a helpful guide when discussing the respective roles they will take regarding child rearing and homemaking with their spouses.
Today, the ratio of eligible male employees who have opted for cessation from work for child rearing rose to 98.2% as a result of our efforts to develop an environment that makes it easier to choose this option and to raise employee awareness regarding the importance of a balance between work and child rearing.
Flow of Cessation from Work for Childcare upon Childbirth
Male Employees’ Status of Childcare-Related Leave
| 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ratio of male employees taking spousal paternity leave | 100% |
100% |
100% |
100% |
100% |
100% |
| Ratio of male employees taking childcare leave | - |
- |
- |
- |
80.3% |
98.2% |
Work Style Reform Initiatives
With the aim of securing a broad range of options that meet the needs of employees for optimal work-life balance, the Resona Group maintains smart employee positions. Smart employee positions allow employees to cut back on working hours or limit the scope of their assigned tasks while ensuring long-term employment comparable to that offered with full-time positions. Currently, the Company’s smart employee roster comprises individuals who have transitioned from full-time positions due to their need to engage in childrearing or nursing care along with those who have been promoted from partner employee positions.
Moreover, we promote flexible work styles in terms of when and where employees work, for example, by allowing them to work remotely or utilize satellite offices as well as to, under certain circumstances, opt to work under a discretionary labor or flextime system. Along with encouraging the utilization of annual paid leave, we are thus striving to help employees improve their work-life balance and raise productivity.
Health Management
The Resona Group has established the Health Management Policy, which informs initiatives aimed at helping employees maintain and improve their emotional and physical health and at creating a comfortable and hygienic workplace environment.
In addition to appointing industrial physicians, we assign staff specializing in industrial health and tasked with patrolling and visiting each department and branch to provide health guidance, confirm the status of workplace environments and, if necessary, give instruction on addressing shortfalls. Such personnel work in collaboration with health supervisors at each department and branch to improve the working environment and make it even more employee friendly.
With regard to health checkups, we not only implement legally mandated periodic checkups but also provide comprehensive medical checkups at Company-designated healthcare facilities to employees in their 35th year and, in years when their age is an even number, to those over 40. Moreover, we con duct stress checks, host various mental health-related seminars and otherwise support employees’ health management efforts.
In addition, from April 2020, a smoking ban has been enforced during working hours to encourage all employees to strive to improve their health.
Supporting Employees’ Financial Wellness
We also aim to help employees resolve anxieties regarding their finances and livelihoods and ensure an environment in which they can work at the Resona Group over the long term with confidence, believing that doing so will contribute to both their well-being and higher productivity. Based on this belief, we have introduced systems to support their asset formation efforts and encourage them to appropriately utilize such systems, empowering them to gain robust financial literacy and otherwise supporting their asset management efforts.
| Asset formation support |
Pension (corporate DB/DC + matching contribution) Employees shareholding association (ESOP trust and subsidies) Asset formation savings |
|---|---|
| Asset management support (education) |
Implement sessions on various asset formation support measures as part of new recruit training Implement annual investment education for all employees (e-learning) |
- *Other measures include providing loan conversion assistance to help employees secure financial stability as well as making various welfare programs available to them in step with life events