February 7, 2020 HR Development 2020

Mitsue-Links is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

In line with our Representative Director's New Year greeting, a central theme for our company this year is “human resource development” – we believe this forms the basis of all growth as we continue to work with the vigor and mindset of a start-up company. Furthermore, while mindful to enhance all areas of our commitment to service quality, technical quality and process quality, in particular, we aim to focus on improving service quality over the course of this year.

So, in 2020, we will focus attention on human resource development.

We have a long-standing value of “don't give bad rice to our customers and say that it's good” (this analogy is likely premised on our founder and representative director's hometown being a prominent rice-growing area). Since our days as a venture, our staff have worked diligently with a commitment to technical quality, and, through internally sharing technological know-how, Mitsue-Links has flourished.

Around the turn of the millennium, we felt that in addition to our technically excellent output/deliverables that procedures and rules were important too - so we implemented appropriate processes and acquired ISO 9001 quality management system certification. Then we quickly worked toward acquiring information security certification, which can be said to be the most important part of our business. We acquired BS7799 in 2002, and we currently hold ISO27001 certification.

This ensures our process quality, and we are continually improving to this day. For us now, the final area to enhance is service quality.

Our service quality consists of six fundamental elements. They are accuracy, speed, flexibility, empathy, sense of security, and creating a good impression. All are related to interactions between people, or, in other words, communication. Regarding service quality, as part of ISO9001 we have undertaken some education initiatives for several years, however, we have not yet conducted in-depth training. It's now time to introduce full-fledged activities.

In our case, due to the nature of commissioned development and operation, it's very important for us to interact with our customers to deliver solutions that meet their needs.

Furthermore, as our organization and projects grow, due to the division of responsibilities and the increase in the number of project members, the communication between departments and occupations became important. Without adequate training and awareness, there is a risk of suffering from a so-called large business disease such as sectionalism/silo mentality and an unwillingness to accept responsibilities.

Last year, we invited an external lecturer to hold two training sessions related to service quality. This was a new approach for our company and participants seemed to enjoy themselves. We will continue to improve our service quality this year through similarly delivering sessions with novel perspectives and stimuli.

Furthermore, in connection with human resource development, we will take initiatives toward achieving Goal 4 of the UNDP's SDGs^*. In particular,

4.4 By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship to which we believe that we can greatly contribute.

Specifically, we will implement initiatives on the awareness and promotion of web-related technologies, accept interns, establish a trainee system, run various training sessions, provide support to acquire qualifications, encourage career development, and offer support for entrepreneurship.

Our company, in-line with the SDGs, seeks to contribute to a brighter future. For many people, the web is a tool that provides necessary information and inspires dreams. We believe the future is bright when young generations interested becoming web professionals work with a twinkle in their eye.

• * The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) are international goals for achieving a better and more sustainable world by 2030, as described in “Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” adopted at the UN Summit in September 2015.