Establishing an Environment that Facilitates both Personal and Corporate Growth

In January 2025, we launched a "Medium-Term Business Plan" outlining our direction for the next three years and, currently, we are advancing various initiatives to achieve departmental goals. In our Corporate Governance Division, which I oversee, our main policy is to " establish an environment that facilitates both personal and corporate growth," and we are promoting multifaceted efforts toward achieving this.

In this Column, I will introduce our initiatives, which commenced in April, and share some future insights.

Our company introduced remote work as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and, since then, has continued to offer "one day of remote work per week". However, we received feedback asking for more flexibility, so in April of this year, we revised the remote work usage rules. The system is being updated to accommodate a variety of lifestyles and individual circumstances.

Under the new rules, in addition to the one day of remote work per week, employees can now use remote work for personal illness or injury, caregiving for family members, family events, and domestic vacations.

For example, remote work can be used if someone is experiencing physical discomfort during pregnancy and feels anxious about commuting, needs to continue working while providing care for a family member at home, or wishes to participate in a "workation."

In order to increase flexibility in working styles, by this summer, we plan to introduce a "flexible work hours system". With this system, employees will be able to decide on their start and end times according to their lifestyle - making it easier to accommodate personal matters, such as medical appointments or picking up children, and thereby improving work-life balance.

We believe this will be a significant step toward creating a work environment that is not overly bound by time, enabling employees to maximize their performance.

Enhancing communication among staff members is one of the key elements required for a company’s growth. To this end, we have launched an initiative to officially recognize and support staff-led club activities that have been voluntarily organized in the past. Club events and activities that are submitted for approval will be officially recognized by the company and, subsequently, provided with a certain amount of financial support. By becoming official, it is intended that the clubs can more easily recruit members. This can assist the promotion of cross-departmental interaction and deepen personal connections beyond work-related matters.

Until now, our company’s evaluation system has focused primarily on competency and skill assessments. However, starting this fiscal year, we have introduced a Management By Objectives framework. This system evaluates how well individuals achieve the goals they set for themselves. By visualizing both the approach to and the outcomes of these goals, we aim to enhance the transparency and fairness of evaluations, creating a structure in which efforts are properly recognized and rewarded.

In addition to department-level results, individual challenges and creative initiatives will now be more clearly reflected in performance evaluations. We hope this will encourage proactive workstyles and help foster a corporate culture that supports ambition and innovation.

As outlined above, we are currently focusing on initiatives that enhance employee livelihoods – we aim to do this through a number of initiatives such as improving work-life balance, supporting compatibility with family responsibilities, and revising our evaluation systems. In addition to these efforts, we will soon be reviewing our learning support programs and introducing new frameworks for career planning — all aimed at helping each individual employee maximize their performance and advance their career.

We believe that the growth of individuals strengthens the organization and ultimately contributes to the evolution of the company as a whole. Our goal is to create an enjoyable workplace that leads toward personal growth and development. We will continue our efforts to build such an environment. As we strive to balance more accommodating workstyles with opportunities for growth, we invite you to look forward to what lies ahead for Mitsue-Links.

At present, we are hiring for a variety of roles - join us and let’s grow together.

If you’re interested, we encourage you to visit our careers website.

We also have an Alumni Hiring Program for those who previously worked at Mitsue-Links. For former employees, as we continue to evolve, would you like to come back and work with us again?