• Basic approach to human resource strategy
• Image of human resources we seek
• Human Resource Management

Epson is a company born and raised in Shinshu. Today, while maintaining its core functions and bases of operations in Shinshu, Epson has established 107 R&D, production, and sales bases in countries and regions outside Japan, which account for 80% or more of the revenue and 70% or more of the employees, and continues to develop its business globally. Therefore, at Epson, the key to our human resource strategy is to build a human resource base that will enable us to survive severe global competition and achieve our management objectives and business growth by proactively acquiring external human resources and achieving diversity, while turning local job security and the relatively long-term employment that comes with it into our strength. For this reason, the following are key points for Epson’s human resource strategy.

• We will accurately grasp various customer needs and promote business reform and innovation to respond quickly and flexibly. To this end, we will actively acquire specialists from outside the Company in growth and new fields in addition to highly specialized fields, as well as management personnel who can work from a managerial perspective. We will also provide our own staff with specialized training and conversion training to focus on areas to be strengthened and build optimal formations from a global perspective.
• Epson, as a “company where people continue to grow and develop their careers autonomously” over a long-term time horizon, provides various training programs, reskilling, rotation, internal recruitment systems, and other opportunities for challenge to enhance each employee’s ability to respond to changes in the internal and external environment. In addition, to build an optimal formation from a global perspective, we will develop and deploy human resources who can work globally, including overseas personnel.
• We will secure and take advantage of a diverse workforce, including women, non-Japanese, mid-career hires, people with disabilities, and older workers, in order to enhance creativity to realize innovation. We will also create a comfortable work environment that leverages our advantages as a regional company, such as our commitment to organizational culture, the natural environment of Shinshu, and proximity to work and home, to increase employee engagement and maximize the overall strength of the organization for continuous value creation.

Epson human resource strategy

Epson‘s corporate activities are supported by initiatives to strengthen its business infrastructure through human resource strategies. Epson is executing human resource strategies that pivot around human capital management and health management. These strategies seek to develop human resources who can think and act autonomously and create an environment where they can capitalize on their abilities to come up with ideas for services that will be sought as society changes and for providing solutions to societal issues.

In order to realize its management strategy and execute its business, Epson needs people who can respond quickly to change with a broad perspective and a high level of expertise, and create customer value independently and autonomously from the customer’s perspective, based on the penetration of Corporate Purpose and the Epson Way, and a shared understanding of the business approach set forth in the long-term vision.
In anticipation of further declining birthrates, an aging society, and a shrinking workforce in Japan, we have been working to formulate a human resource portfolio on a global basis. In FY2023, in a specific operations division, we defined the human resource requirements needed to formulate and execute business strategies and establish new business models based on skills and behavioral characteristics, in an attempt to visualize the current resource portfolio. We will go a step further by expanding these efforts across the Company, as well as manifesting the desired state in the course of preparing the next long-term vision and identifying the gap between the current and desired states both quantitatively and qualitatively. By doing so, we will implement appropriate measures such as recruitment, reskilling, and optimal placement to build an optimal personnel structure company-wide, fulfilling our medium- to long-term strategies.

We formulate a human resource portfolio that shows the current [As is] and desired [To be] states of our human resources. We use it to identify gaps in the quality and quantity of human resources required to formulate and execute business strategies and establish new business models, primarily from the perspective of skills and behavioral characteristics. We refer to personnel skill level maps to determine whether the necessary people can be secured by upskilling, reskilling, or reassigning existing personnel or whether we need to acquire external talent.
We also use the human resource portfolio as a communication tool between supervisors and subordinates to encourage their independent learning and growth.

As the foundation of its business operations, Epson formulates workforce plans based on forecasts of future changes in its workforce structure and the workforce needs to realize its business strategies. As a policy, we will hire more than 350 new graduates and mid-career workers combined each year in a planned and stable manner over the future medium term.
In addition to intensively allocating hired personnel to the growth areas of printing (office, commercial and industrial) and production systems (robotics), and to the new areas of environmental business, environmental technology, and sensing, we will provide internal human resources with specialized training, conversion training, etc., to deploy them in the priority areas. We will also acquire management-level human resource and specialists from outside the company and allocate them to the priority areas after clarifying human resource requirements.

In addition to recruiting the numbers we need, we are looking to increase diversity and are actively recruiting women, seniors, persons with disabilities, and foreign nationals. We have set a hiring goal of 25% women for new graduates. Employment of foreign nationals will be examined from multiple angles. Some foreign nationals will be hired in Japan. Others may be brought over from our overseas subsidiaries. Things will be looked at from a site strategy perspective, as well. We have already transferred some printer design functions to a Group company in Indonesia.

*1 Total number of new graduates who joined the Company on April 1 of each fiscal year and the number of mid-career hires in each fiscal year

＊ Placement by recruitment and internal transfer.

The concept of "role" is the basis for the placement of human resources and their assignment to positions. The basic approach is to design a global organization to execute business strategies, define the roles of each position within the organization, and then allocate and appoint the most appropriate people to that role. To achieve this, the company conducts an annual human resources review at each echelon of the organization to get a bird's eye view of the staffing situation, list potential successors for each position, and review their skill development needs.
As in Japan, we also work with local top management and human resource departments to define roles and requirements for overseas human resources, and formulate succession and training plans for key positions and key human resources. Based on these activities, we are working to build an optimal formation from a global perspective.