• Strategy
• Approach & Initiatives

Our goal under the Epson 25 Renewed corporate vision is co-creating sustainability and enriching communities to connect people, things, and information by leveraging our efficient, compact, and precision technologies and digital technologies. As such, we are pursuing a strategy covering five areas of innovation.
Epson is working to secure specialists in these five areas, especially in growth areas. We are also bolstering human resource development by giving personnel more professional education and more rapidly rotating them through jobs that will widen their knowledge and experience, then assigning these personnel to priority areas.
Epson is also actively endeavoring to create an organizational climate and workplaces that capitalize on these persons. We seek to create an organizational climate in which diverse personnel are encouraged to engage in free and open communication, thereby enhancing the quality of relationships, maximizing the power of the team, and allowing both the company and its employees to continually grow. We are also working to foster a better work environment, one that meets the needs of employees working under a variety of arrangements.
At Epson, our hope is that these efforts will enable both our businesses and our employees to grow and will realize our aim of achieving sustainability and enriching communities.

Epson formulates a staffing plan based on a forecast of changes in the workforce structure and the workforce required to realize its business strategy. In accordance with the plan, we systematically and steadily hire new graduates and proactively recruit highly specialized mid-career talent. Epson is allocating human resources in the growth areas of printing (office, commercial, and industrial) and production systems (robotics). We are also allocating human resources in new areas, including the environmental business, environmental technology development, and sensing. DX and sales strategy execution are two other areas where staffing is being increased, as these are the foundation of management and business administration.
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.

To realize Epson's aspirational goal of achieving sustainability and enriching communities, the company needs talented people with initiative who understand what customers need and can independently create value for them. For this, they must understand our Management Philosophy and values and must embrace our vision. They must also have a broad perspective, a high level of expertise, and the ability to respond quickly to changes. Epson has thus established an education system based on development through on-the-job training. We also provide training by echelon, as well as many types of specialized off-the-job training. Our people are also given a chance to broaden their abilities, experience, and knowledge via transfers to priority areas and job rotations. In the past, job rotations were often held up because they required management approval. Now, to facilitate job rotation we (1) allow employees to apply for job openings within the company without their manager's approval; (2) made rotation a requirement for promotion; (3) fill openings left by employees who rotated to another position; (4) added rotation-related items to management objectives and appraisals; and (5) are creating an education system for transferees. The rotation rate for FY2019 was 6%. We are working toward achieving an annual target of 15% (9.0% in FY2021).

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.