Human Resource Strategy

Basic approach to human resource strategy

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 approximately 80% of the revenue and 75% 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 new and highly specialized fields, as well as management personnel who can work from a managerial perspective. In addition, we will 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.
  • To enhance creativity to realize innovation, we will secure a diverse workforce, including women, non-Japanese, mid-career hires, people with disabilities, and older workers, as well as 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 by taking advantage of our diverse human resources.

Image of human resources we seek

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 begun to formulate a human resource portfolio on a global basis in order to define the human resource requirements needed to formulate and execute management strategies and establish new business models, and to identify gaps from the current situation. With this as a starting point, we will identify the human resource issues needed to realize our medium- to long-term strategies and implement appropriate measures to realize an optimal personnel structure company-wide.

Human Resource Management

Allocate human resources to priority areas

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. In FY2020 and FY2021, we made certain restraints due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, 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.

Number of hires

  FY2020 FY2021 FY2022 Targets
New graduates 344 200 250 Continue to hire over 350
people each fiscal year*1
Mid-career 30 48 241

*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

Human Resource Review and Succession Planning

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.