Fostering an Inclusive Culture

To cultivate an inclusive organizational culture, we are working on “Understanding and raising interest in DE&I” and “Upskilling and fostering a culture that makes diversity a strength for the organization.”

Each month, the Kao Group in Japan releases two to three items of content relevant to sharing awareness-raising videos and seminars, positive examples inside the company, etc. with regards to subjects such as women’s empowerment, LGBTQ+ issues, non-Japanese employees, employees with disabilities, balancing work and childcare, and balancing work and family care based on the Inclusion Promotion Plan. This allows us to encourage employees in the group to understand DE&I and ultimately implement these concepts throughout the workplace.

We started Kao Mates, a project that focuses on individual employees of the Kao Group who have different backgrounds, and introduces them as their true selves. By focusing on employees’ diversity and equity and introducing their stories about inclusion at their workplaces, we hope that other employees will feel closer to DE&I, and become aware that this concept is directly relevant to themselves so they change their behavior. In every other month during 2022, we introduced five employees consisting of two non-Japanese employees, an employee of a LGBTQ+ community, a male employee who has taken long childcare leave, and an employee with impaired hearing. We invited their immediate supervisors and colleagues each time, with their names and pictures. As a result, many other employees became interested in each article as familiar examples, and we received plenty of feedback, including empathy and new discoveries, from readers of the articles (The number of views of each article in a month after positing the article has been approximately 5,000 to 10,000).

With the aim of providing tips to promote understanding of Diversity & Equity and implement Inclusion in the workplace, we have been creating a series of 10-minute awareness-raising videos within the Kao Group, each of which summarizes an important point. In 2022 we released three new videos under the respective themes of “Think about how to work with employees of different nationalities and cultures,” “Let’s think about women’s empowerment” and “Tips you need to know about working with employees with disabilities.” In addition, we released a lecture video about Kao’s full range of D&I promotional activities for all employees in the Kao Group in Japan to view at their leisure. This was previously only available to a limited number of people for training.

We set up the Kao D&I Square on Microsoft Teams in June as a place to facilitate two-way communication among employees who are interested in DE&I (370 employees have joined as at the end of December). The Kao D&I Square announces various ways to promote company-wide inclusion. Furthermore, DE&I-related activities of many organizations and communities in the company and social topics are shared and exchange opinions every day in the square. Members can share information on what they have found and what they think through casual information exchanges online, resulting in the gradual expansion of a new network among Kao Group members.

For Kao Group members in Japan to hear about fresh DE&I topics and Kao’s DE&I promotion activities, learn about DE&I in an enjoyable format, and get tips on implementing DE&I in their workplaces, we planned and carried out a project called “Quiz to Learn D&I” for the first time. As a case study for the quiz, we created seven questions relevant to issues that can actually occur in the workplace. It is a multiple-choice quiz and members who have taken the quiz can read the description of each question. As a result, they should be able to deepen their understanding of DE&I and help to carry out DE&I promotion activities themselves. During the first month of it being available, 3,033 employees (total of those who used Japanese version and those who used English version) took the quiz. Some said “I was attracted to it because it was a quiz,” and “I have found some points I should pay attention to in the workplace.” We think this opportunity for our employees to think of DE&I was a resounding success. At the same time, we received approximately 500 comments about our efforts to improve Kao’s DE&I promotion activities, showing our employees’ high level of interest in this topic. We intend to make use of these opinions in future activities. Owing to the many requests received to continue the quiz, we will do it again in the coming year and beyond.

In 2021, in the last three months of the fiscal year we held Kao Diversity & Inclusion EXPO 2022, a special project on the portal site that showcases the present state of DE&I at Kao. In 2022, under the theme of “Let’s learn about Diversity & Inclusion,” we released the aggregate results of answers to “Quiz to Learn D&I 2022” and “My D&I Experiences,” which is the title for free comments received from our employees, as the main content. In addition, we re-informed our employees about various DE&I awareness-raising measures (distribution of records from seminars and events, videos and articles) that we carried out as highlights in 2022. Consequently, the employees who visited the EXPO page can now view a range of content whenever they want. Comments received from the visitors included, “I got to know other employees’ awareness of DE&I when I saw the aggregate results,” and “I was impressed by the comments on my D&I experience,” indicating the employees’ improvement of understanding of and interest in DE&I.

We are drawing focus on Kao Group members’ activities to promote Inclusion, and are continuing efforts aimed at sharing these activities. In 2022, in collaboration with employees from the Office Support (OS) Division of Kao Peony, we introduced four topics from among many different business areas, including introducing the detailed and diligent work of our colleagues with disabilities, through video. For many employees who do not have an opportunity to directly see Kao Peony employees during business hours, it was a good chance to see that they are taken care of through the support and activities of the OS Division in many different situations. As such, the OS Division received many messages of gratitude and support. We are glad we did so much to raise awareness about Kao Peony’s OS Division.

Toward developing an organizational culture that makes diversity a strength and produces good results in a team through communication, we have been focusing on psychological safety and unconscious bias as one of our key subjects to raise awareness about since 2021. In 2022, we designed the entire project for us to form teams in which we can share dialogue. The first round of the project involved conducting the Psychological Safety Workshop (Basic Edition), which is positioned as one of the components of the Dialogue Festival held by the Kao Group in Japan. After watching a video about fundamental knowledge on psychological safety and working individually, we set up a workshop as a place to learn about other participants, where employees who are in the same grade position exchange opinions on actions they will take in the future. As a result of recruiting workshop participants by a show of hands, 150 employees from each company in the Kao Group in Japan, with a total of 10 sessions held. From the participants, we heard some opinions indicating they understood that other members also had similar problems, even though they work in different workplaces, and that as leaders, they want to keep striving to raise the level of psychological safety. This demonstrated that we successfully provided a place where participants can raise awareness, and they received tips on how to improve psychological safety in their own workplaces. We will continue with initiatives to make many more employees aware of psychological safety.

With the aim of thinking about how to deepen employees’ understanding of topics relevant to social justice and racial equality and what we can do to build a more equal society in our cultures and communities as an organization or an individual, we held virtual events for employees throughout the year.