We seek to create a fair and rewarding workplace, develop a strong and cohesive corporate culture, and foster an open atmosphere in terms of the union-company relationship, across the entire company.

Our Approach

LIXIL promotes workplace diversity and inclusion to create an environment that inspires pride in the company and enables each employee to maximize their productivity and potential.

Based on our Kawaranaito LIXIL initiative aimed at revitalizing our business in Japan, our focus on workstyle reform drives the expansion of our systems to support employees with childcare or nursing care responsibilities and encourages employees to utilize their paid leave, all with the aim of creating a workplace where employees can work with peace of mind.

We seek to foster a growth-oriented mindset and firmly establish meritocracy to enable employees to remain inspired and enthusiastic in their work. To that end, in FYE2022, we laid the groundwork for a review of our qualifications and job grade systems, personnel evaluation systems, and compensation systems. We intend to evolve our human resources systems from FYE2023 onward.

Our System

LIXIL is evolving rapidly. In order to further integrate employees and become One LIXIL, it is important for us to understand the circumstances of each internal organization and actively incorporate employees’ views when seeking to further improve working environments and building both top-down and bottom-up systems.

Promoting Flexible and Diverse Working Styles

In Japan, LIXIL is developing human resources policies and work environments to facilitate a range of effective working styles that suit individual circumstances.

System Reform to Increase Flexibility of Work Location and Hours

In FYE2021, we updated our remote working policy, which includes work-from-home practices popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic, to make it more flexible to use. We also replaced our former flextime system around core working hours with a new Superflex system that will make it even easier for employees to independently select their working hours.

Even in a post-COVID world, LIXIL does not intend to return to conventional ways of working, but rather intends to continue to embrace flexible workstyles. In that vein, in FYE2022, we set flexible guidelines around whether employees could work from home depending on the nature of their job and their working environment, and developed various allowances to facilitate this process.

We also formally introduced a system that permits employees to work concurrently for other organizations to encourage diverse and flexible workstyles and boost employee autonomy.

Supporting Workstyles That Suit Individual Life Stages

We are making changes to enable working styles tailored to the different stages of an employee’s life, such as childcare or nursing care.

Supporting a Healthy Work-Life Balance ＞

Designating the Office as a Place of Communication

Alongside LIXIL’s efforts in workstyle reform, we are planning to relocate headquarters to streamline office space and leverage the workplace as a space for communication, collaboration, and connection between people that will fuel the creation of new ideas and greater operational efficiencies.

LIXIL Continues Work Style Transformation with Move to New HQ ＞

Encouraging Individual Employee Growth

LIXIL is reforming our human resources systems in Japan in order to encourage a more growth-oriented mindset that promotes innovation, firmly establish a commitment to meritocracy, and promote D&I. This will create an environment that enables everyone to demonstrate their full abilities, regardless of age, gender, and other factors and supports the individual growth of all employees.

In FYE2022, we considered how to revise our systems with an emphasis on developing qualifications and job grade systems that drive people to challenge themselves, personnel evaluation systems that encourage personal and organizational growth, performance-linked compensation systems, and benefits that support well-being. We took the first step in April 2022 by reviewing the grading and compensation systems for managers and updating those systems to a simple, and readily understandable alternative system that better reflects employees’ abilities and achievements.

To support the well-being of our employees, we introduced a points system that can be used across a variety of benefit options such as travel and self-development. We also revised various systems to ensure even safer and more comfortable working environments.

Employee Listening Systems

In FYE2022, LIXIL launched an Employee Experience initiative, focused on various values experienced throughout the employee life cycle to increase employee engagement. We are developing and continually improving our employee listening strategy to deepen our understanding of the touchpoints that impact an employee’s affinity toward the company and motivate them in their work.

Furthermore, we have been conducting an awareness survey of all employees since 2015 and using the survey results to improve workplace environments. In FYE2021, we adopted the LIXIL VOICE survey that leverages new digital tools and increased the survey cadence to twice a year so we are able to react to employee voices in an agile manner as we promote changes in workstyles and instill a more customer-oriented mindset through the Kawaranaito LIXIL project. In FYE2022, we revised the survey to enhance the focus on employee experience and established new KPIs to measure engagement, inclusion, well-being, and intent to stay.

The survey conducted in September 2021 held an 85% response rate, the highest of the past three surveys, as wellas a higher engagement score than the previous survey. Through targeted measures such as on-site CEO visits, we are currently working to better understand the situation at sales bases and factories, where the engagement score was comparatively low, and improve working environments at factories. In the past, it took several months to analyze survey results, but this can now be done instantaneously using the LIXIL VOICE survey methodology. This enables us to take action and address issues in a more agile manner.

Based on survey results, our Human Resources Department drives the effort to understand, address, and mitigate company-wide issues. At the departmental level, we distribute dashboards to departmental managers to communicate the teams’ survey results, and conduct training for individual managers across the company. We are seeking to implement highly effective action at the departmental level through these efforts.

To Embed the LIXIL Behaviors

LIXIL’s Purpose is the north star that guides LIXIL’s employees in making decisions and inspires us to become a more agile, entrepreneurial company for sustainable growth. We are working to instill our LIXIL Behaviors across the whole company that guide how each employee should think and act in their daily work in order to achieve this purpose.

We are working to deepen understanding by, for instance, encouraging both management and employees to post their own views concerning the LIXIL Behaviors on the internal social media.

Over 120 employee volunteers have participated in activities as ambassadors that embody and promote the LIXIL Behaviors, and have planned and implemented mechanisms for instilling the Behaviors through workshops and gatherings. The hand signs created mainly by employees with hearing disabilities is just one example. LIXIL has established the NIJI office where we provide support for workers with disabilities and promote the active participation of diverse human resources. In order to enable employees with hearing disabilities to understand the Behaviors more deeply, we have created hand signs to express the Behaviors, and distributed videos illustrating those signs in Japan.

Our Purpose and Behaviors ＞

Preventing Overwork

LIXIL emphasizes working styles that help employees achieve high output efficiently. To that aim, top managers are proactively seeking to improve employee productivity by eradicating long working hours and ensuring a healthy work-life balance.

LIXIL provides information on time management to all employees to help increase awareness of the need to work efficiently. Clarifying the definition of working hours is helping improve the quality of time management.

Employees who consistently work long hours are interviewed by an industrial physician to prevent any consequent issues with their mental or physical health. We also encourage employees to take five consecutive days of annual leave at a time, and to take leave to celebrate special personal anniversaries. In FYE2022, the number of days of paid leave taken was lower than in the past due to the impact of pandemic stay-at-home restrictions, but overtime work decreased dramatically thanks to the advancement of work-from-home arrangements and IT infrastructure, which is helping to generate greater productivity and more flexibility in workstyles.

Labor-Management Relationship

LIXIL believes that efforts to build a relationship of trust between the union and the company and to seek to establish good working environments help create a fair and rewarding workplace and lead to improved business performance. We have established a labor union which adopts a union shop system for permanent employees of the company and achieved a membership rate of 100% (as of March 31, 2022).

The fundamental labor-management agreement includes items relating to health and safety and working environments. Labor-management consultations are conducted in the form of regular discussions and information-sharing on business status, working conditions, health and safety issues, etc., and we work to resolve any issues.

The labor union is also aware of the issues surrounding the reform of human resources systems that LIXIL is pursuing, and the union and the company are working together to promote these initiatives. When working conditions and/or other systems are newly introduced or revised as a result of labor-management consultations, the union and the company cooperate to ensure employees are aware of the changes. This is facilitated by posting the information on the company intranet, passing the information down through the Human Resources Department, and distributing copies of the Union Guide compiled by the union to all union members.

Creating Local Employment Opportunities

LIXIL supports the expansion of employment opportunities in regions in Japan where we operate by employing technical college and high-school graduates as local permanent employees at our plants.

Scope and details of employee-related data ＞