Autonomous career development
based on each individual employee's
strengths, values, and motivations

At FUJIFILM Business Innovation, we attach significant value to voluntary thought and career development, so that employees will improve their capabilities. Based on the above, we focus our efforts on job rotation based on the desired career paths stated by employees, as well as in-house recruitment whose goal is encouraging the autonomous career development of employees.

Regarding job rotation, we believe that strategic job rotation aimed for human resource development is important partly because experience of multiple operations and departments will enable employees to create new ideas. Job rotation is implemented based on employees' values, mindsets, and desired career paths, which are identified through the annual “+STORY conversation” with their immediate managers.

We are proactively implementing internal recruitment programs, including temporary overseas assignment programs, targeting employees all over the world including in the Asia-Pacific region. The purpose of these programs is to provide employees with opportunities to take on challenges beyond the boundaries between companies.
Above all, we focus our efforts on recruiting human resources who will take on challenges in their new roles in our expansion to new overseas territories, aiming to accelerate our worldwide business expansion with our new in-house brands.
Further, in fiscal 2021, we implemented in-house recruitment targeting the Fujifilm Group as a whole, including FUJIFILM Corporation and FUJIFILM Business Innovation, for the first time. Because we respect the free will of employees, they can apply for in-house recruitment without the permission of their immediate managers.
We will continue to implement and enhance this initiative, aiming to promote the active participation of employees and achieve the organizational revitalization of the entire Group.

At FUJIFILM Business Innovation, we permit employees who have applied for permission to have side jobs, on the condition that these jobs will not affect their work at the company. Actual examples of side jobs include teaching at university, consulting, translation, video creation and support for web service development. We believe it is important for employees to build human networks and enrich their experience outside the company.

Some engineering organizations within FUJIFILM Business Innovation engage in “Plism Activities,” which permit employees to use approx. 10% of business hours for independent research.
“Plism Activities” are small group school-club-like activities. Each group consists of a leader, who has presented their desired theme, and employees who have gathered with a desire to join the leader. These activities were started in 2008. Examples of the themes include external technologies which do not exist in our current technological strategies or platforms but in which young or mid-career employees are interested or about which they feel a sense of urgency, as well as university research themes. We believe that increasing engineers' willingness to take on challenges will lead to their autonomous career development and the revitalization of the entire organization.

At FUJIFILM Business Innovation, we believe problem formulation skills are important and position them at the center of human resource development. We request that all employees not only fulfill the roles assigned to them but also (1) develop a future vision by analyzing the status quo accurately on their own and present essential tasks for achieving the vision and (2) develop specific measures to achieve the presented tasks and follow through with them involving the people around them, as the most important elements of work. Every employee should ask themselves what they really want to do and what they think they should do, by playing the leading role in their own work, and take on challenges by thinking outside the box. We believe this is exactly the engine for the constant transformation of the company. For this purpose, we have introduced and implement training programs targeting employees in all job classes, from new employees to young, mid-career, managerial and senior employees.

To strengthen the problem formulation skills, we apply a See-Think-Plan-Do (STPD) framework. This is an approach which adds a process of understanding the facts (See) and clarifying their essence (Think) before the implementation of a PDCA cycle, to implement the cycle from the collection and analysis of information and the determination of problems to the formulation of a specific measure (Plan) and implementing the plan (Do), at high speed, thus solving problems. On the other hand, we believe that people's intentions, there strong awareness of problems, and their future vision are important as the engines for driving the improvement of problem formulation skills. In other words, it is based on ownership in which one regards their work as their own issue and performs it independently. We have also included an initiative for increasing ownership in the job-class-specific “+STORY training” program.

Based on the above idea, job-class-specific training programs are systematized to combine the “+STORY training” program which is aimed at fostering a sense of ownership and the STPD training program which is provided before a promotion or appointment to improve employees' practical skills in a step-by-step manner in accordance with the level of their personal development. For managers who coach their subordinates, we provide New/Existing Manager Training with the goal of enhancing both managers' own problem formulation skills and their ability to coach their subordinates. In addition to the above, we implement other training programs designed for each job class. The Fujifilm Group implements the “+STORY conversation,” in which employees talk about their past experiences and their future career vision with their immediate managers. In the “+STORY conversation,” the dialogue between individual managers and subordinates is not everything. It covers the process until the results are consolidated at the department-level human resource development meeting and a human resource development plan is developed based on subordinates' desired career paths and other elements. Plans jelled at departments are implemented in collaboration with the personnel management division.
Thus, we have combined job-class-specific training provided mostly in the form of group training sessions with the “+STORY conversation” that is implemented on site, aiming to develop every employee into a human resource who thinks for themselves, makes change happen, and achieves new things, and further, to be a company that creates change.

At FUJIFILM Business Innovation, we aim to be a group of aggressive workers with a strong change-oriented mindset. In other words, we aim for a state where people in all workplaces strive to make change happen and take on challenges independently. Therefore, our personnel evaluation and promotion systems attach importance to employees' independence and change-oriented mindsets.

Our employees are not evaluated unilaterally by their immediate managers based on indicators set by the company. At the beginning of each fiscal year, employees themselves propose themes they want to try working with and set measures for making achievements, including creative measures to be devised in the process, in their priority goals. At the end of each fiscal year, the performance of each employee is evaluated comprehensively based on the set goals, with a focus on both results and the process. In addition, a multidimensional evaluation has been adopted for pre-management- or higher-level employees. Once a year, they receive objective feedback about their attitude to work not only from their superiors but also their peers and subordinates, so as to improve their own management skills and teamwork.

We proactively promote excellent human resources regardless of age, to provide human resources who are capable of developing a future vision and driving change to achieve the vision with opportunities to participate actively at an early stage. Employees can be promoted to managers at the age of 29 at the youngest. An employee who has been recommended as a candidate for a higher grade proposes a task to make change happen in the work domain that they are in charge of at present and suggests it in the screening interview. We require this to be not an improvement task based on the current method or assigned role but a highly challenging task that breaks the status quo. With this method of screening for promotions, which is conducted based on the ability to propose tasks to make change happen, we ensure that our human resources are promoted regardless of age.

The Fujifilm Group has initiated the “+STORY” concept as a keyword that expresses the personal development and growth of human resources. This means that employees gather the threads of their life stories by gaining power from their emotions, experience, and the people they meet while working hard on their tasks at hand. We implement various measures in line with this concept.

We hold “+STORY Live” online seminars and have “+STORY interviews” as initiatives to introduce stories of Fujifilm Group employees, who work in diverse fields.
By having Fujifilm Group employees talk with each other about their “+STORY,” including their diverse ways of thinking, initiatives, and experience, we will communicate the potential and true strength of the Fujifilm Group, aiming to improve employee engagement and ensure they all have high job satisfaction.