On November 26th, the major recruiting company En Japan, Inc. announced the results of its survey regarding the promotion of diversity in the workplace. The survey was conducted on En Japan’s website “Jinji no Mikata” (“Friends of Human Resources” in Japanese) and targeted around 560 companies. “Jinji no Mikata” is an information resource for human resources professionals.
According to the study results, 32% of surveyed companies answered that they were making efforts to promote diversity. A little over half (59%) answered that they were not actively promoting diversity in their companies.
The results further broke down the companies promoting diversity by industry. Companies that are making the most effort to promote diversity are ones in the advertising, publishing, and mass communications industries at 50%. Following that, manufacturers were at 42%. Finally, the real estate and construction industries were the lowest, with only 9% answering that they were promoting diversity.
Furthermore, when broken down by scale, 58% of companies with more than 1,000 employees responded that they were promoting diversity. The study’s results clearly show that the larger the company, the more active their efforts to promote diversity are.
The most common answers for why companies want to promote diversity included “To secure superior talent” at 58%, followed by “To make the company easier to work for” at 52%.
79% of companies in the study also answered that women were the largest focus of their efforts to utilize diverse talent. This was followed by non-Japanese at 50%, and disabled people at 46%.
For foreign talent who hope to work in Japan, a workplace’s efforts to promote diversity, as well as a climate that can accept diverse talent are both important.
How comfortable a company is for foreign workers is due to many factors, including an existing structure for accepting non-Japanese talent, as well as a company climate that respects different cultures and values.
En Japan’s study clearly shows that advertising, publishing, and mass communications companies, as well as large companies with more than 1,000 employees, tend to be particularly active in promoting diversity. Before choosing any Japanese company to work for, however, it’s a good idea to check how it thinks about diversity and hiring foreign workers.
〔Reference〕 “Company Diversity” Field Study – Information Site for Human Resources Professionals“Jinji no Mikata”
jopus Editorial Dep.
