The NRI Group believes that enabling employees to continue working healthily and actively is essential both for achieving sustainable growth and for revitalizing the organization. We work to create an environment in which employees can demonstrate their abilities fully while also valuing their own health and family life by reducing long working hours and improving work-life balance.

Occupational Health and Safety

NRI Group Occupational Health and Safety Policy

Kaga Yanagisawa
President & CEO, Member of the Board, Representative Director
Nomura Research Institute, Ltd

Basic Principles

We strive to create a thriving workplace where each of our employees can maintain good mental and physical health and work safely and securely, based upon the idea that highly specialized human resources with diverse values are a valuable management resource.

Guiding Principles

1. Compliance with applicable laws and regulations
We comply with laws, regulations and standards related to occupational health and safety in the countries and regions where we conduct business activities.

2. Continuous improvement of occupational health and safety management system
We strive to improve our occupational health and safety initiatives via continuous improvements of our occupational health and safety management system.

3. Full employee participation in health and safety initiatives
We strive to improve our work environment including health and safety, while engaging the opinions of our employees.

4. Risk mitigation and continuous improvement of the workplace
We strive to identify and prioritize hazards and harmful factors that may cause danger or ill health, and to eliminate or reduce occupational health and safety risks, such as by assessing risks related to occupational health and safety.
We also strive to implement continuous improvements of the workplace environment to achieve this policy, such as by setting targets related to occupational health and safety.

5. Developing human resources through health and safety training programs
In order to create a thriving workplace, we continuously provide all employees occupational health and safety training and strive to improve awareness on occupational health and safety.

Scope of this policy

This policy applies to all executives and employees of the NRI Group. Items regarding health and safety are included in the NRI Group Business Partner Code of Conduct, and we request our business partners to comply with it. We aim to build a safe and secure workplace environment in cooperation with our business partners.

Enacted on July 1, 2023
Revised on July 3, 2024

Management structure for promoting occupational health and safety

The NRI Group has established a Health and Safety Committee with the aim of achieving an appropriate working environment based on the Industrial Health and Safety Act. In addition to maintaining an appropriate working environment at all of our offices, we have established a sanitation management system at each business division. With these arrangements, we can properly maintain the working environment according to the work and characteristics of each business division.
Our President & CEO acts as Chief Health Officer (CHO) and our Senior Managing Director in charge of Human Resources and Human Resources Strategy acts as the Chief Occupational Health and Safety Officer.

Risks and Targets regarding occupational health and safety

A workforce of professionals in possession of high expertise is a principal management resource for the NRI Group.
Should it happen that owing to an occupational health and safety issue an employee cannot exploit the full potential of their abilities in a sound workplace, the resulting drop in productivity and/or poorer quality of outcomes may impact on our delivery of the information systems that are important foundations underpinning the society, or of the consulting services that play an important part in our clients' management and businesses.
As a result of identifying latent risks based on past experience and medium- to long-term possibilities, and conducting an evaluation that considers the frequency of occurrence and severity of impact should these risks occur, we have identified the following two risks as those on which we should prioritize our countermeasures.

• Risks regarding work hours (such as long work hours, late night work, and continuous work)
• Risks regarding mental and physical health

We are prioritizing risk reduction measures for the above risks.

Measures for reducing priority risks

【Occupational health and safety】

Measures for reducing risks regarding work hours (such as long work hours, late night work, and continuous work)

1. Complying with laws and regulations, including those related to overtime work and holidays.
2. Eliminating long hours worked consecutively.
3. Ensuring that employees working long hours get seen by the occupational health physician (OHP), and having them comply with doctors’ instructions.
4. Reducing the amount of night work that employees Perform.
5. Pressing employees to take their paid leave, including ensuring that they are organized and disciplined about taking extended consecutive periods of leave (such as a summer break, and “recharge leave”).

We have mechanisms in place to accurately monitor our employees’ hours worked. At any time, supervisors can check online the hours that the employees in their charge are working, or the amount of leave that they have taken. In addition, managers are sent a list of employees who performed night work or holiday work the day after it has happened. Furthermore, we are grasping the risks by thoroughly conducting industrial physician interviews with long-time workers.

【Health and productivity management】

Measures for reducing risks regarding mental and physical health

1 Reduce lifestyle-related diseases

• Manage employees’ reservations and receipts for medical check-ups and health examinations, and encourage them to take these examinations
• Put in place health management rooms at our principal offices and build a framework for industrial doctors to handle cases

2 Lower stress

• Stress prevention for individual employees and teams
• Develop a system to enable employees to return to work earlier

3 Lower smoking rate

• Introduce support to help stop smoking
• Remove smoking spaces inside the office

4 Promote work-life balance

• Reduce overtime and holiday work hours
• Encourage employees to take paid leave

For information on other health and productivity management efforts, see here.

Targets and KPIs

We are making efforts to achieve the following targets and KPIs in order to reduce priority risks.

【Occupational health and safety】

• ^*  

  Calculated as hours that exceed the statutory working hours (40 hours a week)
  "-" indicates that the calculated value does not exceed the statutory working hours

【 Health and Productivity Management】

Handling occupational health and safety incidents

In case work-related injuries, occupational ill health, diseases and incidents are occured, we conduct a hearing or investigation on the employee and related parties to identify the cause of the incidents and strive to prevent reoccurrence by considering and disseminating improvement measures. Information on these measures is reported to the Health and Safety Committee.

Safety measures for disasters and other emergencies

In the event of a disaster or accident, we will ensure the safety of group employees, protect important information systems and information assets of our customers, and strive to continue operations.
In addition, on the intranet, we post an emergency action guideline and a contact system to ensure thorough internal awareness.
In order to ensure that work can continue in the event of a large-scale natural disaster where it is not possible to go to the office or a pandemic where work at the office is decreased, we have built a crisis handling system compatible with working from home and are continuously reviewing our business continuity plan.

Occupational health and safety training

At the NRI Group, we conduct health and safety training as part of our organizational development to enable all employees to gain knowledge on labor management and mental health, via training on health management for new employees and training on labor management for managers. We also disseminate information on crisis handling and labor management to temporary employees when they start work.

Health and Productivity Management

The NRI Group also considers employee health to be important from the perspective of risk management, and is actively involved as a company, rather than relying on individual employees for health management. We also believe that employee health is important both for individuals and the company, and that actively encouraging employee health improves employee vitality and productivity, revitalizes the organization, and ultimately results in improved performance and corporate value.

NRI has been aiming to realize health and productivity management^* to contribute to employee QOL (Quality of Life) since FY2015, and works towards achieving those targets.

*"Health and Productivity Management" is a registered trademark of Nonprofit Organization Kenkokeiei.

Expected effects of health and productivity management

In order to achieve risk management in four key areas of occupational health and safety, the NRI Group comprehensively works toward maintaining and improving employee health by promoting regular health checkups and following up on checkup results, providing support via industrial physicians and a query hotline, and reducing overtime work.

1 Reduce lifestyle-related diseases

(Action Plan)

• Manage employees’ reservations and receipts for medical check-ups and health examinations, and encourage them to take these examinations
• Put in place health management rooms at our principal offices and build a framework for industrial doctors to handle cases

2 Lower stress

(Action Plan)

• Stress prevention for individual employees and teams
• Develop a system to enable employees to return to work earlier

3 Lower smoking rate

(Action Plan)

• Introduce support to help stop smoking
• Remove smoking spaces inside the office

4 Promote work-life balance

(Action Plan)

• Reduce overtime and holiday work hours
• Encourage employees to take paid leave
• Implement the frontline-driven Smart Work-Style Campaign (SWC) including: streamlining operations and meetings, as well as promoting early morning work

NRI Group targets for health and productivity management

Based on a recognition that employees who are both physically and mentally healthy and satisfied with their job can exhibit a high level of performance, NRI has defined and continuously measures three target indices for health and productivity management, which are absenteeism^*1, presenteeism^*2, and engagement^*3.

• ^*1  

  Index defining the ratio of days where an employee cannot work due to health reasons

• ^*2  

  Index defining the psychological state where an employee is motivated to voluntarily contribute to the organization and autonomously work at their job

• ^*3  

  Index defining the psychological state where an employee is motivated to voluntarily contribute to the organization and autonomously work at their job

• ^*4  

  Days off allowed by the company, such as those for childcare or nursing, are not included in the total work days scheduled.

• ^*5  

  The survey is conducted along with a stress check. It was designed based on the SPQ (Single-Item Presenteeism Question). The target number of employees and response rate are equal to those for the stress check.

• ^*6  

  The average value of all employees over the past year when working in a manner that is both physically and mentally healthy is given as 100.

• ^*7  

  The Wevox engagement survey analysis tool provided by Atrae, Inc. was used for the survey. Survey items were designed based on nine key drivers in categories such as duties, health, human relationships, organizational culture, and environment.

• ^*8  

  “Overall high employee satisfaction” refers to the ratio of the top (7) to (5) responses.

Expansion of efforts

In recent times, we have been expanding our efforts beyond our employees and their families to our supply chain, via efforts such as opening our workplace vaccination program for COVID-19 to our business partners.
We are also promoting communication with our business partners via health and productivity management via efforts such as conducting surveys on the status of health and productivity management at our major business partners.

NRI Certified as Excellent Enterprise for Health and Productivity Management

Since first being White 500 certified as an excellent enterprise for health and productivity management for the first time in 2017, we have acquired this certification for eight consecutive years. This certification scheme was established in FY2016 by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to recognize companies implementing particularly outstanding efforts regarding health and productivity management for their employees from a managerial perspective.
Companies are assessed based on their business philosophy, organizational structure, system/initiative execution, assessment/improvement, and compliance/risk management.

(Information as of the end of June 2024)

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