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Strengthening Our Non-Financial Assets
Human resources strategies:Diversity and inclusion, culture for innovation

To offer value to customers and communities, realizing innovations is essential. Diversity and inclusion, culture for innovation are necessary for the organizational capabilities that provide a basis for realizing such innovations. The Kirin Group will continuously create value through innovations by bringing together employees who have diverse values and specialties, and are sympathetic to its corporate philosophy and strategies.

Realize innovations through the combination of diverse values, ways of thinking, skills and experience

The Kirin Group’s diversity

Diversity was included under the Group’s shared values in Kirin Group Vision 2027. The Group is confident that diversity will be a driver of its efforts to create value in business domains spanning from food and beverages to pharmaceuticals, and to become a global leader in creating shared value. The Group hopes to generate new value and innovations by encouraging open dialogue while accepting internal differences like one’s values, sensitivities, and experience, without regard for external characteristics such as gender, nationality, and whether one is abled or disabled. The Kirin Group is promoting changes to its diverse human resources by reviewing recruitment procedures and carrying out organizational reforms of workplace practices. By leveraging these changes, the Group will aim to realize innovations going forward.

The Kirin Group’s professionals

Each member of the Kirin Group is committed to working in his or her respective workplace and position, refining individual skills, and pursuing very high standards of expertise in terms of becoming the best in one’s occupation and industry. The Group believes that its businesses will be strengthened and a new future will be opened up by having employees voluntarily take on challenges while thinking outside the box.
The source of that is the desire by each person to grow. By actively supporting and encouraging employees who maintain a desire to grow and aim higher, regardless of their age,career, or job, and by creating opportunities for them, the Kirin Group is developing human resources who can promote its business.

Two of the Group’s initiatives for promoting diversity and professionalism

Helping employees understand challenges faced by working mothers and fathers The Kirin Group has a unique program in which employees who have no children work as if they actually do in order to experience how working mothers and fathers deal with time constraints and child-related emergencies. Through improved individual productivity, awareness of the workplace, and management by superiors, the initiative has helped create an organizational culture that continues to produce results.
Work-abroad program This program allows young employees to work for a non-profit organization or company in an emerging country. The aim of the program is to develop human resources early on to support CSV management by having them make use of their talents and gain experience in initiatives aimed at solving social problems in emerging and other countries.
FocusProfessionals

Enhancing individual professional capabilities with competency evaluations
Initiatives taken by Kirin Brewery’s Marketing Department

Aiming to speed up the development of capabilities by improving the fairness and transparency of employee evaluations

In the Marketing Department, Kirin Brewery has been training personnel and working to create a sustainable system of human resource development in order to improve its organizational marketing capabilities. More recently, Kirin Brewery has been improving training to groom marketing leaders based on the goal of strengthening human resources in its MTBP. Above all, Kirin Brewery has been focusing on competency evaluations.
The most beneficial aspect of a competency evaluation is that it breaks down all of duties required of personnel at the level of specific actions, and clarifies how the performance of those duties is evaluated, thereby improving fairness and transparency. That allows Kirin Brewery to standardize coaching terminology and approaches for helping employees develop and achieve goals. Consequently, the performance indicators required for professional goals and evaluations are laid out clearly for employees, and they become more motivated in their work because they understand the specific goals they need to achieve. It also fosters a spirit of challenge in the workplace and speeds up the development of professional capabilities.

Selecting young employees with necessary competencies—even as a brand manager of flagship products

Another advantage of adopting a competency-based evaluation system is that it gives employees excellent opportunities regardless of their age when they acquire the necessary competencies. For example, the brand manager in charge of the renewed Kirin Ichiban and Honkirin brands is aged mid-30s. Such young personnel who have similar lifestyles as Kirin Brewery’s customers carry out their duties seriously and with a sense of responsibility for the brand business they are in charge of. That has led to good results.
As another new development, employees are independently starting up exciting projects together. On their own initiative, they are developing the best marketing professionals for Kirin Brewery and improving the collective capabilities of the entire organization. Employees know what is happening in their respective departments and understand the issues at hand. If they think an issue can be solved through their own professional expertise in marketing, brand business, management, or something else, they actively hold study sessions to share their knowledge and then go about trying to solve it. Kirin Brewery also has leaders who create teams of employees that are struggling, encourage and coach those employees to develop their skills, and lead efforts to solve problems.
By promptly putting the conditions in place for facilitating these kinds of activities, Kirin Brewery intends to continuously develop marketing professionals while helping achieve the performance targets set by the company.

Expanding similar systems group-wide based on the successes at Kirin Brewery

Having consistently achieved success at Kirin Brewery,the Kirin Group plans plan to have its competency management system adopted by the marketing departments of other companies in the Group in the future. By progressively adopting the system group-wide and putting it into practice, the Kirin Group intends intend to continue developing marketing leaders at each group company while meeting the expectations of stakeholders.

VOICE

We will keep improving the capabilities of marketing personnel so that we can help achieve the Group’s goals

By adopting clear indicators of competency, we have implemented a system for fairly and objectively evaluating each employee. As a result, we have fostered workplaces that can take on challenges and created a culture in which employees are highly aware of their work responsibilities. Moreover, marketing personnel have been steadily improving their capabilities. We will continue with these initiatives so that our highly skilled marketing personnel strengthen the company as a whole and help achieve the Kirin Group’s goals.

Mitsuharu Yamagata

Senior executive officer and general manager of Marketing Department,
Marketing Division, Kirin Brewery