Social
Human Rights/CSR Procurement
We, the Zeon Group, are committed to fulfilling our corporate social responsibilities in respect of human rights and contributing to realizing a sustainable society, based on international codes of conduct on human rights, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labor Organization (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights in Labor, and the UN Global Compact.
- Respect for Human Rights
- We will not tolerate acts of discrimination or harassment based on age, gender, place of origin, ancestry, nationality, disability, religion, creed, marital status, employment status, union participation, political views and other differences. We also will not tolerate child labor, forced labor or/nor unjustly low wage labor.
- Collaboration with Stakeholders
- We will encourage our customers and business partners to support this policy with us to pursue business activities sharing respect for human rights.
- Prevention and Mitigation of Human Rights Violations
- We will strive to perceive, avoid and reduce any negative impact on human rights that might result from our business activities.
- Response to Human Rights Violations
- We will work on the relief through appropriate procedures when it is found that we have caused or furthered a negative impact on human rights.
- Efforts on Human Rights Issues
- We will provide appropriate education and training to our executives and employees, so that this policy is understood and implemented.
- Disclosure of Information
- We will publicly disclose information on our human rights initiatives under this policy through communication channels such as our website and integrated reports.
The Zeon Group considers respect for human rights as one of the important foundations of sustainability management and, from FY 2021, has commenced fully-fledged initiatives to ensure the human rights of all persons who are affected by its business activities are respected. Relevant departments at Zeon began by formulating a human rights risk map from an overall picture of business operations, to identify the human rights risks arising in the course of our business.
From FY 2022, we have held human rights seminars for management and relevant departments to instill the importance of respecting human rights within the company.
We have also commenced due diligence on human rights while availing of advisory services provided by outside experts. Specifically, we have created the three categories of Zeon Corporation, Zeon Group companies, and Supply Chain, with each of these used to identify the discrete set of agendas within these categories for the prevention and mitigation of negative impacts on human rights and are undertaking initiatives to address these. We will meanwhile take active steps to publicly disclose and make available the details of these initiatives via various reports.
In addition, we aim to establish a comprehensive mechanism for complaint processing, which will address specific negative impacts, and are undertaking initiatives to extend the scope of this mechanism to encompass our supply chain by the end of FY 2022.
Becoming a Signatory to the United Nations Global Compact and Participating in Subcommittee Activities
In June 2019, we became a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact, and in FY 2022 a total of 21 Zeon employees participated in 13 of Global Compact Network Japan’s subcommittees, and in related activities.
Participating in the activities of the United Nations Global Compact and following its Ten Principles serves as the foundation of the Zeon Group’s 2030 Vision of being “a company that lives up to societal expectations and the aspirations of employees,” and it clearly enunciates to our stakeholders our basic stance on human rights, labor practices, the environment, and preventing corruption in our company activities. We also believe this will advance our CSR management based on world standards.
CSR Procurement
In order to provide safe and reliable products, we procure raw materials based on the Zeon CSR Policy and the CSR Code of Conduct.
We have been developing initiatives for CSR-based procurement since FY 2012. We have established the CSR Procurement Guidelines and Requests to Suppliers, which integrate CSR perspectives into our existing QCD*.
- *QCD
System of production management that controls and improves quality, cost, and delivery.
- 1CSR procurement
We will promote procurement activities that are based on our CSR Policy.
- 2Procurement of optimal raw materials, products, and services
We will work to procure optimal raw materials, products, and services that meet our standards for quality, cost, delivery time, supply stability, and technological development capabilities in order to provide better products.
- 3Consideration of the global environment
We will work to procure raw materials and products that have less impact on the global environment.
- 4Open approach to purchasing and partnerships
We will use a global perspective to search for suppliers from across the world, build partnerships through dialogue, and work to create fair and equitable business opportunities.
We kindly ask that our suppliers:
- 1Follow corporate ethics and thoroughly implement compliance.
- 2Respect human rights and give consideration to workplace environments.
- 3Give consideration to the environment, and provide safe raw materials, products, and services.
- 4Provide raw materials, products, and services with competitive quality and pricing, and abide by agreed delivery dates.
- 5Actively provide information during the creation of partnerships. Also, implement strict management of information disclosed by Zeon during our transactions. We will implement the same strict management.
Human Resources
Vision for the Human Resources Strategy
In the current Medium-Term Business Plan (implementation of which began in FY 2021), we adopted a human resources strategy of “Work together to create ‘stages’ to be active on” as a groupwide strategy, with the aim of realizing our Vision for 2030, which is to “a company that lives up to societal expectations and the aspirations of employees.”
The foundation for our human resources strategy is a commitment to “realize freedom and well-being for all employees,” which includes Health and Productivity Management based on awareness of the fact that “employees and their family members are our company’s most indispensable asset,” and creating a working environment in which each individual employee can fulfill their potential.
By implementing this human resources strategy, Zeon’s aim is to provide employees with more life choices and enable employees to grow together with the company.
Enhancing Engagement through Employee Engagement Surveys
At Zeon, we utilize employee engagement indicators derived from employee engagement surveys as means to gauge the results achieved for the “stages” and their current statuses. We thus aim to raise the employee engagement rate to 75%—the average value for highperforming enterprises worldwide—by 2030. The employee engagement surveys that we use are global surveys, which allow us to perform benchmarking against the average values for high-performing global and Japanese corporations. Whereas in the past the various issues affecting each organization could only be determined subjectively, we are now able to clarify these issues using data.
Survey implementation began in FY 2021, with the latest survey results showing an engagement rate of 48%.
Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace
In the context of an ongoing decline in the working population due to low birth rates and an ag ing population, the promotion of participation and advancement by women in the workplace is essential to Zeon’s continued achievement of sustainable growth. There has been an increase in the number of female employees either holding or capable of holding the positions of department manager or section manager, and we are striving to expand the opportunities for female employees to be increasingly active in such roles. As of March 31, 2022, 12.7% of our company’s employees, and 5.3% of managers, were female. We aim to increase the percentage of female employees to around 20%, and that of female managers to around 20%, by 2030.
We will continue to actively recruit, train, and appoint women in our efforts to increase the number of female employees capable of playing a central role in managerial decision-making in the future.
Sustainability Report
The Sustainability Report provides more detailed information.