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There isn’t really a Japanese word for employee engagement, which tells you something in itself, so the concept of “hatarakigai” – which Google Translate renders as “rewarding work” – is more often used when conducting surveys on employee engagement. Foreign companies tend to dominate surveys of top hatarakigai companies in Japan, in contrast to the ranking we covered in a previous post, of companies that are most popular choices for new male graduates, where only Accenture appeared in the top 100.

In the most recent Open Work survey of nearly 90,000 Japanese who had been working at a Japan based company for over a year, in terms of hatarakigai, foreign companies take the top 3 positions – Procter and Gamble is at #1, Salesforce.com at #2, Presidential Life Insurance at #3.

The obvious overlap with the popularity rankings for graduate hires is the Japanese trading companies. Itochu is #4 in terms of hatarakigai and was top of the popularity rankings for new graduate hires too. Itochu‘s rivals Mitsui and Mitsubishi Corp are at #9 and #10 for hatarakigai. The other major trading house, Sumitomo Corporation, trails somewhat at #25.

Various consulting companies, foreign and Japanese, including Accenture again, feature in the top 50 hatarakigai. Japanese manufacturers such as Sony, Asahi Chemical, Keyence, Murata and Astellas are also in the top 50.

The financial services companies that were so popular with the Japanese male graduates are not so dominant – Tokio Marine at #14, Nomura at #36, SMBC at #37 and Daiwa Securities at #43.

Open Work includes in its criteria:

• satisfaction with pay and benefits,
• employee morale,
• transparency,
• mutual respect between employees,
• opportunity for growth for people in their 20s,
• long term human resource development,
• regulatory compliance/awareness

It points out the biggest gap between those companies who were in the top 10 and those in the top 50 was satisfaction with pay. Foreign companies are well known to pay better and not follow seniority based pay the way Japanese companies do. Japanese companies also have a tendency to sit on their cash for a rainy day rather than use it to raise the pay of their employees.

However those companies who had improved their ranking the most over the year were those who had improved their scores on long term human resource development.  Japan Intercultural Consulting,  which Rudlin Consulting represents in EMEA, is delighted to offer their training and coaching services in this regard.

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Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2021-11-01.