Aligning the Thoughts of Management and Employees and Reinforcing the Competitiveness of the Digital Camera Business： Issei Umemura

I work in business planning for the digital camera business, where I’m involved in the formulation of management policies and the examination of medium-term management plans. At the same time, since FY22 I’ve been responsible for all aspects of planning and management of the Smart Forum, an important event held six or seven times a year to help employees take ownership of our business strategies.

With the nature of the event changing with its switch to an online format following the pandemic, we also decided to rethink the name. And so what was previously called the General Meeting was renamed the Smart Forum in November 2022. I thought the name change was symbolic of the business unit’s intent to implement business and cultural reform.

In my role in charge of the forum, in addition to emphasizing interactive communication in line with the wishes of the business unit director, I also strive to make sure that the forum’s content is catered to employees’ interests, which I gauge through post-event questionnaires and feedback from my colleagues. For example, part of this year’s management policy is to further grow our new businesses, and through the questionnaire we discovered that employees wanted more specific information on this growth project. In the next forum, the business unit director talked about his current thoughts on the project, and I made sure that participants could interact with the content. I’m in charge of everything from planning and filming to editing and broadcasting. I didn’t have any skills in filming and editing beforehand, and so I learned and remembered the methods from scratch.

We also have a new section called Project L in which we have engineers talk about the secrets behind their product development projects. By enhancing employees’ knowledge of products from their own departments, the idea is to boost unity within the business unit and increase the motivation of our engineers. In the post-event questionnaires, we include a section to quantitively assess how satisfied employees have been with the event, and we have maintained our target of more than 95%. I’m always looking to incorporate new elements into the event, and so it might be that my efforts are paying off.

After the announcement of the Panasonic Leadership Principles, I examined whether my work was in step with the Customer Focus principle. I also fully agree with the Evolution principle, which calls on us to continue to expand our horizons, learn, and change. Soon after I took on my current role, my boss said that he wanted to automate the collection of the huge amount of data required for the formulation of our business plans. While thinking that the request was somewhat unreasonable, I nonetheless proactively agreed to give it a go. We succeeded, however, and as a result we were able to automate the analysis of management indicators and drastically reduce the time we spent on the collection of data. We were then able to use the time we gained on more important data analysis. Just as I learned how to aggregate data and edit videos, rather than looking for reasons you can’t do something, I think it’s more important to give it a go.

Our new business unit director wants us to continue proactively tackling cultural reform and improvements in operational efficiency. I have thus created an “online suggestion box” where employees can propose ways to improve employee satisfaction and drive cultural reform. I hope to be able to link these proposals to improvement activities. With the business unit director and the business planning departments leading the way, I’ll do everything I can to ensure these proposals lead to improvements. This article is my commitment to helping employees live their best lives.