Our Approach to Employee Development
The Olympus Group regards its employees as key to our current as well as long-term success. By treating every employee with respect, sincerity, and empathy, we aspire to become an organization capable of fulfilling Our Purpose, putting patient safety at the heart of our endeavors, delivering against our business strategies, and operating successfully in a fast-moving global environment. To achieve this goal, every employee needs to gain a deep understanding of the principles and values shared by the entire Group and to build professional and personal skills to contribute to our shared objectives.
Our ambition regarding learning and development is to create a culture that empowers all employees to grow, build relevant capabilities, and live in accordance with Our Core Values. Changes in markets, technologies, and society have a huge impact on the way we work and the skills that are necessary. The Olympus Group therefore recognizes learning as a lifelong activity. We encourage employees to learn, and we provide them with opportunities to do so in the form of training and education offers, learning from colleagues and leaders, and job and task assignments that foster growth.
Leadership quality is a key enabler both for our business success and our cultural transformation. Our global leadership competency model provides a common global framework for leadership development, talent and succession management, hiring and performance evaluation of leaders.
We aim for the consistent development of our employees regardless of where they are based in the world. With the introduction of our new global performance management process, we emphasize the importance of Our Core Values and foster feedback and learning. Employees are encouraged to create individual development plans. In addition, we measure our success in employee development through regular employee engagement surveys.
Our Development Offers
Olympus provides a wide range of development offers, both on a global and regional/local level, directed at leaders, individual contributors, and teams.
Our focus areas are:
Our purpose, values and culture: Putting patient safety and quality at the heart of everything we do:
Exemplary offers include onboarding sessions on a global and regional/local level, Our Core Values weeks to embed Our Core Values and encourage our employees to embody them, and lectures where patients and healthcare professionals share their stories.
Personal and professional growth: Building the skills and mindset required for success on a business and personal level
Exemplary offers include leadership programs focusing on our leadership competencies, 360 Feedback for leaders, facilitated courses and e-learning relating to business skills (e.g. project management, presentation, decision making, feedback), language courses, cross-cultural collaboration workshops, and career workshops.
In addition to these offers, in FY2024, we extended a LinkedIn Learning offer to our 20,000 employees worldwide. We achieved an activation rate exceeding our initial target in the China regions, where an online self-learning platform was introduced to itsemployees for the first time.
We consistently develop and offer carefully curated learning collections and paths to help employees progress in their learning journey. These resources combine LinkedIn Learning courses with our internal content and materials, aiming to assist our employees in developing skills and knowledge while gaining a better understanding of Olympus' internal practices and processes. The topics covered in these learning collections and paths include business English, interpersonal communication, project management, change management, and leadership development.
Combined with LinkedIn Learning's extensive course offerings, these learning collections and paths are gradually replacing classroom-based training. In Japan, conversational English lessons were replaced by LinkedIn Learning, where learners can access the platform to increase their language proficiency whenever and wherever they want.
Functional/job-specific skills: Building expertise in your chosen field
Exemplary offers include, among many more, product and sales training for our salesforce, training for employees in manufacturing and repair, and the Marketing Academy.
Leadership Development
In 2019 Olympus introduced the Global Leadership Competency Model (GLCM), which highlights the main competencies that leaders need at Olympus to deliver against our strategy and achieve our goals. This model was first applied in talent and succession management for global key roles. Since 2021 it has been expanded and rolled out to all management positions. The model is applied in hiring/selection, talent and succession management, learning and development, and, from April 2023, our global performance management process as well. In February 2024, we launched a refreshed set of Our Core Values. Consequently, we updated our GLCM to better align with Our Core Values and reflect our strategic priorities even more. The GLCM sets the foundation for successful leadership, and the updated version broadens the scope of leadership capabilities that are critical to our impact as a med-tech company. The GLCM is the foundation for our global leadership development offers.
Global 360 Feedback: Introduced in May 2022 with 500 participants in FY2024, this is a development offer for all leaders. Leaders receive feedback from direct reports, peers, and manager with the purpose of gaining insights on strength and development areas and deriving development goals from the process. Since its introduction, approximately 1,000 leaders have gone through the process already.
Our global training initiative equips people leaders with essential DEI competencies, emphasizing the need for psychological safety, recognition and mitigation of unconscious biases, and integration of DEI principles into daily business operations. The program is customized with region-specific content to align with local cultural and regulatory nuances, ensuring relevance and applicability for all participants. This targeted approach not only builds foundational knowledge but also empowers leaders to actively foster inclusive environments within their teams. Training sessions have received very positive feedback, with over 80% of participants reporting that they could apply the knowledge to their work. Since launching the training program in March 2023, approximately 1,600 people leaders globally have participated, representing 34% of all managers company-wide. By the end of this fiscal year, we anticipate that roughly 2,500 people leaders will have joined the program, thereby covering over 50% of all managers.
Regarding talent and succession management, we conduct the visualization of human resources using the nine-box matrix tool to measure performance and potential. This approach leads to custom-made skill development for each employee, as well as the identification of high-potential human resources, strengthening of the succession pipeline, and the implementation of strategic and planned training and assessment.
In FY2025, Olympus will launch its first online global leadership program focusing on our leadership competencies. Leaders will receive the chance to build their own highly individualized journey to further develop the competencies based on their personal strengths and development areas. This globally consistent live-virtual program ensures that Olympus leaders will develop a common language and skillset across the world.
Regional leadership development activities complement the global offers. Examples include:
• Regional mentoring schemes
• Programs for newly appointed leaders
• Courses that focus on specific skills (e.g., managing change, coaching, hiring)
Training and Education System in Japan
At present, Olympus and Olympus Marketing, Inc. provide educational programs and learning opportunities for their employees, with several hundred course titles made available each year. They include e-learning programs based on the Olympus College Plus educational management system and group specialized skills training and compliance training programs. With advances in the online environment in recent years, we are working to develop more effective and efficient skills development systems. Specifically, we have reduced travel costs by conducting online group training programs, created new internal studios, improved the program participation rate with on-demand videos for existing programs and improved the learning effect through combining these programs with flipped learning. By thus consolidating our human resources systems on a global scale, we hope to achieve greater improvements in the training content, learning effect and participation efficiency.
Manufacturing Technicians Training Program
Skill level of Manufacturing Technicians Training Program (Manufacturing sites in Japan)
The Olympus Group regards its manufacturing technicians as an important source of added value.
The manufacturing sites in Japan provide them with functional training through the Manufacturing Technicians Training Program. In the Manufacturing Technicians Training Program, we classify skills of manufacturing technicians into 6 stages, aiming at a planned level-up. Level 1 to 3 new employees are "general technicians," Level 4 and above are certified as "advanced technicians" with high technical skills. Level 4 employees are referred to as Manufacturing Advisors (MA), Level 5 as Manufacturing Supervisors (MS), and the highest level 6 as Manufacturing Masters (MM). From new recruits to MMs, we nurture our employees in a planned manner according to their level.
We implement training programs for employees aiming for high-level certification. Since advice can be received from high-level certified technicians, these programs naturally strengthen organizational capability and also boost individual motivation. As with manufacturing sites in Japan, at Olympus Vietnam Co., Ltd., which handles the manufacture of medical products, a certification system for bonding and soldering work has been introduced. This is designed to upgrade the training and education programs and contribute to the creation of a global manufacturing system.
Global Performance Management Concept
In May 2023, Olympus introduced a global performance and goal management system to integrate performance management systems worldwide. This approach, along with global talent and succession management is operated through performance and goal management system ensuring a consistent experience for employees across the globe.
Developing a healthy performance culture is an enabler to supporting our vision and drive to becoming a leading global MedTech company. Olympus is taking a unified approach to how we manage, attract and retain talent.
Global performance management puts each employee in control of their future. Ongoing conversations about development, performance and feedback are structured around skills, personal goals, and an understanding of how what employees do on a day-to-day basis contributes to the wider success of our business. The approach also focuses on fairness and consistency, as everyone will be measured and evaluated in a transparent way.
It aligns to, and works with, our Talent and Succession process, ensuring the right person is in the right role at the right time. We recognize that investing in our people is key to success and pivotal for us to achieve our goals.
Annual Process and Conversations Between Managers and Employees
Global performance management supports each new financial year. During the goal setting and agreement stage, employees and managers discuss and agree goals. About six months into each financial year, the employee and their manager(s) check in on progress, to make sure performance goals are on track. Year-end activity takes place between April and June and includes review conversations.
Managers and employees have regular performance related conversations throughout the year, to make sure everyone knows how things are going, normalizing conversations about performance, development and feedback, and making sure support is quickly put in place if things aren’t going to plan.
Performance Goals Link to the Company Strategy
Employees propose their own performance goals linked to the Three Guiding Principles—Patient safety and sustainability, Innovation for growth, and Productivity—outlined in our company strategy, and are evaluated in terms of their achievements in each of these areas. As patient safety and regulatory compliance are top priorities for Olympus, we have established a common global goal designed to ensure that all employees prioritize the pursuit of quality in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024.
The global goal ensures the focus on patient safety in everyone’s day-to-day activities, ensuring compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, and industry standards, as well as understanding and adhering to all policies and procedures that govern their work. In addition, every employee, regardless of their function or role, will also identify and report any potential safety risks, hazards, or instances of non-compliance and will actively participate in related initiatives.
