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 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. From 2020 to 2023, we delivered the Business & Professional Skill Development program with the total participation of more than 6,600 leaders and employees.
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.
In addition to these offers, we are establishing LinkedIn Learning as an offer to employees to select from more than 20,000 courses. This offer is already available to 8,000 employees worldwide and will be extended to 20,000 employees within the next 12 months.
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. The GLCM is the foundation for our global leadership development offers.
Global 360 Feedback: Introduced in May 2022, 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, more than 500 leaders have gone through the process already.
In FY2023 we offered six Master Classes to our senior leaders with a total participation of approximately 850 people. These lectures from high-profile experts focused on such leadership competencies as innovation, strategic mindset, and developing talent.
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.
From 2023 on, a facilitated live-virtual GLCM Module Program will be launched. Based on business needs and individual development plans, managers select modules that provide insights and help build skills in specific leadership competencies. This globally consistent 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. As of April 1, 2023, the cumulative number of advanced technicians reached 105.
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.
