Members of AGC Electronics (Thailand) participating in a discussion

AGC Electronics (Thailand) manufactures glass substrates for hard disks. In November 2008, in cooperation with the MONOZUKURI (Quality Manufacturing) & Personal Growth Enhancement Office, Asahi Glass, this company began implementing measures to raise the skills of employees through daily improvement activities to develop human assets*2 and strengthen its competitiveness. At first, employees felt uneasy and showed unwillingness to change their conventional ways of working. But now, with strong motivation to acquire new expertise and with the adoption of know-how accumulated by AGC Group, the company's in-process inventory has dramatically decreased and the operational process increasingly standardized. Approximately 20 employee participants are now using the skills they have learned in this activity and are working as facilitators in a range of daily improvement activities.

*2 Here we use “human assets” instead of “human resources,” based on the idea that people make the company.

Ms. Kimiko Horii
President, NPO GEWEL

It is highly appreciable that AGC Group has a strong vision as a corporate group and clearly includes Diversity in its Our Shared Values. I strongly expect that the Group will show best practices to Japanese companies with regard to diversity. In fiscal 2009, the Group implemented measures to improve its work environment to enable all the employees to work with satisfaction and pride in their daily operations and to share mutual respect based on the value of diversity. I am pleased to know that to meet the aforementioned objective, the Group conducted activities from a global viewpoint such as by the utilization of employee satisfaction (ES) surveys and the advancement of its human resource development programs, as model cases that can be used by other Japanese companies. In my opinion, the Group has already reached a level of “inclusion (paying mutual respect and accepting their mutual differences)” beyond the level of “diversity (recognizing mutual differences)”.
AGC Group is now required to motivate individual employees to make further contributions to their company by paying more attention to intangible elements of diversity, such as differences in values, in addition to the tangible elements of diversity (nationality, gender, and handicaps). In this CSR report, the employment of retirees and people with disabilities, the employment and promotion of female employees, work-life balance, and support offered for balancing work and childcare/family care are covered. I expect that the Group will continue the activities which are prioritized from the viewpoints of improving diversity and inclusion and also in line with its management in 2010.