Health Management
Our Approach
SUBARU is fostering health management measures along with occupational health and safety activities so that all employees can work healthily, soundly, and vigorously, take on challenges, and achieve growth. SUBARU takes these actions in the belief that the health of employees and their families is essential for all its business operations. SUBARU works with the relevant units within the Human Resources Department to support the physical and mental health of its employees as well as to build a healthy organization and promote flexible working styles, and more. By doing this, it creates the underpinnings of a more comfortable working environment necessary for greater employee engagement.
Subaru Health Declaration
Purpose
In pursuit of becoming a company “delivering happiness to all” and based on our Global Sustainability Policy of “striving to maintain and advance the workplace environment so that employees can work safely in peace, and with a sense of satisfaction,” SUBARU CORPORATION, the Subaru Labor Union, and the Subaru Health Insurance Association jointly released the Health Declaration in October 2020 with the intent that the three parties work in unison toward health.
Health Declaration
To build happiness for our employees and their families, we need a foundation of mental and physical health.
SUBARU works with its employees to promote health and preventive care, taking on the challenge of building workplaces full of smiles and enabling growth.
Representative Director, President and CEO, SUBARU CORPORATIONTomomi Nakamura
Executive Chairman, Subaru Labor UnionMinoru Yamagishi
President, Subaru Health Insurance AssociationTatsuro Kobayashi
Established October 2020
Management System
SUBARU considers health promotion activities to be a management issue, and as of FYE March 2021, SUBARU has discussed and operated a PDCA cycle regarding its health management issues and measures at the Executive Meeting. SUBARU is also advancing collaborative health with partnership from its labor union and its health association. On the operational side, the Health Promotion Group has served as a core driver of our company-wide, unified health promotion measures since 2021. This dedicated organization within the Human Resources Department coordinates weekly regular meetings with stakeholders such as the health association, health promotion managers at our sites, industrial physicians, and other staff in charge of industrial health.
Health Promotion Framework Diagram
Initiatives
SUBARU is engaged in activities to visualize and improve health issues, divided into the three categories of physical health, mental health, and organizational health.
Physical Health
By encouraging employees to undergo regular health checkups, we are striving to promote early detection of lifestyle-related diseases among employees and help those suffering from the diseases to recover. We also collect data about employees with some signs of these diseases, including numerical data, to help them improve their lifestyles and prevent the outset of the diseases.
Initiatives for regular health checkups and reexaminations
In addition to regular health checkups, we recommend 100% of employees who are subject to reexamination to undergo medical checkups and share a portion of the cost for those who need to take reexaminations. In this way, we support our employees in receiving appropriate medical treatment. We use the high-risk approach to provide those determined to be at high health risk with advice from public health nurses and provide guidance to raise their health awareness, including via seminars for health maintenance and promotion.
Activities for better physical fitness and dietary habits
We use the population approach in our preventive activities, and have introduced body composition analyzers at all sites to visualize not only BMI but also muscle mass and fat mass. We are also expanding activities throughout SUBARU to make people aware of the importance of balanced physical fitness. In addition, we have implemented a total health promotion plan (THP), visualizing physical fitness and proposing a variety of physical exercise programs for employees derived from this information, while also holding seminars to help them improve their dietary habits.
Measures against smoking
We are implementing measures to completely separate smoking areas from non-smoking areas at our sites, and we are taking action to reduce the ratio of smokers to below 28% and prohibit smoking on our premises by 2025. We have established internal clinics on our sites’ premises to help smokers stop smoking, made efforts to provide our program for quitting smoking online during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are cooperating with the health insurance association to encourage smoking employees to meet the challenge of quitting smoking. Moreover, we give financial support to employees who visit external clinics to stop smoking.
Increasing employees’ health awareness at the canteens
At all our canteens, we provide healthy dishes prepared under the supervision of registered dietitians so that employees can enjoy meals rich in vegetables. We also provide low-salt, low-fat, high-protein, and low-sugar dishes alternatively from day to day, with a view to helping employees raise their health awareness by eating at the canteens.
Mental Health (Prevention of Mental Illness)
We are implementing “self-care” and “line care” measures for the prevention and early detection of mental illness among employees. We have also set up a consultation service so that employees can receive follow-ups from industrial health staff.
For employees who took leave due to mental illness, we proactively support them when they return to their workplaces.
Self-care
We utilize self-care training and stress checks so that participants can learn how to self-manage their mental health, and new employees are provided with training on internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (iCBT).
Line care
We have formulated the Line Care Guidelines and include line care training in the collective training for managers, held twice a year, and use the results from collective analysis of employees’ stress checks to take improvement actions at the workplace level for those workplaces found to have high health risk. For the departments engaging in technological development, we foster workplace improvement activities in which employees themselves voluntarily work to revitalize their workplaces. We are also expanding management systems that increase their work motivation to the entire Group, focused on administrative departments, and enhance bidirectional communications between managers and their subordinates, with support from staff in charge of industrial health. These measures are contributing to preventing the onset of mental illness and mitigating the lengths of these illnesses among employees.
Return to work program (for return to work on a trial basis and gradual return to full-time work)
We have implemented a program to support the smooth return to the workplace for employees who have taken leave. In this program, employees can return to work on a trial basis and gradually step up their hours as they return to full-time work.
Organizational Health (Improving Psychological Safety)
We are carrying out trials of praise, acknowledgment, and appreciation activities to improve employees’ intrinsic motivation and psychological safety. Using IT tools, we are working to create workplaces where employees can work with greater peace of mind and where they can take on challenges in their own unique way by strengthening peer bonds between employees and visualizing the exchange of appreciation in the workplace.
Recognized as a Certified Health & Productivity Management Outstanding Organization for 2022
For the second consecutive year, SUBARU has been recognized as a Certified Health & Productivity Management Outstanding Organization in the large enterprise category (White 500) for 2022 by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Nippon Kenko Kaigi (Japan Health Council).
Going forward, we will continue to accelerate a variety of health promotion activities with the purpose of improving the health of our employees—the people who bring happiness to our customers—and their families.
