Creating a Safe, Healthy and Comfortable Workplace Environment

At FamilyMart, we believe that the health of our employees and everyone involved constitutes a vital foundation for realizing our vision of the future. Besides formulating a corporate Health Charter, as outlined below, we are also focusing on putting the right systems to promote in place, and on realizing effective health management.

Under the direction of the President, who also serves as Chief Wellness Officer (CWO), FamilyMart’s Health Management Office (with our industrial physicians and public health nurses), Human Resources Department, Labor Union, and The Health Insurance Union, collaborate closely on the sharing of information and take steps to enhance employees’ health.

In addition, meetings of the Industrial Safety and Health Committee are held on a monthly basis at each FamilyMart business location. Company-wide issues are shared at the regional level, and measures are discussed for addressing regional issues and situations. We are also putting in place a system whereby suggestions from the regional level are channeled through the Central Industrial Safety and Health Committee at head office so that company-wide feedback can be provided.

Furthermore, FamilyMart has implemented an industrial safety and health management system. We will continue to promote voluntary safety and health activities in each region to prevent work-related accidents, promote health of employees, and improve safety and health levels overall.

As for health measures, we set a goal to improve each and every employee’s performance and energize the organization.

We will establish measures to create an environment where all employees are healthy in both mind and body and are able to maximize their capabilities and take on challenges with enthusiasm.

Building on the foundation provided by statutory industrial safety and health management, we have identified four key themes to focus on that have also been positioned as major health issues by the Japanese government, lifestyle habits, cancer, dementia, and mental health.

We check the effectiveness of the performed measures with health examinations, stress checks, and health awareness surveys, and we review, plan, and implement measures that will lead to the improvement of numerical statistics for health targets.

As we promote health-oriented management, we have been holding meetings with the Health Insurance Union to exchange opinions every month, discussing the current issues, how to promote health measures, participation rates regarding the measures, results and effectiveness, as well as further improvements.

Note: The above includes joint measures with health insurance unions and labor unions

In order to achieve enhanced collaboration with the Health Insurance Union, FamilyMart established a memorandum to promote health collaboratively with the Health Insurance Union in fiscal 2022.

This memorandum has enabled streamlining of the health management operations for preventing mid- to long-term lifestyle diseases, cancer, and implementing mental health measures. It has also made it easier to implement and promote both FamilyMart’s and the Health Insurance Union’s health improvement measures, allowing us to further promote the betterment of employees’ health.

As our employees continue to work remotely, we introduced stretch videos and tips about the walking activity. We will continue to take effective health improvement measures for the improvement of BMI values.

In the fiscal 2021 and 2022, we implemented a health initiative called the “Style-up Program,” a weight management program based on dietary treatment to work on the improvement of BMI values.

In the nationwide Industrial Safety and Health Committee meetings, our industrial physicians emphasized the necessity of quitting smoking. 
In the fiscal year 2021, we performed a quit-smoking program twice a year. As a result, though gradually, the smoking rate of FamilyMart employees has gone down to 30% in the fiscal year 2021 and 28.9% in the fiscal 2022, achieving the reduction goal of over 5% compared to the fiscal year 2019.

Our industrial physicians also spoke about the importance of having breakfast in the nationwide Industrial Safety and Health Committee meetings, and conducted an awareness campaign with the keywords being “go to bed early, wake up early, and have breakfast.”

We will continue the campaign emphasizing the importance of meals by providing information such as cooking using our own products.

The style-up program conducted in the fiscal 2021 and 2022 was based on a dietary treatment plan that limits caloric intake for dinner, and so this has contributed to the improvement of BMI values as well as the establishment of breakfast habits and a reduction in alcohol consumption.

FamilyMart provides financial assistance for secondary health examinations to promote early discovery and treatment of diseases. With this, we aim to reduce employees with abnormal results of health examinations and eliminate absenteeism and presenteeism.

It is said that mental illnesses tend to relapse, and so FamilyMart has a return-to-work support program to help employees avoid taking additional leave.

The return-to-work support program helps achieve mental preparedness for the employee and their manager, creates a roadmap for their return, necessary procedures, and conditions of return, so that the employee can focus on recuperation while feeling safe, and prepare for their return.

The return-to-work support program also has a system to allow employees to practice commuting and rehabilitation of coming into work to reduce the rate of recurring leave from mental illness.

Starting from the fiscal 2022, we have introduced an initiative to prevent the recurrence of unplanned employee leave, particularly in cases related to mental health, within our workplaces.

This program offers tailored line care training to managers, aiming to minimize incidences of employees needing to take unplanned leave repeatedly from the same workplace.

The occurrence of unplanned employee leave represents a significant labor loss and places an additional burden on the remaining workforce. To address this, we are actively implementing various measures to help minimize occurrences.

The program was created by the Health Insurance Union and designed for employees who are judged to have a high risk from prediction of disease onset and severity of possessed risk factors among those who are being treated for lifestyle diseases at medical institutions. These employees are provided with a dedicated device to count and record steps, salt intake, and heart rate on an app on a smartphone to visualize their lifestyle habits as well as phone consultations with a healthcare worker. The program essentially implements a lifestyle habit improvement plan that is appropriate for each employee.

The lifestyle habits improvement program by the Health Insurance Union was designed to reduce as much as possible the risk of employees developing metabolic syndrome in the future.

A 6-week online program, featuring live seminars and videos related to exercise and diet, will be accessible through a dedicated website on the health app, designed to help participants establish healthy habits.

This quit-smoking program allows employees to utilize video calls on a PC, smartphone, or tablet to get an online consultation from a doctor without the necessity of traveling to a medical institution.

We conducted this program twice in the fiscal 2022 just like the previous fiscal 2021, in hopes of having more people quit smoking due to COVID-19-related risks as one of the motivators.

Related to World No Tobacco Day (May 31) set by the WHO (World Health Organization) to promote quitting smoking, we have promoted awareness in the nationwide Industrial Safety and Health Committee meetings, encouraged people to stop smoking on the portal site, and created digital signage and unique posters to appeal to smokers. FamilyMart focuses on reducing the smoking rate in this manner.

FamilyMart conducts stress check to not limited workplaces with 50 or more employees but all employees, performs collective analysis on the stress check results, including the rate of high-stress employees, and implements improvement measures for the workplaces after analysis.

In addition to offering resilience training for our younger employees, we conduct monthly mental health seminars open to all employees. These seminars cover topics such as self-care and line care training.

FamilyMart issues health news every month, providing useful information for our employees (mental healthcare, guidance for health events, etc.).

Health-oriented management does not work with just the company-side efforts. The labor union (FamilyMart Union) collaborates with the company to conduct health improvement measures.

So far, we have issued a healthcare book, held RIZAP’s live seminars, RIZAP’s online health seminars (e-learning), and in fiscal 2021, we introduced RIZAP’s 5-min training, RIZAP channel, and the Style-up Program along with RIZAP’s seminars. We have continuously been implementing various health improvement measures.

In fiscal 2023, we initiated the distribution of a new RIZAP Column in electronic format and established a corporate contract with RIZAP. We are committed to collaborating with the labor union to advance our health management initiatives.

In addition to our own health improvement promotion measures, we proactively leverage the Health Insurance Union’s webinars to improve our employees’ health awareness.

In the fiscal 2023, we are expanding our course offerings to include not only the existing themes of sleep, stress management, women’s health, nursing care, and dementia but also introducing new topics like anger management, eye health, and dental health. This expansion will bring the total number of available courses to 19. We encourage employees to take advantage of these courses as valuable opportunities to acquire knowledge. Information about these courses will be disseminated through health news updates and Health Committee meetings, all in support of our commitment to promoting health management.

We will continue to increase the opportunities for our employees to receive information by collaboratively promoting health with the Health Insurance Union and maximizing the use of various channels.

Half of FamilyMart’s employees take less than 6,000 steps per day on average, displaying a significant gap from target value of steps set by the government (Health Japan 21: 9,000 steps for males, 8,500 steps for females).

As a motivator to increase the number of steps even a little and eliminate lack of exercise, we hold walking events led by the Labor Union twice a year (spring and autumn).

This walking event is a regular health promotion event that has been taking place for over 15 years. In the event held in spring 2023, as many as 2,362 employees participated and increased their physical activity.

As remote work is promoted, communication among employees is one of the challenges remote work is facing.

As part of our methods to promote communication at the workplace, FamilyMart partially assists financially for the activities.

Our employees have come up with and held various unique ideas such as online sightseeing and online escape room games.

As we drive health-oriented management, we conduct a health awareness survey every year for the purpose of understanding employees’ health awareness and behavior and developing measures that are effective and appropriate for their needs.

By conducting a fixed-point observation of changes in employees’ health awareness and behavior, we are working to assess the effectiveness of each measure and the entire health management system.

Survey questions consist of health awareness, lifestyle habits, mental health, and productivity. In terms of FamilyMart’s health-related issues discovered from the results, we are now seeing low physical activity and low count of average steps per day in addition to increased incidences of being overweight with a BMI value of 25 or more, smoking rates, and rates of skipping breakfast.

We need to establish well-regulated lifestyles in order to help address these issues. We promote attractive health improvement measures to assist with improving the lifestyle of employees as well as increasing their physical activity levels so that our employees’ awareness and behavior will change.

We let our employees know of all the survey results (compared to the previous year) through the health news, Industrial Safety and Health Committee meetings, and the in-house portal site.

The average daily step count of our employees has shown steady improvement. In particular, the percentage of employees taking less than 4,000 steps per day decreased from 24.4% to 22.1%, and the percentage of employees averaging more than 8,000 steps per day increased from 23.2% to 24.1%. These results suggest a gradual shift in employee health awareness, with a growing number of employees engaging in regular walking. These positive changes can be attributed to the ongoing health education initiatives we have implemented.

It is said that a concrete method to increase the amount of physical activity in daily life, it is useful to increase the physical activity centered around walking and to set a target number of steps.

We will persist in actively conducting educational initiatives to enlighten our employees, along with hosting ongoing walking events.

Average steps per day for a FamilyMart employee

It is of utmost importance to secure a work environment where anyone who works at any stores and offices can feel safe and comfortable. At the Industrial Safety and Health Committee meetings held every month, we share information about work-related accidents that happened nationwide and exchange opinions between employers and employees in order to prevent the same type of accidents in the future.

We will continue to aim for a safe workplace that promotes everyone involved with FamilyMart to work energetically and take measures to prevent work-related accidents day by day.

We have set up a dedicated health consultation service staffed by medical professionals, achieving a system that enables our public health nurses to respond quickly to employees’ health concerns.

We are committed to creating an environment in which employees can feel free to ask questions and talk about their various concerns. Other than the mentioned service, we also have women-only consultation services for power harassment, sexual harassment, and birth and childcare by phone as well as email. Consultations for sexual harassment, birth, and childcare are always conducted by female employees.

In Tamachi head office, we prepare all kinds of equipment and take initiatives for promoting the health of our employees.

The health of our franchisees, with whom we work closely together, is just as vital to the ongoing development of our business as the health of our own employees.

We are implementing the following measures to help improve the health of FamilyMart franchisees.

We will work to ensure that our franchisees can find time for their checkups.

Each store has the opportunity to submit up to three applications for cost subsidies per year. Additionally, we are actively enhancing the convenience of the subsidy payment process through the introduction of a system for that purpose.

We offer a range of inexpensive group insurance policies, along with medical and injury cover, so that our franchisees can run FamilyMart stores with peace of mind, and to strengthen welfare provision for store staff.

We have rolled out a range of different projects and products to enhance the health of all FamilyMart stakeholders.