Message from Management (Senior Executive Vice President)

Achieving a sustainable society and profit growth

When we look at the various issues that plague society these days, there are simply too many to mention--the increasingly tense global situation, circumstances related to carbon neutrality, the rapid increase in traffic and network loads due to a spike in remote operations spurred by COVID-19, and soaring oil prices to name a few.

The NTT Group aims to help achieve a sustainable society by promoting its own transformation in response to the direction of society and the economy and solving various social issues through its business operations. To ensure that the NTT Group keeps on track for sustainable growth, efforts have been made to grow and strengthen the new DOCOMO Group, coupled with significant restructuring of business segments from January 2022. In May 2022, we also announced reorganization of our global businesses. We are also aiming to boost corporate value through initiatives geared for ESGs, and in November 2021 we created and announced the NTT Group Global Sustainability Charter. In order to implement these initiatives, performance indicators for officer compensation was freshly updated covering aspects like amount of greenhouse gas emissions or ratio of women in management positions. Going forward, we will be making greater effort for the disclosure of non-financial information like utilization of human capital, while also preempting trends in social values likely to undergo significant changes such as environmental issues, in an attempt to achieve more advanced disclosure.

Achieving carbon neutrality

To reach carbon neutrality, around half of efforts to reduce energy consumption will come from increasing the efficiency of electricity usage while the other half will be from innovations based on IOWN. In addition to ongoing efforts towards energy-efficiency, we will also be rolling out measures such as switching to renewable energy sources for our power consumption. We are also looking at highlighting use cases and other benefits of IOWN with an eye toward commercialization.

Initiatives for human capital management

Human capital development is drawing a greater level of attention throughout society every year and is an area in which we will be placing a greater focus. . Strategic investment into human capital is considered a key factor underpinning "sustainability management" that aims to achieve both sustainability for society as well as corporate growth and earning power--we are planning to make improvements with a focus on the following three areas.

The first will be "linking management strategy and human resources strategy." In October 2021, NTT unveiled its "New Management Style." We believe that promoting diverse work styles and increasing opportunities to harness the capabilities of people from diverse backgrounds will help to achieve a more open, global and innovative business management style. We are promoting the participation of women, foreign employees and outside personnel as part of these efforts and introduced a jobbased personnel system last fiscal year to encourage self-guided career formation. We are moving ahead with a shift from company-driven career development to a system that allows employees to control the development of their own careers.

The second area is gaining an understanding (visualization) of the gap between available personnel and our human resources strategy, against the business model and management strategy we are striving to achieve. We aim to disclose various types of information required in response to trends in systems, laws and policies, and in response to requests like this from society. We are also looking at spurring effective investments toward human capital, by analyzing the gap in skills between the business model or management strategy that we are striving to achieve for the future, and the currently available personnel with their skills and specializations.

We consider "visualization of human capital" as an essential step for advancing both corporate and personnel growth to create value and subsequently a more prosperous society. Looking ahead, we will be engaging in discussion to develop a clear awareness and vision for investment into human capital, with efforts including defining our expectations of personnel that match our management strategy, implementing policies to facilitate securing and training, and establishing indicators and targets for monitoring the results.

The third area is establishing a corporate culture that encourages behavioral changes among individuals throughout the organization. We want to develop a culture that respects more open, flat and flexible communications, and diverse values, that also embrace the action of taking on challenges without fear of failure. To better visualize the way this culture is instilled, the NTT Group in fiscal 2021 revamped its existing Employee Satisfaction Survey, which focused on questions related to ease of working, and added questions related to job satisfaction. Approximately 130,000 Group employees in Japan responded.

By understanding current levels of engagement among NTT Group employees and the issues that need to be improved, and by taking action to make improvements, we hope to increase the number of highly engaged employees who identify with the company's and organization's policies and strategies, as well as feel pride and take initiative in their work.

The employee engagement rate has a major impact on labor productivity and is also directly related to business performance. This provided a clearer image of specific issues when viewed against domestic and international standards, and we will be investigating potential courses of action that can be taken to establish a corporate culture that encourages behavioral changes.

Management strategy and sustainability

Carbon neutrality and various policies related to human capital only make sense if they are tied to the management strategy and incorporated specifically within action plans. Initiatives aimed at achieving carbon neutrality can help to reduce the costs that society or companies would have to bear in the future and providing our initiatives as solutions could also result in potential business opportunities. We believe that advancing Diversity & Inclusion as part of the human resources strategy creates an open workplace environment and being able to harness the potential of diverse human resources in turn results in greater productivity. As work styles, unconstrained by location or time, become increasingly commonplace we introduced the Remote Standard from July 2022 to address the need for companies to provide flexible working arrangements. We will continue creating an environment where individual diversity can lead to dialogue, innovation and positive business outcomes.

The NTT Group will strive to become an innovative corporation spearheading societal transformation by inviting dialogue and communication with various market players and a broad range of stakeholders.