Social
Basic Policy on Human Rights
The freee Group is committed to its mission, “Empower Small Businesses to Take Center Stage,” and aims to create an environment where everyone can manage their business freely and easily. As a company contributing to society, the freee Group, under its Basic Policy on Human Rights, works to deepen understanding of human rights of all stakeholders related to its corporate activities and strives to achieve a society where human rights are respected by building on the worldview that the Group pursues and the experiences that it offers.
DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion)
Establishment of the Diversity Promotion Office
To ensure that each one of its employees can achieve their full potential even as the organization scales up, the freee Group established the “Diversity Promotion Office” in 2018, and has been working to build an environment that emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) so that diverse people can work comfortably and deliver outstanding performance.
We have been implementing various DEI initiatives across the board in the Group. As a company-wide event to promote the development of our corporate culture, we provide a training program for all employees to experience unconscious biases in a simulation. In this program, we organize a workshop involving the User Experience (UX) team to learn about disabilities and how a person feels when the ability to see, hear, speak, or move one’s arms is restricted.
Empowering diverse employees
The freee Group has been working on a range of initiatives to build an environment where diverse employees including LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other gender minorities) can realize their full potential, from providing company-wide awareness-raising programs to establishing the hotlines that take into consideration diverse employees including same-sex partners. In recognition of these efforts, we have won the Gold award of PRIDE Index hosted by work with Pride for two consecutive years and the D&I Award.
In addition, we monitor the ratio of female managers and the ratio of female recruits, and are implementing concrete measures to empower female employees, such as mentoring.
Creating a workplace environment where people with disabilities can work comfortably
We are working to create an environment where people with disabilities can work comfortably, calling this commitment “Universal Employment” within the freee Group.
Caring about disabled people has spread across the Group, taking root in various forms, such as paying special attention to seating, marking office signs and supplies in braille, adding captions to images of internal and external presentation materials, and supplementing presentation of tables and charts with verbal descriptions. We also take color blind people into consideration when selecting colors. At our new office in Osaki, we will work to create an environment that takes universal design into account.
In addition, we utilize freee’s accessibility-conscious services in-house to promote the development of an environment where disabled people can work comfortably.
Promoting employees’ global activities
The freee Group has overseas operations (in the Philippines) where many local employees are making strong contributions.
We are promoting collaboration among our Group entities to enhance our overall technological capabilities and working on human resource development to help each one of our employees achieve their full potential, while also pursuing organizational management that drives innovation.
Establishment of the policy on occupational safety and health and mental health
Occupational safety and health
The freee Group recognizes that it is its vital role to ensure that all of its employees stay safe and healthy and can work excitedly, as well as in good health and productively, and feel their personal growth and the blessing of work. In compliance with laws and regulations, we have established the Heath Committee, and are working to make continuous improvements by implementing measures that are essential to preventing hazards or health problems from occurring to our employees. In addition, we send our occupational physicians and health supervisors to workplaces for inspections in order to detect any safety and health issues at an early stage and implement improvement measures.
Mental health
The freee Group surveys all of its employees every two weeks to monitor their daily conditions to ensure that any significant changes can be detected early, even for those employees who work from home. In addition, we have established a counseling center that individual employees can contact to directly consult our affiliated occupational physicians and psychology counselors concerning physical and mental issues.
Efforts to achieve work-life balance
Helping employees manage both career and family
With the aim of achieving a work-life balance, the freee Group has put various systems in place to ensure that each of its employees can work excitedly, as well as in good health and productively, and feel their personal growth and the blessing of work. Not only do we have leave systems, including childcare leave and nursing care leave, in accordance with laws and regulations, but we have also established our “Back to Office after Maternity Leave Support System”* to eliminate employees’ concerns that they might have to wait for a long time to receive childcare services of authorized nursery schools for their children and also help employees return to work, in order to create an environment where even after there are changes in their lifestyles, employees can work confidently in the freee Group and continue to grow.
In addition, we provide a training guidebook for employees and managers.
* Back to Office after Maternity Leave Support System
Under this system, the Company pays an employee or a contract employee who has given birth and enrolled the child in an unauthorized nursery school up to 100,000 yen per month, for a maximum of one year after the enrollment in the unauthorized nursery school, to compensate for the difference between the unauthorized nursery school fee and the authorized nursery school fee after deducting from local government subsidies. (This also applies to children enrolled in certified nursery schools.)
Developing systems that allow flexible work arrangements
With regard to work arrangements, we have introduced a flexible working hours system and a discretionary labor system, as well as the “freee Work Styles” system, in which employees can select shorter working hours not only for engaging in domestic work, childcare, and nursing care but at any time they like, in order to help employees to work in diverse ways and achieve a work-life balance.
In addition, employees are allowed to use a work-from-home (remote work) system and to have a second job to the extent that it does not affect their work at freee.
Efforts to monitor and maintain at appropriate levels employees’ working hours
We have introduced a system to send an alert mail from freee HR to a member who is working at such a rate where the overtime work are expected to exceed 45 hours a month and to the manager of the member.
Enhancement of employee engagement and human resource development initiatives
Enhancing employee engagement
Since its founding, the freee Group has continued to work to help employees work more comfortably and enhance employee engagement, and has been ranked in the top 10 companies of “Best Workplaces” for eight consecutive years.
Specifically, we identify organizational issues, including those related to employee engagement, through an annual company-wide survey and regular team surveys, and in order to enhance employees’ intrinsic motivation, we are making efforts to spread our management philosophy across the Group and foster our corporate culture, ensure that employees can feel their personal growth and contribution to freee more strongly, and strengthen their emotional commitment.
Moreover, under our ”Growth Vision Sharing” system, each of our employees lay out a vision for their own career and this vision is taken into consideration when jobs are assigned. This is aimed at achieving both employees’ personal goals and the freee Group’s mission at the same time.
Initiatives for human resource development and leadership development
Since the founding of freee, we have been proactively investing in onboarding. As the freee Group continues to scale up, we remain committed to doing so. We have established a process that enables new employees to demonstrate their full potential in terms of culture, duty, and roles as soon as they join, providing more than 20 onboarding programs, which feature sessions hosted by CxOs.
Under the “freee Style HR System”, the mainstay of our human resource management systems, managers come together and discuss individual employees’ achievements and growth on a quarterly basis and provide concrete qualitative feedback and stretch assignments to effectively support individual employees’ growth in ways that fit their respective situations.
In addition, we actively engage in management training and leadership development. Specifically, we provide management training programs when a member starts a new position as well as a few months after and implement a regular 180-degree survey and feedback, while also offering selected employees a leadership development program. In recognition of these efforts, we received the Management Section Award of Work Story Award2020.
Aiming for services to a society where "Everyone Can Take Center Stage in Business”
The freee Group has set out a vision of providing an “Integrated Management Platform for Everyone to Manage Business Freely.” We have been working to enhance accessibility, considering that we should ensure that everyone can use the freee Group’s services.
We have continuously improved accessibility for our existing services such as freee Accounting and freee HR. Besides that, we have built-in accessibility in the development of our new services, which are freee Project Management and freee Ordering.
To make the development of high-accessibility products a sustainable effort, we provide relevant training for all employees and also conduct quality inspections involving disabled employees that include the perspective of accessibility.
Moreover, we have developed our accessibility guidelines based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) formulated by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an NPO engaging in the standardization of web technology, as well as an accessibility checklist, and are making continuous efforts to improve the accessibility of the freee Group’s services. Furthermore, we have published these guidelines, checklist, and training materials for not only the freee Group but also for third parties to refer to in service development.
