Summary of Research Findings

The HR (Human Resources) industry used to mainly deal with recruitment and staffing such as intermediary of human resources, job advertisement, and consulting. However, as a part of the measures against decreasing working population in Japan, companies are required to improve labor productivity, which has made HR department necessary to figure out a plan to improve labor productivity and contribute more in business performance. Such circumstances have come to require advanced HR services to address the challenges in HR as well as the entire organizations by coping with turnover-rate reduction after recruitment, revitalization of the whole organizations, improvement in employee engagement, and streamlining of labor management and entire HR tasks.

Innovative HR services in this research refer to overall services that are given business opportunities by the Government-promoted Work Style Reform and other innovative HR activities. The services are chiefly provided in the form of cloud services, targeting the following six categories: 1) Employee performance evaluations, HR management (talent management), 2) Recruitment (new way of recruitment, recruitment management and support), 3) Operational efficiency (HR and labor management), 4) Organizational improvement (engagement, prevention of turnover, health & productivity management), 5) Talent utilization and training (career building support, revitalization), and 6) Side jobs (skill sharing).

When observing the listed human resources companies since 2004, those listed have tended to be work efficiency service providers. While there had been no HR companies listed during the period between 2009 and 2012, i.e. after the Lehman's collapse, in 2016 and 2017, the companies such as Atrae,Inc. and Unipos Inc., working on organizational improvement were listed, indicating how the category gathered attention at that time. 2019 was the year that saw largest number of HR companies being listed in the past several years. Among such companies was kaonavi, inc., the company of HR management and assessment, the category that had never been listed before.

Noteworthy Topics

Emerge of Survey Focusing on Employee Mental Health

Overtime, working hours, employment patterns, and workers have diversified, as the following legislations were enacted, i.e., the amendment to the Act on Child Care and Family Care Leave in 2010, the revised Act for Stabilization of Employment of Older Persons in 2013, and the Act on Promotion of Women's Participation and Advancement in the Workplace in 2016.

It is a challenge for companies to improve labor productivity through such diversification of working styles, and employee engagement can be an important index.

Those enterprises engaged in health and productivity management, in which enterprises focus on and strategically work on their employees’ health from a management perspective under the Health & Productivity Stock Selection Program, were first selected in 2015 by Tokyo Stock Exchange and by METI which then selected“White 500” in 2017 to acknowledge large enterprises that strategically carry out efforts in cooperation with an insurer to manage employee health. Health and productivity management will be one of the growth strategies for companies to survive hereafter. While enterprises are shifting from business-oriented management to human-resources oriented management, quite a few attitude surveys have emerged since 2019, focusing on employees’ mental health.

Research Outline