SMBC Group and Atrae Join Forces on SMBC Wevox (Part 2): Improving Organizations and Creating New Value

Drawing on the functionality of Atrae’s Wevox, we will develop SMBC Wevox as a digital solution that improves organizational capabilities and supply it to customers through the SMBC Group’s network. We will also make our own updates based on the big data gathered.

SMBC Wevox will visualize intangible organizational capabilities like employees’ psychological states and characteristics and the organizational culture in real time, opening the way for better decision-making and actions within the organization. The regular survey function, which is designed to minimize the burden on employees, enables agile and flexible identification of what’s going on by attribute and unit, such as department, age range, and job type. And the abundance of know-how and actual examples of organizational improvement built into the service, along with AI support, will encourage workplace-driven improvements. SMBC Wevox brings on board all the strengths and know-how of Atrae’s Wevox, which as of August 2023 was in use by 2,940 organizations.

Because we believe that enhancing organizational capabilities is the most effective way of increasing corporate value.

Until now, Japanese companies have really focused on the concept of operational excellence.*1 They’ve emphasized the creation of mechanisms that can deliver strong performance independent of the human players, and they’ve been able to improve performance simply by making sure that those mechanisms are functioning correctly. This was certainly an effective strategy while the economy was growing, and Japanese companies saw it as a source of global competitiveness. I think that knowing how to build the mechanisms that enable a company to continue to make perfect products is a Japanese strength that we should definitely hang on to.

Well, that depends on which business area you see our services as falling into, but I think we definitely have a tail wind.

When the 2020 global pandemic led to more people working from home, a lot of organizations realized that workplace relationships weren’t as strong as they thought, that team status was surprisingly opaque, and that what they really needed was real-time tracking. I think companies are now far more aware of the importance of management based on real-time visualization of organizational and workplace status, as well as of heightened employee engagement.

The reality is, though, that many companies still don’t give much priority to agile organization-building, and there’s also a deep-rooted sense that organizational issues are the province of management and HR. But efforts to improve the organization are for the benefit of every person working at that organization. I feel that the biggest challenge is creating a culture in which all employees think about what could be done to improve the time that they personally spend at their company and what organizational investment would produce the highest returns.

While mandatory human capital disclosure has certainly been a step in the right direction, it has also created a new problem, which is that more companies are just putting in the token effort of conducting a single annual company-wide questionnaire with no follow up.

Actually, we don’t have a specific target area. If I had to come up with a description, it would be “all customers that are serious about improving their organization.” I want to get this service out not just to management and HR personnel but to everyone who, right at this moment, wants to enhance their organization and their team. The aim is to support all organizations that can relate to our efforts, regardless of their scale or business area, so that we can realize our vision of making Japan a country to be proud of.

Conventional organization management tools have been created based on the idea of making the most efficient use of people as resources. The tools and services that we offer, however, are designed to maximize human potential. There aren’t yet many success stories to hold up in our area, but through our services, we want to provide the world with various models for achieving that potential maximization.

The SMBC Group plans to continue offering the business support that we’ve pursued to date along with the new support for enhancing organizations. We want to create a virtuous cycle in Japan whereby we improve business while also boosting the professional well-being of the personnel engaged in that business, with corporate value increasing as a result.

Our ultimate goal is to contribute to the development of the Japanese economy and realize our vision of making Japan a country to be proud of.

In the first part of this series, we talked about the State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report showing that only five percent of Japanese workers feel motivated and engaged at work, which was the lowest of the countries surveyed. Conversely, though, this means that the current aggregate market value of Japanese companies is being generated with just five percent of their workers highly engaged. If we can raise that figure to 20 percent and improve employee performance, the aggregate market value should increase and lift the Japanese economy. Our goal is to enhance organizational capability throughout Japan to liberate the sensibilities of the Japanese people and reverse Japan’s lost 30 years.