Designing a Well-being Management Strategy

Our mission is to design genuine well-being management strategies.

While factors like employee enthusiasm, health and vitality, and emotional attachment to the organization are certainly noteworthy, they represent just a single dimension in the multi-faceted landscape of well-being management.

We believe that the essence of achieving genuine well-being management lies in enabling employees to lead fulfilling lives through their work.

In the Post-Well-Being era, "goodness" will become increasingly critical in the field of management.

In the Post-Well-Being Survey that we conducted, we examined a wide range of factors related to well-being and concluded that goodness—defined as a good heart guided by ethical principles—will likely emerge as the cornerstone of future management strategies.

This perspective aligns with the writings of renowned business leader Kazuo Inamori who contends that an elevated sense of goodness is a crucial factor in leading a happy and fulfilling life. He further champions the integration of this goodness into management practices.

We believe this alignment with our findings is more than mere coincidence.

Good causes lead to good results, bad causes lead to bad results.

Goodness circulates through direct reciprocity, exemplified by actions such as returning favors, and also through indirect reciprocity, illustrated by acts like repaying kindness. As the goodness continues to circulate and create a chain reaction, it has the potential to gradually spread across the world, ultimately contributing to making the world a better place. Corporate management also has a role to play in this cycle and chain, making the need for management based on goodness imperative.

The circulation of goodness signifies that performing good deeds with a good heart will bring good results back to you. This can be considered akin to the Buddhist principle of karma, which posits that desirable and undesirable acts produce corresponding good and bad results.

Goodness-driven products or services warrant a higher price tag.

According to a 2021 survey on brand purpose by Hakuhodo, younger consumers—particularly those in their 20s—are more likely to make purchases based on a brand's values or mission. This trend diminishes as age increases. Furthermore, one in five consumers who align with a brand's values are willing to pay a premium for its products or services. This suggests that a brand's value increases when the company's philosophy or mission resonates as good-hearted with consumers. As the current generation in their 20s ages into their 30s over the next decade, this trend is likely to gain even more traction.

Therefore, the future of corporate management will increasingly require us to lead with good-hearted philosophies, build organizations that engage in good-hearted practices, and conduct business operations that embody these good-hearted principles.

We aim to integrate goodness-driven management philosophy, goodness-driven organizational culture, and goodness-driven business models.

If a business is driven solely by the pursuit of profit, customers will see through the self-interested approach, preventing the business from adding value through goodness.

To become a goodness-driven enterprise, it is essential to adopt a management philosophy focused on benefiting others, as well as to sincerely engage in realizing a goodness-driven organizational culture.

However, the specifics of what constitutes a goodness-driven philosophy or organizational culture are not yet fully understood.

To that end, we are conducting field research in the corporate world.

We are exploring factors that go beyond Personal well-being.

In our research, we categorize the factors affecting well-being into four tiers: financial, personal, collective, and whole.

Within this framework, despite the presumption that collective (relationship) and whole (holistic) well-being are essential for goodness-driven management, these aspects have not yet received much attention.

Currently, we are focusing on factors such as self-transcendence, awe, altruism, and debt of gratitude within the collective and whole tiers.

We are developing technologies essential for genuine well-being management.

Currently, the practice of well-being management is predominantly spearheaded by small to medium-sized enterprises, where workforces are often limited to a few hundred employees. This raises questions about the adaptability of successful strategies and processes from these smaller settings to much larger organizations, with employee numbers reaching into the thousands.

In more intimate corporate environments, it is entirely possible to nurture a rich tapestry of relationships throughout the entire workforce. However, as an organization expands to include thousands of employees, the presence of unfamiliar faces among colleagues becomes not just possible but inevitable. This situation introduces complexities in maintaining a culture focused on well-being through meaningful relationships. With the growth in employee numbers, the imperative for innovative technologies that can effectively promote genuine well-being management comes into sharper focus.