Hello! On the fifth day of Advent, Nakamura, who is in charge of the D&I team within the Human Resources & General Affairs Department, and Dovile, also a member of the same team, would like to introduce the initiatives at ExaWizards that support diversity and inclusion - highly important values when it comes to the future society.

D&I at ExaWizards

While diversity and inclusion - D&I - can sometimes be simplified, it is a very broad term encompassing many different themes that are highly important to us. Do you know why our company was called  “ExaWizards”? The name consists of two words - “exa” - meaning quintillion, and “wizards” - sorcerers or experts, referring to the idea that we need a team of employees with diverse values, various domain knowledge as well as many unique skills all working together to be able to face the challenges in order to “Solve social issues through Artificial Intelligence for future generations.” (In this Advent calendar we will be introducing many employees from various fields, so make sure to check the other articles as well!) As such, many unique wizards came to work at ExaWizards, our business kept growing, the comprehensive employee number surpassed 400, and we naturally arrived at the topic of D&I. 

In December 2021, we released our official D&I statement in which we talk about 3 kinds of diversities.

Furthermore, to realize these three types of diversities, we are promoting various initiatives from four different perspectives.

ExaWizards established a "D&I Committee," that includes members in various positions and departments starting with, but not limited to the Human Resources and General Affairs department. The committee is divided into sub-committees that focus on different areas such as policy & training, workstyle, multicultural topics, recruitment, etc., and the members participate on a voluntary basis.  We believe that one of the things that makes ExaWizards great is that the volunteer members are addressing the topics that they themselves find important within the D&I field, as opposed to only targeting the issues indicated by the organization. In this article, we would like to focus on the activities supporting the foreign national members.

Support for Foreign National Members Available at ExaWizards

As of December 1, 2022, ExaWizards has employees from 22 different countries and regions working together. We have various support initiatives to help our foreign national members maximize their potential at ExaWizards.

One of such initiatives is the translation and interpretation of various meetings. For example, while our management meetings are open to everyone to promote the transparency of the information, the main language for the discussions during these meetings is Japanese. In this case, the D&I team translates the meeting minutes to English weekly. Furthermore, when it comes to the bi-weekly all company meetings, we not only prepare all of the materials in English, but also provide interpretation services to ensure that as much information as possible reaches all of our members.

In addition to the interpretation and translation, on occasion we also conduct activities to promote mutual understanding such as “Easy/Kind Japanese” language introduction sessions, unconscious bias training with concrete examples and solutions, as well as sharing the D&I survey results on a regular basis. One of the key points of these initiatives is that we are encouraging all employees to deepen their understanding of diversity and inclusion topics in the form of training.

Furthermore, we have also created a “Life in Japan” channel on our company’s internal communication platform where everyone can share and discuss information about living in Japan. To help with the language learning, we are holding the Japanese classes (“Nihongo Classroom”) in-house, too.

ExaWizards hopes that in the future even more wizards from various countries will be joining us. Therefore, we are going to continue actively challenging the ways to lower the language barrier.

Our Future Aims

We believe that in order to realize CCA (Cultivate Collective Awareness) and MDT (Mission-Driven Teamwork) that are a part of our credo (code of conduct), it is important to understand each other's values and respect each other as we work toward solving the problems. The community of our foreign national employees including the members joining us directly from abroad has continued to grow, and as such, to keep promoting the diversity and inclusion between the members coming from different cultural backgrounds, we have even more initiatives that we would like to implement. In the future, we would like to introduce the "language exchange" sessions where the participants could practice speaking each other’s languages (with the Japanese and English being our starting point), as well as the "culture days" allowing everyone to share more information about their home countries in person.

ExaWizards will continue to grow to become a more diverse organization. If you are interested in becoming a part of building the foundation of such a company, please take a look at the career opportunities in the Human Resources Planning and Accounting fields.

If you would like to apply for a casual chat first, please click here.

※Japanese here.