Creating an environment where foreigners can work with peace of mind

Q.Why did your company decide to take on interns? What did you aim to achieve?

The service area of our corporation has seen the advance of aging population and population drain, having difficulty in securing staff for nursing care employees. With the EPA (Economic Partnership Agreement) alone, it is difficult to secure employees, so we thought we need to open our doors to foreign exchange students and technical interns as well. For that purpose, we wanted to create an environment where foreigners can feel comfortable in coming to Japan and working. In order to create the environment and system for employing nursing care staff, we want to hear the opinions of foreigners, so we applied to this program. As foreign nursing care staff increase, problems can be expected to arise from differences in culture and customs, so making preparations to respond to those issues is another objective.

Utilizing the opinions and suggestions from a foreigner’s perspective, we prepared materials that will be helpful for future management

Q.What kind of internship did you run? What difficulties did you face and how did you resolve them?

First, in order to get the intern to know about this facility, we decided to have her learn while checking the manual etc. During those activities, just around that time there was a breakout of the norovirus, and we asked the intern to prepare a dual Japanese-English version of a first response manual. Japanese staff took pictures to be used, and handed them to the intern. The intern looked at them, and said “foreigners won’t understand these”, and suggested retaking the photos from a foreigner’s perspective. The finished manual was quite detailed, and received high praise as easy to understand among foreign staff. In addition, for the training of foreign staff, he also made a response flow chart when an accident occurs, manuals for norovirus and influenza, etc. Finally, she made an explanation video for these facilities for Vietnamese people. We plan to make use of this video in recruitment activities for Vietnamese staff going forward.

We noticed what was lacking in the system until now, and learned the required stance for working together with foreign staff

Q.Comparing before and after the internship, what effects did it have on you, your employees, or your organization?

The biggest success was reforming the awareness of Japanese staff regarding working together with foreign staff. Until now, we have had an active stance on accepting foreigners in these facilities, and believed we had sufficient measure in place to that end. However, through this internship, we realized that our stance that “we will also have foreigners work here following the methods of these facilities”, is not making an environment that is easy to work at from the perspective of foreigners. Methods of training and materials were only those made by Japanese people from a Japanese perspective. As pointed out by the intern, the meaning of symbols on flow charts is difficult for foreigners to understand, and we also realized it is necessary to explain the meaning of procedures when explain work procedures. Suggestions given to us from the intern during the internship were all quite valuable, and we intend to use them for future hiring and training of foreign staff.