Women’s College Alum Voices

Attending Sekisui House Women’s College has equipped me with various skills, including management and leadership skills, as well as the ability to identify and solve problems from a management perspective. This experience has convinced me that I wanted to develop my management perspective as a generalist to maximize the impact of the company’s core competencies, namely our technical capabilities and construction capabilities. It also motivated me to enroll in the Management Strategy Course at the Management School of the Kansai Productivity Center, and to embrace the challenge of pursuing an MBA. Additionally, the meaningful interactions I had with fellow students from the College and external experts have been invaluable, forming a trusted personal network that I consider my greatest asset.

I held the role of on-site supervisor when I was attending the College. During my second year of the training program, I worked on improving the implementation rate of exterior construction works, which take place before the main construction begins. Despite being a company-wide initiative with defined KPIs, its benefits had yet to be effectively implemented in on-site operations. Recognizing this as an issue, I proposed actionable steps to encourage proactive efforts. As a result, we successfully achieved our goal of improving implementation rate, and fostered a deeper understanding of the initiative as one that supports construction teams. Today, the initiative is a standard component integrated into our process planning.

Currently working at our head office, I am involved in company-wide operations. I apply the problem-solving skills acquired during my time at the College, as well as the information-gathering skills and techniques for tackling tasks. I find it rewarding to be able to approach problems that cannot be solved by one business office alone and work on making fundamental improvements. Given the rapidly changing social situation, we need to rethink and change construction site operations and management practices. I hope to drive innovations that will reinforce the company’s position as an industry leader, and transform our construction sites into examples that others aspire to follow.

In the work that I do, I was able to really feel and immediately put into practice the skills and ways of thinking that I learned at the Sekisui House Women’s College. I truly believe that while attending the College I got a real sense of the importance of analyzing problems and working on solutions. The reorganization of my workplace from the Corporate Social Responsibility Department to the ESG Management Promotion Headquarters was my tailwind, and it really provided me with an opportunity to reexamine the content of my work from a variety of perspectives—the added value produced by my work, quantifying effectiveness, or visualizing and quantifying my work.

In my second year on the program, I selected “Utilizing Social Contribution Activities for the Improvement of Corporate Value” as my theme. I used a questionnaire to survey employees regarding their activity status and level of awareness regarding social contribution activities, and based on the challenges that became apparent from the results of this survey I produced a proposal to strengthen our dissemination of information and our promotion of utilizing both “planning and development of housing education programs at exhibition halls” and the “Sekisui House Matching Program.”* During the results presentation to top management, I received lots of comments and feedback, which led to new realizations. I feel like this gave me a lot of food for thought when it came to taking on actual challenges.

After graduation, I set up an internal website, Volunteer Web, for all Sekisui House employees to apply to join volunteering activities with the content and location that suits them. The site went online in July 2021. In order to create systems and mechanisms to make the Sekisui House Matching Program more accessible, and I’ve also been planning the “Tsunagari Café,” an online café exclusively for Sekisui House employees. I’m also moving ahead with trials of a housing education program that will connect local elementary schools with exhibition halls over the Internet. The ability to create presentation materials, which I honed at the College, have been coming in handy not just in my day-to-day work but also in creating easy-to-understand slides at housing education presentations. I really value the experiences and relationships I got out of the College, and I hope to continue playing an active role in creating opportunities for people to make ESG a personal matter for themselves.

Studying at the Sekisui House Women’s College allowed me to take on my design work while keeping in mind the work policies of the company, its headquarters, and my branch. Up until that point, I had thought of those policies as being some far off thing, but this made me keenly aware of the need to recognize them as something that is right here beside each one of us. Since taking the course, I have noticed positive changes in myself, such as being able to take the lead in promoting various initiatives in the Planning & Design Section, and speaking up at branch meetings toward the goal of winning orders for added-value Sha Maison houses.

In my second year on the course, I turned my attention to the drop-off in the number of rental housing construction projects that is expected as a result of Japan’s aging population. I had the idea that we should aim for long-term stability in our branch’s business by breaking out of market rent and building high-added-value rental housing in accordance with Sekisui House’s price leader strategy. Have three-way meetings for each project between sales, design, and Sekisui House Real Estate, and move forward only after considering the optimal proposal; devise proposal contents that set us apart from the competition, such as including elevators; prepare materials in PowerPoint to make presentations that tell a “story”: I clearly presented these three initiatives, and it was decided that we would move ahead with them within our branch.

Now, all three initiatives have set in at the branch. The whole branch’s motivation was increased, and in terms of results we became the No. 1 branch in Japan. By providing good products and services, the number of orders increased, and this led to stable operations at our branch. Furthermore, while attending the Women’s College, I was able to talk with Sha Maison designers from other branches, and I was able to form relationships with them such that I am still in touch with them and can exchange information and advice. It was tough balancing my regular work with the training course, but I really feel like my efforts have paid off big-time.