Attracting talented people with benefits and succeeding new business in Japan

Companies in any countries need attractive benefits programs to hire and retain talented people. The same goes for newly established companies in Japan, it is important to provide the necessary programs at appropriate levels for the law, culture, and market standard in Japan. However, those companies have difficulties in providing competitive programs because of the following two issues.
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Issue 1: Health insurance structure and its impact on recruitment and retention capability

Japan has a national health insurance system, and companies are legally required to provide health insurance to their employees through the health insurance associations.

There are three types of health insurance associations; EHI(Employee’s Health Insurance/Kyokai Kenpo), Multi-employer HIA(Health Insurance Association), and own HIA.

A new company is allowed to join only EHI for the first year after establishment. This EHI provides just a statutory minimum insurance. Click here for the detailed explanations of health insurance associations.

The people your company is looking to hire are mostly covered by Multi-employer HIA at their current companies. If your company provides only the statutory minimum of the EHI, your benefits will be lower than those of other health insurance associations and your company's competitiveness in recruitment and retention of human resources will be at a disadvantage to the market.

So you should offer benefits programs that can fill the gap between the EHI and the Multi-employer HIA before joining Multi-employer HIA.

Issue 2 : Difficulties for creating benefits programs that is not legally required but customarily common.

You also need to consider to implement benefits above statutory in order to stay competitive in the recruitment market, not only statutory benefits.

To know the appropriate benefits programs and levels, you should get the appropriate market data and knowledge.

But it's not easy for newly established companies in Japan to know the common benefits programs and the levels among the companies in the same industry or in Japan.

If you provide less than the market, your recruiting competitiveness will be weaken.

On the other hand, if you provide employees benefits exceeding necessary ones, it will be difficult to reduce the benefits in the future.

Our service to support to solve the difficulties

Mercer's knowledge and data will help you determine what kind of programs & levels will have a competitive advantage in the Japanese market.

Our Service: We propose your company’s appropriate benefits based on your company's industry and HR strategy.

The areas in which we can offer proposals are as follows:

  • Insurance(Life, AD&D and Business Travel)
  • Disability (STD, LTD)
  • Healthcare(Medical, Dental, Vision and mental health)
  • Perquisites and Allowances
  • Childbirth, Childcare, and Family care
  • Leaves
  • Retirement

Options

  • Support for selection & applying Multi-employer Health Insurance Association
  • Creating Rules of employment
  • Introduce Insurance & medical checkup management outsourcing vendors

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