Mr. Umezawa :

Under the mission of “seeking the blossoming of new culture by promoting the convergence of Eastern and Western cultures,” Daito Bunka Institute operates three schools: Daito Bunka University, Daito Bunka University Daiichi High School, and Daito Bunka University Aogiri Kindergarten. As an Executive Director, Secretary General and Planning Director, I assist the chairman of the board and I am in charge of general management and operation of the institute, including corporate decision-making procedures, financial and office organizations, human resources affairs etc.

 

As the Chief of Staff in the Institute’s General Information Center Office, I am in charge of information systems including network, server, backbone network and client PC, and I also take care of adoption of IT devices, maintenance, and operation management.

 

Ms. Maekawa:

In the Faculty Course Center located in Daito Bunka University, we support acquirement of teacher’s licenses and finding career paths as a teacher. As a member of the center, I am in charge of gathering and delivering information related to job and volunteer opportunities in schools for students who wish to become teachers.

Mr. Watanebe :

PCs used by office workers who handle students’ personal information can only be accessed through intranet for safety purposes, and in principle, taking them outside of school is prohibited. Nevertheless, this factor has been impeding work efficiency, and we felt the need to create an environment where information can be accessed from the outside, and promote communication among employees.

 

Ms. Maekawa :

For students who aim to become teachers, we post information about teacher recruitment in the school portal and also on the bulletin board. However, as it is difficult to catch students’ attention with the bulletin board in the faculty course center, we were searching for an alternative means to share information that could substitute the paper notices, which were quite cumbersome to make and replace.

 

Mr. Watanabe :

After comparing and reviewing various tools, we came to notice LINE WORKS, which has the same interface with LINE many young employees use. We decided to introduce the service because there was no special training needed before the introduction, and because operating and managing the service didn’t seem burdensome.

Mr. Watanabe :

We made a regulation prohibiting employees from describing information related to students’ personal information, and informed the employees through orientations, LINE WORKS’ ‘Home,’ school intranet and etc. But we tried to stay away from unduly detailed regulations as much as possible, in order to bring about the active use of LINE WORKS.

 

Moreover, this coincided with the time when we provided iPads to all employees to pursue paperless work environment, so we kitted and distributed the LINE WORKS app.

 

For office workers who were not provided with iPads, we allowed using LINE WORKS through personal devices like mobile phones. But since we also ban taking iPads outside of school in principle, we allowed BYOD (Bring your own device) for all employees, creating an environment where information and work-related contacts can be shared, regardless of time and place.

Mr. Umezawa :

Prior to the implementation of the “Work Style Reform Act,” we organized employees into groups so that they could voluntarily start projects on how to change the way they work. About 70 out of 200 employees took part in the project, even though it was a voluntary activity outside of working hours. There were also many people who wanted to know about the project’s progress but could not participate, so for them I uploaded a video explaining the project’s guidelines in the LINE WORKS message room as a kickoff. Afterwards, we conducted a survey with LINE WORKS’ ‘Form’ (which has just been introduced) on pending issues, and we could collect so many responses compared to the surveys conducted in the past. Based on the responses, we established six subcommittees, and they are utilizing LINE WORKS along with discussions and face-to-face meetings.

It wasn’t easy for employees to participate in the existing project while juggling with daily work, but LINE WORKS has enabled them to exchange ideas anywhere, anytime—message rooms almost serve the role of group study rooms. Although young employees find it quite challenging to speak out in a typical face-to-face meeting, ‘Message Room’ enables everyone to participate in the discussion regardless of age or rank, and also to check previous conversations and review the flow of discussions. I think this is a big strength of LINE WORKS. Although these groups are a place for voluntary learning for employees, without particularly aiming to make proposals to reform policies, we plan to combine the results achieved in each subcommittee and use them as a reference for establishing policies to change the way we work.

Mr. Watanabe :

The Institute’s General Information Center frequently gets inquiries from other departments regarding the backbone network and client PC. After adopting LINE WORKS, we get most of the inquiries through LINE WORKS, not calls. When we received calls, we often had to stop what we were doing to respond to the inquiry right away; but when we receive them through message rooms, we can judge whether we can respond when we have time, so there is less psychological burden for response.

Ms. Maekawa :

I consulted Watanabe from the Institute’s General Information Center about how we can efficiently deliver information related to teachers’ recruitment. He recommended creating the center’s LINE WORKS account and sending information to students’ LINE accounts just like [LINE@.] Based on his counseling, we built an environment where we can connect with students’ LINE accounts through external conversations, and send information about recruitment and volunteer opportunities in message rooms through PDF files.

 

After recruiting applicants who had wished to receive a LINE alarm among students, most of the students who had completed the teacher training course have registered. Students can additionally fill in information about name, student ID, major, and the kind of local government or school (elementary·middle·high) they wish to apply for through tags; based on this information we use the ‘search’ feature in message rooms to search for tags, and send information customized for each student.

 

Mr. Yamamoto :

Our company is a Holdings company, and our business covers from housing wholesale to manufacturing and sales. Main business is the wholesale business which mainly covered by Japan Construction Materials Corporation. However, we also have interoffice in which doing housing construction business. I am a member from Finance Accounting Department, Business administration Headquarters, but also as a member of Office Rationalization Committee, I was in charge of introducing LINE WORKS to our company this time.

Mr. Yamamoto  :

A purpose of Office Rationalization Committee is to introduce systems or tool which enables efficient working environment. We had a mission to find a communication tool that is suitable to use, since we did not have such tool. We used to use a groupware as a communication tool. However, there are limitations such as it can only be used inside the office and if the employees were to use outside the office, they had to connect VPN every time.

 

Moreover, not all the employees had the accounts to the groupware. Therefore, we had to use phone calls obligatorily in order to connect with other employees. Phone calls, fax, and groupware communication has been continued for decades.

Mr. Yamamoto :

Under such circumstance, important information such as announcements on personnel as well as medical checkup cannot be delivered to the all the employees. Especially, ‘Japan Construction Materials Corporation’ is consisted mostly with salesperson, and therefore, the administration department considered about not being able to share various information to them. In order to make sure the information is delivered successfully to each employee, some of the branches print out the written mail and receive the paper with the employees’ signatures on it. Still, it costed a lot of efforts.

 

Company provided cellphones were mostly 2G phone, which only provide calling feature. For this reason, we often use personal smart phones to communicate with the employees from both working inside and outside the office. Notably, the number of employees who are using LINE as a communication tool was increasing. It is unavoidable if the customer wants to communication through LINE, but this was still not perfectly suitable. Although we wanted to prevent our employees from use LINE as a business communication tool, we had no other option to replace it.

Mr. Yamamoto :

We compared various communication tools to find the most suitable option. But, with the purpose of regulating the contacts held between the salesperson and the customers through LINE, we paid attention to LINE WORKS. For other applications, we had to install a certain program in order to communicate with the customers. However, LINE is already well being used by the people, including our customers. The most decisive factor for LINE WORKS introduction was that it is easily connected with LINE.

 

Also, LINE WORKS is cost-effective, when compared with other tools. We wanted all the employees to use LINE WORKS, instead of the current groupware that only certain portion of employees are using.

Mr. Ishizawa :

We were thankful about that there is no need for manual or education needed for LINE WORKS introduction. Because most of the people were already using LINE, we believed that the employees would soon be able to get used to LINE WORKS. We were not sure about the other tools since they had different user interface to LINE.

 

Mr. Yamamoto :

In 2017, we started a project to reform our working style, and 10 participants from the project started using trial version of LINE WORKS. And, soon we received positive feedbacks from the participants such as, ‘Response time gets faster’, ‘I can definitely contact everyone inside the company’, ‘Read notification feature is comfortable’. It took less than a month to actually introduce LINE WORKS to our company.

Mr. Yamamoto :

Employees from administration department to part-time workers, we are able to communicate everyone working in the company without feeling difficulties to it. This definitely has broadened our communication. One of the great features of the LINE WORKS is that we can easily reach out to the people whom did not know their contact information. We are encouraging our employees to record their duties at the LINE WORKS profile. And when we have questions like ‘Who is in charge of this agenda?’, we can easily check the profiles of the employees and reach out the right person.

 

We can work time effectively as we reduced unnecessary time we spent in the past, such as waiting for omitted emails to be checked or waiting for a call to be connected. We believe that overtime working at night time will soon be eliminated. By sending photos about the question we want to ask, it is now possible to share thoughts and opinion in depth.

 

Mr. Oshio :

As one of the employees from Human Resource department, dramatic increase in survey response rate and active communication with prospective employees are the two key accomplishments. It is cost-effective to use LINE WORKS because we did not have make individual tool for each agenda. Also, we curtailed expenditures by changing the tool from the SNS tool that we previously used to LINE WORKS.

 

Mr. Ishizawa :

We would like to implement auto-answering chatting bot based on AI near in the future using LINE WORKS. Setting aside from the working style that we have continued for decades using phone calls and fax, we expect that the introduction of innovative tool called LINE WORKS would bring us big impacts to our company.