Message from the President June.2020

The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is having an immense impact on the world. With many experts predicting that the COVID-19 crisis will continue for the long term, it is thought that working environments and values in the “With / After COVID-19” era will change greatly from those that have existed until now.

At the conference held on May 12 to announce the Meitec Group’s financial results for fiscal 2019 (the year ended March 31, 2020), we gave our first explanatory briefing for media outlets and investors via web conferencing. In a “real” conference where we meet face to face with participants, we can instinctively gauge the level of understanding of the listeners and perceive other aspects such as the atmosphere in the venue, and make efforts to increase the satisfaction of the listeners by adjusting the method, content and dynamic of our explanations as needed. With web conferencing, however, we can only judge the reactions of listeners based on visual and auditory information that we draw from what we see and hear from our screens. I felt the difficulty of communicating in this way once again on this occasion.

To adapt to this new environment, we must first become accustomed to it, and acquire new skills as and when they are needed. Optimizing communication in web conferences and other virtual environments demands different presentation skills from those needed in real environments. In one-to-many communication, even when we use bidirectional interactive tools, it is difficult for us to feel a sense of scale, and it is prone to become a one way conversation. For this reason, the challenge lies in how frankly and speedily we can complete our own performance. I think that another important factor is to grasp the interest of participants from the start by communicating the conclusion first.

Strangely enough, the COVID-19 pandemic has also led to the sudden and rapid advancement of telework, which had not yet gained widespread popularity in Japan. This working style revolves primarily around virtual communication. For this reason, I think that many people are now beginning to feel that time where we can meet with face to face with people in reality is very precious. This change in the working environment seems to have taken place ahead of its time, but there is now no way that time will reverse itself. It is therefore necessary for us to establish our own new styles of working in order to adapt to this change.

In telework, it is not easy for superiors and coworkers to see our work processes. For that reason, as a basic rule, we must manage our own work progress and working hours. I would like to request that all employees take the initiative and act responsibly at all times with regard to their own productivity (i.e. the costs required to generate output).

Whenever we as humans feel the limits of our own abilities, we have always resolved the issues that we face by driving the evolution of our technologies and creating things that supplement our abilities. With the further evolution of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the gap between the real and virtual worlds may disappear altogether in the After COVID-19 era. When that time comes, a major transformation will surely occur with regard to not only the way we work, but also the way in which we live our lives.