Initiatives to Maintain and Improve Employee Health

The Sumitomo Forestry Group is committed to health management in order to prevent absenteeism*¹ due to injury or illness and to avoid reduced labor productivity caused by presenteeism*² from poor physical or mental health. Also, through health management, the Group aims to help individual employees maintain their physical and mental health as well as their work-life balance to continue to work with vigor in an autonomous manner, which will in turn lead to the revitalization of their workplace.

Sumitomo Forestry maintains a 100% medical examination rate for regular health checkup, which is vital to preventing illness. In addition, we have a system in place that offers regular health checkup, stress check aftercare, and consultations with industrial physicians to employees working overtime or facing other stressful situations. The system is available also to employees working at locations with less than 50 employees through the assignment of industrial physicians to the sites. For those with abnormal test results, the health supervisor and industrial physician at each site recommend that they undergo medical examinations or check the status of their hospital visits. Additionally, working with the health insurance society, we encourage employees eligible for specific health guidance to participate in relevant programs. The specific health guidance implementation rate was 0.7% in fiscal 2021, 28.8% in fiscal 2022, 12.7% in fiscal 2023, 18.7% in fiscal 2024, and 14.1% in fiscal 2025. A clinical psychologist and public health nurse are assigned to the Workstyle Diversification Department run by the Personnel Department to implement a variety of health measures and provide employees who are forced to take leave for health reasons with a system that allows them to focus on medical treatment and return to work without worry.

*1The state in which a person finds it difficult to work because a physical or mental disorder causes them to be late to work, leave work early, be absent from work and/or take unpaid leave.

*2The state in which a person goes to work while suffering from some disease or symptom, and their ability to perform work or productivity is impaired.

*1Rate of employees whose health checkup results are outside the reference ranges for any of the following five important items: blood pressure, glucose metabolism, lipid metabolism, liver function, and anemia

*2Rate of respondents who answered "Yes" to the question "Do you exercise or play sports at least once a week (regardless of the length of time)"?

Organizing Walking Events

Sumitomo Forestry has been holding regular walking events since fiscal 2021 as part of its health management efforts to maintain and promote employees’ health. The 2025 fall event was attended by 871 people from across the Sumitomo Forestry Group. In this event entitled "Let’s Walk to Protect the Earth: Environmental Charity Walk,” we donated 100,000 yen to an organization engaging in forest protection according to the total number of steps walked by participants in the event (about 73. 24 million steps in total). After the event, about 70% of participants said they were either "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with it, with comments such as, "It’s a wonderful initiative as we can make donations by walking to the goal,” “I was able to contribute to society by walking, which is rewarding and also good for my own health,” and “In the event, I walked a lot while checking the number of steps walked. I will continue to do this to solve my lack of exercise.” A growing number of employees have established an ongoing exercise routine as a result of participating in these events.

As a company continuously and proactively implementing measures to contribute to employees’ health, Sumitomo Forestry was selected to be a Sports Yell Company 2026 by the Japan Sports Agency for the third consecutive year.

Health Literacy Education

Sumitomo Forestry aims to raise employees’ awareness of mental and physical health and help them improve their lifestyles and productivity. To this end, we offer various e-learning courses on topics such as sleep, smoking, cancer, how to read the results of health checkups, etc. Since 2025, we have also provided courses on women’s health; headache, frailty, infectious disease prevention; and measures against hay fever. We are thereby helping employees protect their own health and increase their health literacy in this information-saturated society.

As for lifestyle improvement, we focus on the improvement of dietary habits, for which we now provide a contact point for employees to consult with registered dietitians and are proactively holding events and seminars on dietary habits by using a special app.
In recognition of these efforts, Sumitomo Forestry was certified to be an excellent corporation in terms of food and nutrition education for fiscal 2026 under the system newly established by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Since 2023, based on the overall trend of results for employee health checkups and stress checks, we have created a unique e-learning program that covers issues such as sleep, diet, and exercise. This program is intended to help all employees raise their health consciousness. The participation rate in it was 91.8% in fiscal 2025.

Seminars for Health Supervisors

Sumitomo Forestry provided general administrative managers of the Housing Division (65 in total) with training on laws, regulations and internal rules related to their daily operations in April 2025. From June to August of the same year, we also gave lectures on the legal duties to be performed by health supervisors and how to make effective use of health management systems individually at 12 of our bases, thereby helping each of the bases to continue implementing measures to enhance their health management capabilities.

Eliminating Absenteeism and Presenteeism

*Calculated by dividing the total number of days absent due to personal injury or illness (including paid leave taken) from January to December each year by the number of employees at the end of each year

*In fiscal 2023, the measurement method was changed from the WHO-PHQ method to the University of Tokyo one-item version.

*Measured through additional questions during the stress check

*In the stress check, we asked additional questions to respondents to measure their work engagement based on the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-9.
Average value for the two items, “At my work, I feel bursting with energy” and “I am proud of the work that I do” calculated by the method adopted for the New Brief Job Stress Questionnaire