Episode 62: The Reality of Trinity’s Unique Programs, Part 4: Reducing Commuting Stress and Promoting Health and Productivity Management

“Real Management | The successes and failures of corporate management—the unscripted reality of a CEO speaking candidly”

In this program, I, Tetsumi Hoshikawa, also known as Hossy, talk frankly about management and what goes on behind the scenes, based on my own experiences.

Real Management isreleased every Friday morning at 6:00 a.m.

Good morning. I’m Tetsumi Hoshikawa, also known as Hossy, the free spirit.

Yes.Last time,we talked about Trinity’s unique systems. We discussed how the company draws a clear line between workdays and days off, and how the idea is to rest properly when it’s time to rest, which means there are more days off in various forms than at a typical company.

That said, it’s not simply that we’re a “white company.” The philosophy is that we earn enough profit for the company to survive, and then we make sure to rest properly when it’s time to rest. At the very end, I mentioned that it’s a little different from just saying, “It’s nice that you’re so employee-friendly.”

If I start from the beginning, when we first launched the company, everyone was working from home.

We were fully remote 20 years ago.

Right. These days, saying “fully remote” doesn’t sound strange, and in fact, the company I’m running now,Eureka Studio,is a game company that is fully remote, so we only meet once a month, and everyone works from home. But for us at Trinity, it was like that from the very beginning.

When Yohei joined, he wanted an office, so we set up a very small office.

Yeah, exactly. In that sense, yes.

Although we did set up an office, at the time we also had members living in Osaka. There was Douglas, which was the handle name of one of my gaming friends I mentioned before. Well, when Yohei came in, we created an office. On top of that, when we started hiring new people, I had this idea that I wanted to avoid making them commute as much as possible. Yohei eventually moved all the way to Niiza City too.

Before I started Trinity, at my previous company, I worked in Ikejiri-Ohashi for a long time at first. Also in Yutenji. Now there’s the Fukutoshin Line, so Yutenji isn’t that hard to get to, but back then there was no Fukutoshin Line. I would go from Shiki Station to Ikebukuro Station, then from Ikebukuro Station to Shibuya Station, and then take the Tokyu Toyoko Line from Shibuya. It took an hour and a half.

Exactly. And when it takes an hour and a half, what happens is that it’s three hours round trip. So if I worked at night and it got to around 9 p.m., if I left then, I wouldn’t get home until after 10:30. Then the next morning, I’d spend another hour and a half coming in. So I started thinking that going home was a waste.

Rather than going home after 9 p.m. and then eating, I figured it was better to just eat near work. If I went home, it would be past 11:30, and the next morning I’d have to leave a little after 7. As I kept living that way, I started thinking, “It’s better not to go home,” and I often stayed overnight at the office.

For me, it was fine. It was fun in its own way. But still, I had this feeling that commuting was unpleasant. As I said earlier, when we started the company, we were fully remote from home, so if you wanted to sleep, you could go to sleep right away. You could work and then, when you felt you couldn’t go on anymore, just sleep. You could work right up until the moment before going to bed. And the instant you woke up in the morning, you could start working again, because the commute time was zero.

From experiences like that, I came to want to reduce commuting time as much as possible. Our office was in Niiza City, Saitama Prefecture, so we created a system where we would pay 20,000 yen to people who lived nearby or could come to the office without using public transportation.

That gives people an incentive to move near the company, doesn’t it?

They receive 20,000 yen, and it’s better for them because they’re closer. For example, if someone lives far away, the company basically pays their transportation expenses, right? So instead of paying that amount for transportation, we give it to the person, and if they come to Saitama, rent is cheaper than in Tokyo.

So their rent becomes cheaper, and on top of that they receive 20,000 yen, which means they can live in a really nice room. Or they can save the money. In that sense, it’s kind of like a housing allowance. Incidentally, at one point Trinity bought an apartment building called Casa Trinity. The units were studio rooms. The rent was 55,000 yen.

So there’s the point of having people come live near the company, and as we’ll get into later, there are a lot of good things that come from being near the company. First of all, there really is no commuting hardship, and as I said earlier, you also receive money and can come to a place in Saitama where the rent is cheaper.

For example, even during Covid, if you live near the company, you don’t have to ride a packed commuter train to get to work, right?

You can walk or come by bicycle. So you can get to the office without close contact with other people. Being close really is good. As I mentioned earlier, in the old days I used to work until 10 seconds before going to sleep. But even now, for people living near the company, if they end up working overtime until 8 p.m., for example, they can be home at 8:05, so that’s definitely nice.

There are those health-related benefits, and then there are sudden events like Covid, and disasters too. For example, if a major earthquake happens and your home is an hour away by train, if the trains stop, you can’t get home.

I think that happened during the Great Earthquake too, but living close means you don’t have that issue. So as a company, we approached it as paying employees the amount we would otherwise have paid for transportation expenses, and a little over half of people often move near the company when they join.

Yohei also came to Niiza City. Trinity’s Zion is closest to Shiki Station, which is a station on the Tobu Tojo Line, and he lived in a place facing the road on the way to Shiki Station. So everyone who came to work by train had to pass by there.

Right. So everyone would look at Yohei’s house, look at his laundry, and then go to work.

And when sales members were talking on the phone during the morning commute, he said he could hear it every day and it was noisy. After that, he moved to the other side of the station and even bought a house. But of course, some people already owned homes, or were living with a spouse and couldn’t move just for their own convenience. So a little over half were near the company, but then the next issue that came up was heatstroke.

It’s been really hot these past few years, hasn’t it?

So as heatstroke became a major topic, the area around Zion was also pretty hot, really. I felt that was dangerous. Trinity originally started on the premise that full remote work was possible, and we exchange data through cloud-based systems, so we basically have a rule of not keeping things locally. That makes remote work easy.

Commuting in the heat carries a risk of heatstroke, and even if you make it to the office safely, you may be exhausted from the heat and need time before you can get into work mode. Taking that into account, we made it so that under certain weather conditions, each person could choose to work remotely. People who want to come to the office can do so, but basically we created “remote work recommended days,” where people can choose how they work.

It has changed a bit over time, but at first we used temperature, such as 30°C, as the standard. However, I felt there was a bit of a gap between that and the actual perceived temperature. So now we use an index called the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, or WBGT. This also takes humidity and other factors into account, so it lets us judge the risk of heatstroke more accurately. We decided to use that as the standard.

We started this around 2023, and it was right around the time when society as a whole was gradually starting to think, “This is dangerous.” So it was introduced by the media quite a lot as a very new system.

I think in the first year we used temperature as the criterion, but when we actually tried it, there were only one or two remote work recommended days, if I remember correctly, even though it was hot. So, as I said earlier, we changed the index. Because of that, we got a lot of interview requests, and they would ask, “How many days actually became remote days?” But when the answer was something like, “Actually, maybe two days, or was it one?” the reporters would suddenly be like, “Oh, ah, maybe next time,” and back off.（笑）

It was like it wasn’t what they were looking for. But after we changed the index, those days happened fairly regularly, and it was covered quite a bit, including on TV and in newspapers.

You start early in the morning and try to get things done before the temperature rises.

Oh, so it’s not that you finish early—you have to keep going?

Because it’s just too hot.

“That’s just how it is” (laughs)

Do you have to be able to see? Couldn’t you work at night instead and rest while the sun is up?

So you really can’t do it unless you can see?

Well, I’m saying this without knowing what kind of work you’re doing, but if you started after the sun went down and finished before sunrise, it would still be hot at night, sure, but it’d be way cooler than when the sun is out, right?

For example, if you’re planting or harvesting with machines, couldn’t you just put on strong lights and run them around?

Do you use machines for it?

Ah.

Yeah.

These days, I feel like there might be options like flying drones and shining light from above to brighten things up.

Sure, but the cost of a person collapsing is pretty high too.

Anyway, that was a bit of a digression, but with that said, let’s move on.

I think remote work is completely normal now, but Trinity already had that kind of foundation in place. On top of that, the fact that we ourselves experience the heat firsthand is a major factor.

Executives, department heads, and board members at large companies may be driven around by car, so they might not know how hard it is to walk along the road to get to work. Because we know that heat firsthand, I think we were able to create these kinds of systems.

Sure.

Ah, yeah, I do have that image.

Huh?

That makes sense. Driving yourself is certainly dangerous, and I do think there’s peace of mind in leaving it to a professional driver. But then you could also say, “Why not just commute by train?”

Well, there are also stories about people “jumping in front of trains,” but once you start talking that way, everything has risks. In the end, I can’t help but think it’s just a plausible excuse not to ride the same packed trains as ordinary people.

Exactly. In the end, if employees aren’t healthy, the company’s performance won’t improve either. Of course, it’s important to take paid leave and refresh yourself, but conversely, if negative situations continue—like people being unable to work because they’re unwell—it becomes difficult to maintain the performance of the company as a whole.

When we previously talked about launching the wearable device “weara,” I touched a bit on “preventive medicine,” right? If ordinary medicine is about treating illness after you get sick, preventive medicine is about taking action before you become ill. To maintain health, exercise, diet, and sleep are essential.

As we were reaffirming the importance of health and asking, “What can we do as a company?” it happened to be around the time when a certification system called “Health & Productivity Management Outstanding Organization” had appeared and was being covered in the media.

It wasn’t immediately after the system started, but we thought, “If we apply properly and get certified, it could serve as proof that the company is firmly committed to employee health.” Since we are a company working on weara, we felt we should show that we were properly practicing Health & Productivity Management as an Outstanding Organization, so we decided to take part in this initiative.

This is actually pretty difficult. You have to clear around 200 to 300 items. You also need to prepare things like establishing company systems and clearly stating them in the work rules.

So there were many initiatives that started from pursuing this certification, including revising the work rules. The certification has incredibly detailed items, and each item has a set score. The system works by totaling those up, and if you reach a certain score, you get certified. For the Health & Productivity Management Outstanding Organization certification itself, it’s at a level where you can pass if you make a certain amount of effort.

So if we were going to do it, we thought we should aim for the Bright 500, which is awarded to the top 500 companies nationwide among Health & Productivity Management Outstanding Organizations.

So we decided to aim that high. We created a dedicated team, and they worked hard, going through all the things we had to do and the requirements we needed to meet. In 2023 and 2024, we made it into the top 500 companies nationwide.

This is actually quite difficult. They don’t tell you your score.

I think the system is that they tally everything up and select the top 500 companies.

This system selects the top 500 companies. For example, even if we were certified in 2023, and we continued the same initiatives in 2024 with no change in our score, it’s still a relative evaluation. So if more companies score higher than us, our ranking automatically drops.

So we were selected for the “Bright 500” through 2023 and 2024, but in 2025, after I was no longer involved, we ended up becoming “Next Bright 1000.”

More and more companies are making their way into the top ranks.

Yes. But you don’t know exactly what rank you are.

That’s right. You know you were selected for the Bright 500 category, but they don’t disclose whether you were 499th or 2nd.

Exactly. These days, the number of companies trying to earn the title of Health & Productivity Management Outstanding Organization has been increasing a lot, and applications go up every year, so the bar keeps getting higher.

But even though Trinity is now in Next Bright 1000, it’s not as if the company has regressed from when it was in the Bright 500.

So just because the ranking dropped, it absolutely does not mean we stopped doing good initiatives. It’s just that more companies started ranking higher, so even if we continued the same efforts as before, our relative position dropped. That said, we are still certified as a Health & Productivity Management Outstanding Organization, and we are still firmly in the upper ranks, so that’s how we’re continuing to approach it.

Also, changing the subject a bit, one issue we had—not exactly a huge hurdle, but still a challenge—was smoking.

Actually, I smoked until I was 26.

When I caught a cold, cigarettes tasted awful to me, so I quit just like that. I haven’t smoked at all since.

The company was basically non-smoking, and Trinity also had its own additional rule: no smoking near the company either. The idea that it’s fine as long as you step outside the office wasn’t allowed.

First of all, smoking on the roadside is a nuisance, isn’t it?

Well, secondhand smoke too, and it also gives a bad impression.

No, that doesn’t matter. There are also a lot of private homes around us. I don’t intend to drag this topic out too much, but there’s also the issue of whether leaving your seat to smoke can really be called a “break” in the first place.

So, smoking during work hours is not allowed. And even during the commute, the route from Shiki Station or other stations to Zion would be within the scope of what the company would cover under workers’ compensation if something were to happen, right? In other words, the idea is that you’re under the company’s protection, so we tell people that we don’t want them smoking during that time either.

So we made that a rule.

At a typical company, they would set up a smoking area and say, “Please smoke here,” right?

We don’t have a smoking area in the first place, and we also don’t allow people to smoke just because they think, “It should be fine if it’s outside.” It’s not allowed even between the time you leave home and arrive at the office.

Well, honestly, there are some things we wouldn’t know if someone smoked in secret, but as a company rule, it’s not allowed. Also, in aiming to be certified as a “Health and Productivity Management Outstanding Organization,” having smokers at all is a problem.

But we did have a few smokers. So we had various discussions with them. But of course, some people still kept smoking. So at Trinity, since we are committed to health, we take the stance that smoking is “all harm and no benefit.” In the early days, we actually used to say there might be at least one benefit, because some people said, “Smoking helps me calm down.”

But after looking into later research papers, we came to understand that there actually isn’t much scientific basis for claims like smoking helps you calm down or relieves stress. In fact, there is even data showing that smokers have a higher risk of depression. Of course, there were still some people who just wouldn’t quit. At Trinity, we have something called an “evaluation point system,” where we evaluate people from various angles and award points.

Within that, there is a non-smoking incentive, so people who don’t smoke receive a higher evaluation.

People who smoke stay the same, while people who don’t smoke get a boost.

That’s how we’ve institutionalized it.

Exactly. You go out for lunch during your lunch break, right? Some restaurants have areas where smoking is allowed, but we also prohibit people from smoking there. After all, the unpleasant smell remains.

Maybe so.

You know how there are interviews when hiring employees? At that time, there is a checkbox for whether the person smokes or doesn’t smoke, and basically, we refrain from hiring smokers.

Last time, we talked about applying to Trinity, but I’d like to end this time by sharing a little trick: if someone who smokes says, “I currently smoke, but I will definitely quit when I join your company,” it will make a much better impression.

We still don’t see the end in sight, so this series will continue. We look forward to having you with us again next week.

“Real Management | The Successes and Failures of Corporate Management, Told Candidly and Unscripted by a Real Company President”

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