Culture series – vol. 3
Kids Day in August 2022
*This blog was co-created by high school intern Emma as part of her work experience program!
Taken place at Tokyo office, “Kids Day 2022” allows Kids to visit working Mums and Dads at Rapyuta
■ Background and Objectives of Kids Day
Rapyuta Robotics focuses on creating an office environment and structure that allows all employees to work to the best of their abilities. Typical systems include flextime with no core (7:00 to 22:00) and shorter working hours. Many employees work under these systems to the extent that it does not interfere with their work, allowing employees raising children to work in a fair condition.
At this event, we invited families of our employees to the office to interact with robots and create opportunities to network and communicate. For children, the opportunity to see their parents at work, and for families, the opportunity to experience the place where our employees work, the services we provide, and to interact with other employees is not a frequent experience. A total of 60 people were present on this occasion.
For children of elementary school age and younger, we prepared a program that nurtured their intellectual curiosity and provided demonstrations using Rapyuta PA-AMR, so that they could have the experience of collaborating with a robot. For children of junior high school age and above, we provided a work experience program and created opportunities for them to learn social manners and rules through communication with people of different generations. We also expect that practical work experience will help them form their own ideal view of work and occupation, and broaden the scope of their future career choices!
■ Enthusiastic Robot Demonstration (Created by Emma)
As part of the Kids Day event, there was a robotic picking experience. The majority of the participants this time were preschool children. Some of them struggled to reach the robot’s screen because they were not tall enough to touch it, while others did not know what a bar code was. We tried lifting them up so that they could reach the screen and rephrased the explanation in simple terms. Eventually, they understood how to operate the robot and successfully learned how to pick. Even children with no picking experience were able to operate the machine easily and happily. After this experience, everybody realized how heavy the packages were that the robots handled seamlessly. Through this experience, we could clearly see how the use of a robot reduces the burden on human pickers.
The picking activity was popular with children of all ages, and when asked “what was the most fun part of today’s event?” many of them answered “the picking one”.
■ Work Experience (Created by Emma)
I participated in a one-week work experience program. I was mainly taken care of by the people operations squad, who showed me how to organize internal events and make presentations to customers.
I have seen my father, who is an engineer, work from home but this was my first experience in planning internal events and working in PR to communicate the company’s appeal through social media, and I became aware of a new aspect of his company that I did not know much about.
Through this, I experienced a multinational environment and the atmosphere (culture) of Rapyuta, and I would like to work for a company like Rapyuta in the future, where there are wonderful people who are open-minded and diverse. To achieve this, I will focus on my studies and be more proactive if I have another chance.
■ Positive Feedback from Participants (From in-house surveys)
A survey on satisfaction with the event showed that approximately 90% of members were “very satisfied” or “satisfied”, indicating the event led to increased employee engagement. There was positive feedback, such as “It was nice to have a program that allowed us to interact with many employees”, “It is very important for children to have new experiences, and I feel that this helped them to grow up one more step” and “I was happy that my child enjoyed it so much”. We will continue to create many opportunities to interact with our employees and their families to build trust and encourage new internal communities!
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