Toyota plans for 25,000 employees to work from home

Tokyo: Japan's Toyota Motor is planning to introduce a telecommute system, which will allow around 25,000 employees to do most of their work from home, to improve work-life balance, the company announced Thursday.

The world's leading automaker is at present negotiating the plan with trade unions and hopes to put it in action by early August, a company spokesperson told EFE news.

The programme could be extended to almost a third of the company's 72,000 strong workforce.

The measure will affect those who have been working in Toyota for over five years and those working in the company's headquarters in Aichi prefecture in the human resource, accounts or sales departments, along with those engaged in research and development and other engineering fields.

The plan will allow these employees to work from home most of the time and go to office for a minimum of only two hours per week.

To prevent any kind of data leakage, the company will allocate employees computers that will only function as client terminals to a cloud computing system.

Toyota hopes this flexible system of working will help it retain its skilled and experienced human capital by allowing male employees to devote more time to their children and encouraging female employees not to leave their jobs after getting married or having a baby (a common practice in Japan).

It will also help the automaker reduce the number of employees who leave their jobs to take care of their elderly parents, in a rapidly ageing society.