Photo/Illutration The building housing NTT’s head office in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. aims to adopt remote working as its standard work style by 2025 to exempt employees from relocating to a new post, the company president said on Oct. 12.

“We want to phase out job transfers in four to five years,” NTT President Jun Sawada said in an exclusive online interview with The Asahi Shimbun.

He said the telecommunications giant plans to make the necessary arrangements by 2025 to allow employees at most of its group companies to work from home or other locations.

It was the first time Sawada has named a specific year for when the company intends to implement the new work style policy.

Sawada announced in September that NTT would allow employees to work remotely, in principle, to “change the work style of the Showa Era (1926-1989).”

He also said the company plans to reduce its number of job transfers, including those requiring workers to leave their families behind, in stages from fiscal 2022.

Nearly half of the company's roughly 180,000 employees in Japan are working remotely, in principle, Sawada said.

He said the company will enable staff in its maintenance division to work from home by expanding the use of digital devices, such as monitoring equipment with security cameras, to increase the number of remote workers by 20,000 each year.

Sawada also said he intends to further move the company's headquarters operations, currently concentrated in the greater Tokyo area, to other regions.

He said he plans to do so because the regional hierarchy with the capital at the top that has justified job transfers should be restructured according to changes in the environment.

Sawada added that NTT will enable employees who cannot relocate to a new post to continue working at the company by respecting workers’ desires when assigning them to a new position.

In September, he unveiled a plan to secure 260 or more satellite offices by fiscal 2022 for employees who find it difficult to work from home.

Sawada said he is also considering building satellite offices in unused spaces at NTT’s 2,000 or so facilities, including telephone stations, and lending those offices to other companies to help further promote remote working.

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