The Immediate Response to Friday’s Earthquake: What HR Leaders in Japan Can Teach the World about 'Workforce Contingency Planning'

Being closely connected to the most senior HR practitioners at multinationals in Japan, we were in a unique position to assess the immediate reaction of Japan’s HR Leaders to the earthquake and tsunami along Japan’s north-eastern seaboard on Friday 12th March. Writing from the safety of Singapore, we were in touch with some 400 Japan HR Leaders over email until the early hours of Saturday 13th March to assess the immediate impact of the disaster on the workforce of the world’s multinational organisations based in Japan.

We’ve read a lot of news reports about the unfolding situation, but we don’t often hear the Human Resources angle behind these events. Here is a special report for HR Leaders across Asia and the globe on how HR teams in Japan responded to the unfolding situation.

1) Background: The Physical Impact

When we first began receiving replies to our messages, it was very clear that most companies based in the Eastern side of Japan had been directly affected. The companies worst affected were in the manufacturing industries (which may have had factories located directly in the disaster area) and consumer/retail organisations that had a dispersed network of stores or sales representatives across the country, including the north-east.

90% of the world’s multinationals base their Japan headquarters in Tokyo or in the wider Kanto region, so most were spared the direct impact of the quake, suffering only damage to the interiors of their offices. The biggest impact to these companies came in the aftermath of the quake, where high-rise buildings swayed heavily for over thirty minutes following each aftershock. With elevator power switched off, many were trapped in high rise buildings for several hours, and others were similarly trapped underground in the city’s expansive metro network. With the city’s transport infrastructure totally shut down for the rest of the day, many HR Leaders (we crudely estimate around 50%) stayed at their office overnight with those who could not return home. The lucky ones could walk home, however we were still receiving messages at 3am local time from people who had walked six hours to reach their houses in the outlying suburbs of Tokyo.

2) Background: The Personal Impact

The personal impact on HR Leaders was palpable through the messages that we were receiving throughout the evening and night. Even in normal circumstances, senior HR can be a lonely profession because of the need to often keep strict confidences between parties within the same organisation. However it became lonelier still when HR Leaders became directly responsible for reporting on the safety of all their company’s employees. Many were happy to take the chance to express their own personal anxieties during the harrowing hours of Friday night, allowing them to continue to keep outwardly focused and professional in their efforts to account for employees and their families.