It has been a year since we’ve started Woven Union — how did this year go for us and what is next?

Our Union was formed at a time when our company was entering a period of changes: in our working model, our leadership and team structure, and our understanding of what the future looks like for the employees at Woven by Toyota and the company. Through our organization, we aimed to support each other, help the company develop and improve, and ultimately succeed for the benefit of our customers and all the people around the world who are excited to see what the mobility technologies of the future will look like.

The Union was created with ambitious goals in mind, and we are doing our best to work towards achieving them.

Over this year, we have been working to build our relationship with the company, set up working agreements, and establish mutual understanding to be able to drive change. While there are multiple issues we are still waiting to see improvement in, we are happy to see Woven by Toyota changing the way we work in a set of areas the Union has requested: our performance management program was changed to provide every employee an avenue to share their feedback on their managers, and, with our recent company policy updates, we are assured that no automated attendance tracking is to be implemented to enforce Woven by Toyota’s “return-to-office” policy.

While we believe that the best path forward for our company is “remote-first” as it is inherently inclusive, helps all employees be productive while maintaining a healthy balance between their work and family lives, and helps us achieve our climate goals, Woven Union is happy to see that the company is open to working with us to listen and make adjustments to the policies to let employees feel safer, more comfortable, and trusted at work.

Woven Union has had many of Woven by Toyota employees approach us with their personal work-related challenges, and we are happy to be available to everyone to provide advice, support in discussions and negotiations with the company, and suggest avenues for legal advice. We hope that having a group that people can reach out to and find help is valuable to everyone at Woven!

As we enter our second year, we are looking forward to bringing more positive change to all of our coworkers, hearing more of your thoughts, questions and ideas, and being there for you if you need support! Please get in touch with us at [email protected] or join Woven Union now!

March is the annual reviews season at Woven by Toyota and this year it brings an important change that employees have asked for and brought to the company through our Union. Starting this round, all employees will be asked to provide feedback to their direct managers and offer their managers suggestions on how to improve, or what works and what doesn’t in their work.

When we formed our organization, one of the ways to improve the company we could see was giving the employees with a path to communicate feedback upwards through the management chain. To make it possible, we have requested Woven by Toyota’s management to provide every employee a path to share their thoughts with their management and leadership, specifically by making it mandatory for managers to ask all their direct reports for annual performance review feedback.

How did the reviews work before this change?

Previously, every employee, both individual contributors and managers, would choose a group of peers from across the company to provide them feedback. Managers were recommended to include some of their direct reports of their choosing in this group, but did not have to include every one or any of them.

Why changing this was important?

While a manager has a significant influence on their reports’ working conditions and their experience at Woven by Toyota, not providing every report with a guaranteed path to record their thoughts and feedback towards their managers meant that managers did not have a high enough level of accountability in how they work with every report in a fair, unbiased and inclusive manner. Unconscious bias or unresolved conflicts would sometimes lead to some employees being rarely or never asked for feedback by their managers, making their opinions and ideas not heard or overlooked.

What improvements do we hope to see?

We hope that by reducing the risks of unconscious bias influencing the selection of peers for the annual review process, managers will start receiving a more well-rounded set of constructive and actionable feedback that would help them become better leaders, find opportunities for improvement, and surface potentially unknown issues or hidden conflicts that they may have with their reports, ultimately leading to the issues being solved, making Woven by Toyota a better place to work and enabling us to deliver better products to our customers faster and more efficiently.

Woven Union is happy to see Woven by Toyota’s management taking our thoughts and feedback into consideration, and we are inviting the company to continue building a collaborative working process between the Union and the management to improve our company together.

Finally, we are inviting all Woven by Toyota employees to reach out to us, ask questions and join Woven Union!

Woven Union met with the Federation of All Toyota Workers' Unions leadership.

Woven Union is building connections with the wider family of Toyota Group's unions and it was really encouraging seeing their interest and intent to help.

On Monday, October 16th, we had a productive meeting with the leadership team of the Federation of All Toyota Workers' Unions in Nagoya. We introduced our organization, shared our objectives, and discussed the struggles and issues that Woven by Toyota's employees and union members face at work. We also asked them for their suggestions and support.

The Federation expressed their sympathy and solidarity with our goals and direction, which they said were aligned with what they were working for with the whole Toyota Group. They were concerned about the working environment at Woven by Toyota, especially in the time of labor shortage and declining attractiveness of Japan for foreign talent with weakening yen and rising inflation.

From the Woven Union side, we noted that we share the goal of building an environment of Mutual Trust between the workforce and leadership that the Federation has as this is an area where we need to improve from the side of Woven Union and Woven by Toyota.

The Federation offered us their advice and support, and we agreed to continue having such meetings in the future. They also offered to introduce us to other unions in the Federation so that we could exchange knowledge and advice.

We are very excited about this visit to Nagoya and our Union receiving this recognition from this long-established Federation and feeling welcome as a member of Toyota Group's family of labor unions. While we work on different parts of what makes Toyota Group successful and in different organizations, we share a common philosophy, set of beliefs and common goals as Toyota companies. We can only succeed by working together and we are happy to be doing the work to make this happen!

As always, we invite all of our colleagues from Woven by Toyota to, most importantly, join the Union, and to share your feedback, thoughts and ask any questions you may have. Visit us at https://woven-union.org or send us an email at [email protected].

Woven Union is continuing our work towards a better working environment for all of us at the company.

Last Thursday, Woven Union had the second Collective Bargaining Session with Woven by Toyota. The company was represented the HR and Legal teams at this event.

At the meeting, we received Woven management's feedback on our original set of requests that we presented to them at our first meeting in July.

Unfortunately, while we are happy to see the conversation between the Union and the company continue, at this meeting we did not receive any truly positive response from Woven and did not see clear intent or commitment to real and meaningful change. Woven by Toyota's management has reiterated their plans to follow the existing company policies in the areas of return-to-office, performance management, compensation and others while only making incremental changes.

On a positive note, we could see the company being generally interested in our feedback on Woven by Toyota's policies, even if the management is not considering taking any decisive action at this time. We expect to be able to continue presenting information and stories that support our case and keep working towards changes that will benefit both Woven and Toyota Group.

Additionally, while Woven did state that they do not have any intention to accommodate our Union's promotional activities of any kind in the office, we received renewed assurances that the company recognises our organisation and its rights under the Labor Union Act of Japan and is committed to continue this dialogue.

To be clear, this is not the result that we've hoped for. While it is of course a right of the company to commit to the policies they've set, in the current reality when both the workforce and our shareholders demand and are waiting for true improvements, it is really unlikely that doing just minor alterations will lead us to success.

As always, we invite all of our colleagues from Woven by Toyota to, most importantly, Join Woven Union now or send us a message and get in touch!

Today, as James Kuffner, Woven by Toyota’s long-time CEO, is stepping down from his position to take on his new role at Toyota Motor Corporation, Woven Union expresses our gratitude for all of James’s work and dedication to building Woven over the years. We wish James success and best of luck with his new work and challenges.

Woven Union is excited to welcome Hajime Kumabe as the new CEO and we are optimistic about this opportunity to create a path forward with closer communication, cooperation, and understanding between Woven by Toyota’s senior leadership and its workforce. The Union would like to invite Mr. Kumabe to join the ongoing conversation about the issues and challenges that are facing Woven's workforce.

As Mr. Kumabe has mentioned, one of the keys to Woven by Toyota’s success is in leveraging our incredible talent. We at Woven Union are excited to share both our concerns and ideas with the new leadership team to help make Woven by Toyota a place where world-class talent can enjoy their work while being enabled and inspired to deliver safe, intelligent, human-centered mobility for all.

To achieve that, as before, it is necessary to establish a constant and productive dialogue between employees and our leadership to make sure we have our voices heard. We are hopeful that such dialogue can be achieved and we will be able to drive Woven toward success together.

We also would like to take this opportunity to address all of our colleagues. As we believe that Woven Union is crucial for Woven by Toyota’s continuous betterment and improvement, we invite all of you to join the Union, share your feedback with us, and ask questions. The times of change are the best ones for kaizen and we want to make sure we can ensure everyone’s concerns, ideas, and needs are given voice.

Join Woven Union now or send us a message and get in touch!

We were thrilled to announce the formation of our Union a few weeks ago and we appreciate your enthusiasm and support. Since then, we have been working hard to secure our recognition from the company, establish effective communication channels and initiate meetings with Woven by Toyota's management. Our goal is to build mutual understanding and trust, find common ground and convey our members' feedback, requests and concerns.

On Monday, we had our first meeting with the company's representatives. We were glad to have the opportunity to introduce ourselves, share our views and feedback on various issues such as the mandatory return-to-office policy, the performance management programs, the compensation fairness and more. The company has also acknowledged our status and standing as a Labor Union and expressed their recognition and respect which we appreciate greatly.

We are excited to start this dialogue with our management and we are hopeful that we can drive positive change for everyone at Woven by Toyota. We are also grateful for all the feedback, questions, concerns and ideas that we have received from many of you in the company. Please keep them coming and we will do our best to respond to everyone!

Why are we organising Woven Union for Woven by Toyota employees?

Tech companies like Google, Meta or us at Woven used to follow a unique path of constantly moving towards providing high-and-competitive wages for employees, treating them well and with respect, and building long-term lasting mutual trust. The atmosphere of mutual trust and respect made it unnecessary and unreasonable for folks to unionize in such an environment.

What has changed?

Tech companies have universally stopped honoring their side of the deal.

The industry that was full of excitement, optimism, hard collaborative and efficient work is now full of distrust, worry and paranoia due to large layoffs, pay cuts, “return to office” mandates and management’s transactional approach to worker relationships. Workers who moved across the world to pursue their passion and achieve their goals now find themselves stressed, unsafe and unsure about their future.

And as our leader Akio Toyoda has said: one of the goals that Toyota must pursue as a company is Happiness. We can't build Happiness for others if people here are not happy themselves.

What will the Woven Union do?

Back in the day we took pride in the fact that our office was designed with our employees' input to make it a great place to work for everyone. Today we must take note of employees' feedback in how we design our work processes as a whole.

Woven Union is organizing to establish a constant and productive dialogue with our leadership to make sure we have our voices heard.

Our goal is to rebuild the mutual trust between the leaders of the company and the “Gemba” — the people on the shop floor who make things happen.

We strive to align with Toyota and follow Sustainable Development Goals initiatives to help us save the environment we all live in and create paths to sustainable development for us all.

It is our social obligation as the company developing mobility solutions and we must do better.

We are pushing for wide acceptance and adoption of work policies that are considerate towards all kinds of folks regardless of their individual circumstances.

We want everyone at the company to be compensated equitably, treated with respect and receive benefits appropriate for the work done. The union aspires to have every employee happy at work and so we request that the company builds a strong DEI organization and builds upon policies of zero tolerance for harassment, discrimination or retaliation.

And ultimately, we are committed to Toyota Motor Corporation success. We are passionate about the mission and deeply care about the value that Toyota brings to the world. We care about every Toyota customer and want to serve all of you as good as we possibly can. To achieve that we must constantly improve Woven by Toyota too in the spirit of Kaizen that is a Toyota's core principle.

We truly hope that Woven Union will be valuable to all employees and that we will be able to succeed together.