YOKE respects and ensures equality at work. Recruitment and labor conditions, promotion and transfer, training, and benefits of all employees do not differ because of ethnicity, class, belief, religion, party, place of birth, gender, sexual orientation, age, marriage, physical appearance, and physical/mental disability.  Applicable labor laws and regulations are followed. People who are not willing will not be mandated or forced to engage in any labor-based activity by means of violence, coercion, or detention, or in other illegal ways. Meanwhile, our employment policy is primarily focused on the recruitment of full-time employees. As of the end of 2020, we had hired no contract personnel and certainly had no child labor under the age of 16. A strict interview procedure is required in order to verify an interviewee’s eligibility.

As of the end of 2020, YOKE has 407 full-time employees on its payroll at its Taiwan HQ (including 85 Filipino employees and 5 outsourced personnel). Compared to 2019, our number of full-time staff decreased by 49. This was due to the reduced utilization of production as the result of COVID-19 as the Company decided to leave specific positions open. Our outsourced personnel are responsible for security duties at the entrance gate, cleaning duties within the work environment and gardening. In 2020, our contract staff included a janitor (female), three security guards (male) and one gardener (male). Our subsidiary in Shanghai has 21 full-time employees on its payroll, while our subsidiary in Vietnam (Yoke Vietnam Co., Ltd.) has three full-time employees. All of the aforementioned staff are local employees in their respective region, with the ratio of local employment at 100%.

We currently have 141 full-time female employees (34.64% of all full-time employees) at our Taiwan HQ. As more male employees resigned in 2020, the proportion of full-time female employees grew by 0.87% compared to 2019.In terms of age, we have 282 (39.29%) employees between the ages of 31-50, which is roughly equivalent to that of 2019 (slight decrease of 0.45%). Due to the fact that the working environment at the factory requires more manual labor, we had hired more male direct personnel (200 men, which made up 81.97% of all our direct employees). If we were to exclude the direct personnel, female employees (59.51%) at YOKE are actually higher than male employees. Compared to other companies in the traditional manufacturing sector, YOKE even has more female executives (44.45%). In addition, more than half of our employees (at 56.02%) have undergraduate degrees or higher in terms of their academic credentials.

As of the end of 2020, we hired 85 Filipino direct personnel, and among our indirect personnel, we have foreign colleagues in charge of sales and technical support (FAE), with two senior managers of British and American nationalities respectively, along with one Indian and one Canadian technical support personnel. Foreign employees constitute approximately 21.87% of our full-time workforce, and our ratio of local employment for senior managers came to 80%.

Our mentor system was changed in 2017 through the establishment of standardized procedures, including preparations for new employees before they come onboard, helping new employees to adapt and to undertake work, presenting our approaches and processes of training and care and so forth in order to prevent significant discrepancies in actual implementation across different departments. Continuous improvement upon the mentor system In 2019, we established the qualifications for mentor selection. To be eligible as a mentor, an employee must have completed two years of service at YOKE, demonstrate outstanding competence in expression and communication along with the fundamental traits that are desirable for mentors: “willingness to teach, teaching by example and having patience.” New employees shall go through their “new employee care” process during the 2nd week after they have come onboard by having a 1-on-1 interview with their supervisor, who will take note of their feedback and follow up and make relevant improvements based on the feedback given. When a new employee has completed his first month of service after coming on board, he shall complete the “New Employee Mentor System Satisfaction Survey” as a way to verify the effectiveness of our mentor system. In 2020, the survey scored an average of 4.8 (out of 5) and in comparison with the “turnover rate for employees who completed fewer than 3 months’ of service” (5% in 2019), the turnover rate had fallen to 2.5% in 2020. This reflects the efficacy of our mentor system.