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| An overworked office worker in Seoul. / Korea Times file |
By Lee Suh-yoon
Jung, an IT developer who is currently working in Seoul, stops talking at work after 4 p.m.
"Even if I had finished everything, I just remain quiet because if I bring up some new topic to my superior around this time, that becomes my next task, forcing me to stay and do overtime," Jung said.
According to Jung, the company's unilateral extension of work hours and the lack of a democratic decision-making process hinder him from performing his best.
"It's hard to exercise your full potential when your superior decides everything in an authoritarian way," he said. "I think the situation could be improved by getting rid of the hierarchical decision-making process and by ensuring employees can go home on time."
Seventy-nine percent of employees said they do not perform to their full potential at work, according to a recent survey by job matching platform Saramin, Sunday.
The top cited reasons were excessive workload, limited authority over one's tasks, and an insufficient reward scheme. Forty-five percent of the 914 employees surveyed said they chose not to exercise their full potential at work because "doing good work just leads to more work".
Employees are not simply overworked, they're also overwhelmed _ by being tasked with multiple tasks.
"I'm not performing at my best because I'm forced to take on many different tasks at once. This makes it difficult to properly focus on one main task," said a 27-year-old office worker surnamed Kim, currently employed in the automobile industry. "There needs to be better work division and additional hiring of employees."
A 26-year-old publishing house editor surnamed Seo, voiced similar concerns.
"My main task is supposed to be editing and planning new publications. But I'm flooded with all these smaller tasks like creating mp3 files for language books and managing books that my superior is in charge of," Seo said. "So I cannot wholly perform my actual role."
"I also get unmotivated when new ideas that I pitch based on recent trends get rejected at the upper decision-making tier due to a conservative outlook," she added.
Unreasonable workload and multi-tasking demands exhaust workers, impacting their productivity in the long run. Korea's labor productivity ranks only 17th out of 22 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Koreans are some of the most overworked in terms of working hours. According to most recent OECD statistics, the average Korean works around 350 more hours, or about 6 work weeks, than workers in neighboring Japan. The Moon Jae-in administration has been working to reverse this trend by cutting the maximum weekly work hours to 52 hours, from the previous limit of 68.
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