Nepes CEO puts employees first
Nepes Chairman Lee Byung-koo speaks during an interview at the firm’s office in Seoul. / Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
By Kim Tae-gyu
Nepes employees start the day with around half an hour of singing together at a company auditorium. They participate in a weekly book club and are also strongly recommended to write seven gratitude notes, mostly to colleagues, all during work hours.
Accustomed to typical workplaces, which attempt to do more with less in terms of workers, observers might point out that the Korean powerhouse at system-in-packaging solutions would lack work ethics.
The opposite is the reality, however, as the North Chungcheong Province-based company is regarded as one of the most prominent in Korea on the back of its technological edge and rising sales.
And beneath such a unique management style lurks the firmly rooted principles of Nepes founding Chairman Lee Byung-koo, who established the company in 1990.
“In management, one of the most important things is the mindsets of our staff members. Filled with tension and stress, how they can work properly?” Nepes CEO Lee asked.
“The music sessions during office hours could look like losses for a company. But they create and spread positive energy among our employees, which has led to great effects in our management.”
In other words, Lee does not pull out all the stops to fatten the company’s short-term bottom lines. Instead, the chief executive seeks to make a top-class outfit via a family-like soft atmosphere and in-house collaboration.
Nepes and associated corporations have chalked up annual sales somewhere between 300 million won and 400 million won with healthy profits.
In particular, the outfit is also spearheading a futuristic technology called fan-out wafer level packaging (FOWLP), the core application to produce super-slim digital devices.
“CEOs are those who should feel responsibility for their employees. Actually, that role is their significant duty. CEOs are not supposed to fire their employees due to temporary slumps in business,” Lee said.
Lee’s remarks might sound like textbook answers for inquiries of journalists with regard to perspectives on labor but he really meant it as amply demonstrated by his track record.
Over the global financial crisis and the resultant credit crunch in the late 2000s, Nepes also faced great pressure to cut payrolls when the plant operation ratio fell to about 30 percent. Even plant workers expected massive dismissals in the face of what could be a life-or-death crisis for Nepes.
But Lee did not resort to the conventional solution of drastic cuts. In fact, he did not fire a single worker and opted to train the “idle workforce” so they would be able to learn new technologies.
Such approaches worked in a handsome fashion. As the economy soon turned around, the plants needed to churn out products around the clock and Nepes did not struggle to hire qualified workers unlike its competitors, which failed to find good workers after carrying out massive job cuts.
“Back then, the orders plummeted. Were our employees accountable for that? If not, I could not let them go,” Lee recollected.