By Choi Sung-jin
“Most duty orders in our company are still made by a rule of thumb. Whenever I submit plans as instructed by my superiors, they reverse the drafts at the last minute. It’s as if I keep repeating assembling and disassembling the same machine,” says a mid-level manager at a large Korean company.
A foreigner, who was a director at a domestic business, recalls, “In a Korean company, staff have to pull themselves upright in front of their superiors and accept the latter’s unclear and unreasonable instructions without rejecting or even questioning them. I have found the atmosphere at corporate boardrooms here is like those of solemn funerals.”
These statements demonstrate how Korea’s business organizations have become ill because of an inefficient work system and a top-down structure of communication.
The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in conjunction with McKinsey and Co., surveyed 40,000 employees at 100 Korean companies from June to September last year. On Tuesday, the chamber released a report on Korean businesses’ organizational health and corporate culture.
In the case of organizational health, which constitutes the basis of corporate competitiveness, more than half, or 52, of the companies surveyed remained at the bottom level in the world, indicating how difficult most Koreans find life in the office.
More specifically, Korean companies were uncompetitive in all of the four categories that make an organization healthy _ leadership within businesses, system, capability and outer orientation. On the other hand, they received good grades in two elements -- accountability and motivation -- factors that raise workload and stress.
Top managers rated the organizational health of their companies at 71 points, but employees gave the floor grades of 53 points, revealing management’s failure to understand the situation and thoughts of their employees.
The single biggest factor hurting organizational health was night overtime.
These employees work into the night on 2.3 days a week on average with nearly half of those surveyed saying they work overtime more than three days in the five-day workweek. But the productivity of chronic overtime workers remained at 45 percent, far lower than the average 57 percent. The respondents attributed the frequent overtime to an inefficient work system and a top-down culture.
“Bosses abruptly give new instructions just as I am preparing to leave the office, forcing me to do overtime,” a respondent said.
Women work less overtime than men, but still find it difficult to hold down a job and run a household at the same time. “I often have to leave the office earlier because of childcare, which makes me feel isolated at work,” a female worker said.
The KCCI report cited an irrational work process, an unreasonable assessment and reward system, poor leadership and lack of consensus on corporate values as the three major problems of Korean corporate culture.
“We need more fundamental remedies in each area to advance the nation’s outdated corporate culture,” the report said.