Why young workers quit so soon?

New employees find it hard to adapt to company culture

By Park Ji-won, Nam Hyun-woo, Baek Byung-yeul, Lee Kyung-min

Nearly one out of four new employees quit their jobs within a year, despite the high rate of youth unemployment, amid the continuing economic slowdown.

The Korea Employers Federation said in a report that 23.6 percent of new employees quit their jobs within a year in 2012, an increase of about 8 percentage points from 2010.

Jobseekers are presumed to be desperate for jobs, but many who land them find it hard to adapt to company culture.

There have been extreme cases involving attempted suicide as a result of unrelenting workplace stress.

A 29-year-old intern at an insurance company committed suicide a few days ago, apparently because of alleged poor sales. According to investigators, his family quoted him as saying, "I want to quit the job."

This might be a rare example. But definitely a growing number of new employees are quitting their jobs for different reasons.

Interviewees answer questions during a job interview. Many young employees do not stay long in their jobs, mainly due to difficulties in adapting to rigid company culture. / Korea Times file

Difficulty in adapting

"Didn't you get what I said at all?" Lee, 26, who works at a bank, heard this every time she made a copy of a document. Each time she made a new one, the response from her superior was even more scathing.

With a stone-cold look on her face, the boss just kept saying, "Do it again. Do it again." Without any guiding sample to turn to, Lee had to return to the same machine multiple times, which she wished had never been invented at all.

At one point, her superior blurted, "Can't you even handle this sort of simple task? You are not professional."

She couldn't stop tears streaming down her face. After all, she was working at a bank, not a photocopy store.

"I studied really hard during my years at college, high school and middle school. Did I put all of my effort to just spend my work hours in front of a copy machine, and to get mortified because of something I never thought I would do? No," she said.

Tasks aside, invisible but apparent office "politics" were at play, too. The boss was the power, and Lee didn't fit in. It was about small things, she said.

"Take lunch, for example. All of us are in the cafeteria. There are plenty of seats. My boss and her followers all gather at one table. All but me. When I try to sit with them, they say ‘There's a seat over there.' The other people in the cafeteria are unknown to me. I don't want to look like I'm shunned. Whenever that happens, that unhealthy stress drags on into the afternoon," she said.

Out of 244 office workers who have worked more than six months, 12.9 percent said they experienced office bullying, according to a report released Jan. 30 by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education & Training.

In another survey by Job Korea, one of the leading job portal sites, 67 percent of 748 workers said they were bullied, or witnessed bullying.

Military experience

Hyun Se-yeong, a 26-year-old employee who has been working at a mid-size information technology company for two years, said his first few months at the office were tough.

Due to fitness reasons, Hyun was excluded from mandatory military service and admits he had a hard time adapting to a workplace whose staff were mainly ex-soldiers.

"I don't know exactly what military life is, but I felt my seniors in the office treated me as a newly recruited soldier during the job training period," Hyun said.

"During snack times, my companions used to exchange jokes about their military experience. When they began to talk about their stories in the army, they always mentioned, ‘You don't understand because you didn't join the army,'" he said.

"I really hated that because their stories were usually about common things so that a person without military experience like me knows enough from TV shows or friends, but they were just unrelenting, offending me so many times."

Smoking was also a hard fact for him to adjust to in the company. As a nonsmoker who hates the smell of tobacco, Hyun said he felt left out each time his colleagues went out for a smoke.

"In Korea's workplace, going outside for smoking together is a good opportunity to know what is going on around the company, and I didn't know it at that time," Hyun said.

Seeing colleagues who entered the company at the same time as he did getting along well with other workers because of smoking together made him feel more alienated. He decided to join them outside at break time though he still doesn't smoke.

Changing careers

While some opt to quit their employment because of harsh working conditions or the oppressive hierarchical culture, others say their work ethic put them back on the job market or in the academic field shortly after going through fierce competition to get a job.

A 26-year-old, surnamed Cho, recently quit his job at a renowned local bank. He said getting a job at the bank was not his prime goal.

"The job was rather a passing point adding another career to my resume," he said.

"Of course there was lots of absurdity in the working culture at the bank, such as forced late-night drinking sessions, but that was not the biggest reason for my resignation," he said.

In job interviews, all applicants promise to devote themselves to the company, but almost none are sincere, nor do interviewers believe them, Cho said.

Unlike our fathers' generation, whose loyalty to their companies was unquestionable, the younger generation is recognizing employment as a contract between employers and employees, which can be broken anytime.

"The concept of work ethic for people of my age is changing. My former colleagues and I agree that we cannot be loyal to the company. The company does not guarantee your life after retirement, while the retirement age comes too soon."

"That means you can and have to leave the job whenever there is a chance. Your current work may not be your ultimate lifelong job, but a passing point," he explained.

He has been studying economics to become a certified public accountant (CPA) after he left the job at the bank. He may be satisfied when he passes the CPA test, but that does not mean he will be complacent about a job in the field.

"As I mentioned before, nothing can be a job for life. Getting a CPA certificate is the biggest goal of my life for now, but who knows? Being a CPA could be another passing point in my career," he said.