Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ghostrider]

"1. Rigid Structures and Hierarchy

...From experience, my previous company was a never-ending merry-go-round of audits and presentations, which resulted in my team leader spending the majority of his time making PowerPoint presentations for the CEO, a situation he himself would lament as a waste of his time....

2. Communication Issues

...Most Koreans think that learning English is only useful as a means to communicate with foreign business partners, or for use in business emails. But they overlook the fact that a world of resources and knowledge (case studies, annual reports, professional tips) is available to them via the Internet predominantly in English, and only a fraction of what is out there has been translated thus far into Korean. Foreign workers will always have the advantage of a simple Google search, which can provide hundreds to thousands of alternative information sources to what is available to a Korean limited to searching in Korean on a portal such as Naver....

3. Mobile Phones and Online Communication

....Everyone is tapping away furiously at their workstations, and you can easily presume it’s because everyone is working very hard. But check a screen and you’ll see that most workers are engaging in some form of online messaging, whether it be Kakaotalk’s desktop version, Microsoft, LYNC, or Nateon. Workers will normally be chatting away to office buddies - occasionally about work, but more often than not just wasting time....

4. Hungover Workers Taking Excessive Breaks

....Staff may as well not be at work the next day because a heaving, red-eyed, headache-ridden shell of what used to be a fully-functional worker is going to be useless for the entire next day without proper rest and recovery from the night before....

5. Form Rules Over Substance

....During my time at a Korean company, one of the observations that I made was that co-workers would spend two to three days adding in an array of fancy-looking shapes, images, flow charts, and graphs to a PowerPoint presentation that contained roughly half a day of research. That is the power of perception in the Korean office, and it forces workers to spend ridiculous amounts of time 'beautifying' simple reports that would take 10 minutes to present in an informal meeting or chat....

6. Poorly-equipped, Older Graduates

Korean graduate employees, despite extreme competition for jobs, are under-prepared for the workplace, and come with poor research and reporting skills. This is a side effect of an education system based around testing and lack of practical applications. Many young graduates come into the workforce with next-to-zero work experience, bar a few obligatory volunteer activities....

7. The Art of Looking Busy

In business or social situations both, Koreans have a penchant for giving off the impression of being busy. Rarely will you meet a Korean that will say they have relaxed recently. Being busy is the desired state and worn as a badge of honor.

This leads to Korean workers staying late, much later than any of their OECD counterparts, to give the impression of being busy. Unfortunately, staying late at the office does not equate into greater productivity, and although Korean work colleagues will claim to be very busy at work, the reality is that most are over-exaggerating their workload, which brings Parkinson’s law of time into effect.

Parkinson’s law is the adage which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/article/3698/insider-perspective-seven-reasons-why-korea-has-worst-productivity-oecd#sthash.qqCTUVs6.dpuf

[cmxc]

I agree with all of your observations, and wish to add that the single greatest cause of low productivity is unbelievably poor management.

Years ago I worked at Samsung Electronics and even worked on a particular project with the son (JY Lee).

Bottom line, the skills considered necessary for even entry level management positions at a typical fortune 500 company in the US are painfully lacking in even the highest levels of management at Korea's "best" firm.

Samsung's only method of success is to drive out cost from manufacturing copies of at the time Sony and Nokia products, and now Apple products. The main way they are able to squeeze cost is through exploiting a captive labor force that has no option of going elsewhere because they only speak Korean and every other firm in Korea is even worse.

[Handsome Boy]

[/b]OP. BRILLANT! WELL SAID!

[happiness]

Great post, and not anything that can be easily fixed. I also think that, as someone who worked for a K-company and speaks decent Korean, is that Korea peeps are terrible at communicating with each other, much less than in English. Communication is so difficult here, not only because of the need for honorifics, but the idea of not looking smarter than the other person, thus aiienating the other, embarrassing them. Ive been told many times, even when I talk about work, I talk about concepts or perspectives the boss may or may not have considered, thus they didnt like it, they felt I upstaged them.

No wonder most people just talk about the latest phone ad, or alcohol. Korea is a info-lacking society (but "education" is a word bantered about endlessly).

Oh well.

[Stan Rogers]

Does this apply to blue collar workers too? Can it be said about workers in construction, manufacturing or transportation? The analysis comes off as a broad over generalization to me.

[le-paul]

I have a friend who is a taxi driver.


(I would like to say that he is a very nice gentleman by the way, 'salt of the earth' and very interested in the well being of those around him etc. - I cant find fault in him as a human/his character)

Talking to him on first impressions, you would believe that he is indeed very hard working.
He often begins his shift at around 6/7 a.m. after church, and returns home usually after 11/12 p.m/a.m. That is a long day by any standards!

However, the more I talked to him the more I understood that taxi drivers seem to have a lot of 'meetings' - almost everyday in fact. They would usually take place around lunch time and last up to two hours. They would also have other meetings that took place on afternoons to discuss uniforms/gps systems or whatever.
I also learned that he went hiking almost everyday. He also returned home 2/3 times a day for meals.
He would never take a days rest - apart from Sundays, as he believed it was wrong to not be at work.

While I realize my sample size is hardly a sample at all, it seemed that a lot of his colleagues followed a similar type of daily work routine.

I don't think he was ever trying to be misleading, it just seemed to me that it is unethical to be doing anything other than working very diligently everyday.

The impression of doing so seems to be generally accepted amongst males in the case of how hard we work. This is also noticeable for example, when you discuss with a businessman the hours he works. Though a lot of that is spent hung-over or in a soj hof, its the time spent away from home in a shirt and tie that seems to count.

[atwood]

[Weigookin74]

Great points. Also, don't forget everything being done at the last minute. If things were organized and planned out, people could complete tasks within an eight hour day instead of being around for many hours being available all the time looking busy until there's work to do. Also, the payouts and bonuses are way more than an average office worker would get in the west. Their salaries in proportion to the Korean cost of living are quite high compared to the west - using percentages. Not saying it's a bad thing as westerners probably could stand to be paid more. But, I don't believe most westerners would want to sit around at the office for 14 hours a day either.

Strip away the salaries and bonuses and you wouldn't have too many Koreans wanting to work for the top companies here. Rigid confucianism, long hours, etc blow. It's a shame there weren't more companies in smaller Korean towns that paid less but only made you work 8 hours a day. You might see some floks move to these places. The cost of housing where I am is a third of the cost of Seoul housing. A 3 million won salary would go pretty far, especially if your wife worked, even if only part time. In Seoul, it takes closer to 6 million due to the over inflated housing costs. Who pays that? The big companies. Hence the grind.