An Example of Problem Solving at a Korean Company

Technically its an American company that I work at but when 99% of the workforce are Koreans, I guess its pretty safe to say they are adopting the "when in Rome.." line of cultural relativism pretty well.



(I hate that line by the way)



In any case, here is a recent, personal example of how sometimes problems get "resolved" within a Korean company. Not to perpetuate any blanket stereotypes but when statistical evidence shows your country has the longest work hours of any industrialized country in the world while only barely hanging in the middle half of productivity, you've got some efficiency issues.

So, we've recently started a campaign called "Happy Wednesday" (yeah, I know) here at the ol' company. Essentially it's an attempt at culling some of the extremely obnoxious hours that some of us work here by telling us that no matter what, we have to go home on Wednesdays by 5pm. The first week it came into action we were actually told that the lights were going to be turned out on us by 5:30.

Yeah, so let me process this through my limited mental facilities.

Instead of attacking the REAL issues as to why we have so much work to begin with, we are just being told that no matter what, we have to go home at 5pm. We have to tell our clients this (Leave at 5pm?!?! Inconceivable!) and also magically make our work disappear for the day. If for some reason we get past all of the managers telling us to shoo and end up working past 5pm anyways, we need to get a special form endorsed by three separate managing entities. I don't know about you but to me this seems pretty shitheaded.

Let's discuss the realities of this campaign.

1) It was obviously cooked up by HR, a group who is routinely involved in making decisions about things they have no idea about.
2) It really does nothing but push the work load from one day to another essentially making people now have to work later during the other days of the week or on the weekend.
3) It addresses the real issues behind the obnoxious workload by....ignoring them.
4) Is something I suspect was created so they could put up a bunch of dumb yellow posters with smiley faces all over the office with the words "Happy ____" on them.
5) Is obviously completely fucking stupid.

Too add to this, not 2 days after the first week of this goes by I hear this conversation:

Manager type: "Hey, how is everything going?"
Grunt type: "Oh hey, pretty well. Just trying to finish this up and get out of here on time today."
Manager type: "On time? It isn't Happy Wednesday you know."

Yeah.