Two small companies in Busan have cut working hours while raising productivity. A shoe insole maker trimmed production time by 8% after introducing paid days off and overhauling its processes. An IT infrastructure maintenance firm moved from a 40-hour to a 35-hour workweek without any decline in service levels.
The Korea Labor-Management Development Foundation held the third steering committee meeting of its "Work-Life Balance+4.5 Project" on the 21st at Youngchang Eco in Busan's Sasang District, reviewing how two local companies shortened working hours and how the practice could spread. The meeting was part of a public-private productivity support group launched in May. The program backs companies that reduce actual working hours through labor-management agreements without cutting wages.
Youngchang Eco, a shoe insole maker in Sasang District, cut the average weekly working hours of its 31 employees by two hours by designating the third Friday of each month as a paid day off. The company, which supplies insoles to a global sportswear brand, joined the project to curb the long hours that recurred during every peak season and to retain skilled workers.
The company also reworked its production processes to match the shorter hours. It reviewed order-by-order production plans in advance to reduce the number of mold changes and assigned multi-skilled workers to bottleneck stages. It adopted ERP and MES systems to manage production planning and execution, and consolidated its inventory files into one. As a result, the time needed to produce 10,000 pairs of insoles fell to 46 hours from 50, an 8% reduction. Rather than shaving a little off each day, the company opted for one day off per month, taking into account plant conditions such as equipment preheating.
DI&C, an IT infrastructure maintenance firm in Haeundae District, switched from a 40-hour to a 35-hour workweek with no cut in pay. It shortened the workday by one hour and extended the lunch break by 15 minutes. The change was aimed at stemming an exodus of young talent driven by frequent overtime and holiday work tied to night jobs and emergency troubleshooting. The company introduced an in-house work automation program and an electronic approval system, and hired three additional staff so that work would not pile up on particular employees. The time spent preparing supporting documents for monthly reports to public agencies fell to two hours from eight per report. Approval times fell to half a day from 2.5 days. Maintenance service levels remained unchanged after the hours were reduced.
The two cases show that shorter working hours avoid disrupting production or degrading service only when work methods and production processes are changed alongside them. The key was not simply cutting hours but automating repetitive tasks and redeploying workers to raise efficiency.
The committee meeting also covered the trial and error, difficulties and responses the companies encountered in raising productivity. Participants agreed that productivity gains are a precondition for sustaining shorter working hours, and examined ways to extend the examples to other regions and industries.
"The two Busan cases show that changes in how we work, combined with technological innovation, can raise both corporate productivity and workers' quality of life," said Park Jong-pil, secretary general of the Korea Labor-Management Development Foundation. "We will create an environment in which many companies join in shortening working hours and can sustain that through higher productivity," the official added.