[Weekender] Simplicity key to Hyundai Card office culture

Modern society is fated to grow ever more complicated, and to keep hold of the things that truly matter, one must eliminate excessive formalities, according to a top official of Hyundai Card.

“A meeting should be about discussing a specific issue and reaching a tangible conclusion, but people are too often distracted with the process itself,” Hwang Yoo-no, Hyundai Card and Hyundai Capital’s executive vice president and corporate service division head, told The Korea Herald in a recent interview.

The executive, along with the CEO Chung Tae-young, was one of the key people who implemented the firm’s latest simplification initiative. Hwang’s division ranked second in a company-wide evaluation on idea excutuion.

“We are a demanding company that pushes employees to work hard and well, so we wanted to boost their morale and help them work more efficiently by relieving them of unnecessary formalities and documents,“ Hwang said. 

With such goals in mind, the company introduced the concept of focus meetings and zero presentations.

“In our focus meetings, the participants, who are limited to a minimum number of hands-on staff and decision-makers, hold an open debate on the given issue instead of making presentations,” Hwang explained.

All decisions are made on the spot, with viewing materials kept to a minimum.

“What is the point of spending hours on making pages and pages of presentation materials when there is so much real work to do?”

Formal presentations were cut out completely, with employees encouraged to communicate by phone and email.

The results were astonishing, the executive said. Hyundai Card and Hyundai Capital cut their operating lead time by 250,000 hours and annual office hours per employee by 30 hours last year. The average clock-out time was also moved forward.

“Though the simplification campaign has only been active for less than a year, we believe that we have achieved sustainable reforms,” Hwang said.

The notion of simplification was also adopted for Hyundai Card’s financial products.

“When products become too complicated, users stay away. It’s as simple as that,” Hwang said.

However, for issues that require complicated regulations or safeguards, the company tries to make things easier by changing its approach.

The simplified employee tax forms was one such example.

In the past, Hyundai Card’s employees had to run around for countless documents to receive company subsidies to cover their medical fees.

Instead of trying to get around the government regulations, the company decided to change the forms to precisely match those required for the National Tax Service’s year-end tax adjustments.

And when the company found out that the scope of the new format was wider than before, it simply reduced the subsidies to keep within the budget.

“Our employees no longer have to spend time and effort on gathering medical bills, meaning they can better use their energy, ideally on company affairs,” Hwang said.

One downside to so much simplification is that there is a lack of people-to-people communication. To address this potential problem, Hyundai Card regularly holds sessions where executives work together, face-to-face for hours at a time.

The meetings were awkward at first, but employees now look forward to them, Hwang said, as they provide a time for them to sit together and look at themselves as friends and fellow human beings instead of simply colleagues.

By Bae Hyun-jung (tellme@heraldcorp.com)