Samsung requires its executives to go into “crisis” mode by coming to work six days a week

Despite the success of its smartphones, all of the Samsung group’s activities are showing declining results. To motivate teams, in South Korea, the solution does not involve team building seminars in the countryside, but rather through a crisis context in the office.

The giant Samsung has just decided, in mid-April, to have its executives come to work on Saturdays or Sundays, in addition to their usual five-day week. And normally, they will not be paid for these overtime hours. Samsung is simply reinventing the six-day week.

Samsung is South Korea’s largest conglomerate. Locally, these giant companies are called “chaebols”. The group is known for its most prestigious subsidiary, Samsung Electronics, which is the largest producer of smartphones in the world, neck and neck with Apple. Samsung Electronics also makes household appliances, flat screens and all the memory chips that we use in our home electronics.

But the Samsung conglomerate also has subsidiaries specializing in construction, electric car batteries and even pharmaceuticals. And therefore, the management of the conglomerate believes that the economic health of this set of activities is not satisfactory. It is time to pull ourselves together, to establish a feeling of crisis, and this requires sacrifices from managers. They must now come to work in meetings on Saturday or Sunday, it will depend on the teams, to reflect on their strategies of recent months and possible improvements.

Executives must agree to sacrifice their weekends, they don’t have much choice. In South Korea, as in Japan, the relationship with work is very different from that we know in France or Europe. Here, business is truly at the heart of your life. And these executives at Samsung will obey, without complaining. They are, for the most part, on short-term renewable contracts with very good salaries. And they wouldn’t want to risk losing that golden place, for which they have been preparing since elementary school or middle school. To join a group like Samsung, you have to be the best at school, take private lessons and pass the competitive exam in one of the country’s three prestigious universities.

Furthermore, these executives are considered, in labor law, as employers and not as employees. And so, they are not paid more when they work more. The six-day week will therefore not cost the company much.

Samsung being a reference in the South Korean economy, other groups will probably follow this example and reintroduce this six-day week. This has already started in the second big “chaebol”, the second largest conglomerate in the country called SK. SK management has just decided that the directors of all its subsidiaries will have to come to a meeting at least every other Saturday at headquarters to take stock of the group’s situation with the big boss.