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Samsung Shifts To Emergency Mode With 6-day Work Week for Executives (kedglobal.com) 85

Posted by msmash from the emergency-mode dept.
Korean newspaper KED Global: Executives at all Samsung Group units will work six days a week from as early as this week in a shift to emergency mode. The move comes as the won's sharp depreciation, rising oil prices and high borrowing costs aggravate business uncertainties after some of the group's mainstay businesses delivered poorer-than-expected results in 2023. The executives of Samsung Electronics Co., including those in the manufacturing and sales divisions, will work either on Saturday or Sunday following the regular five-day work week, according to Samsung Group officials.

They will review their business strategies and may modify them to adapt to the changing business environment amid mounting gepolitical risks from the prolonged war between Russia and Ukraine and escalating tensions in the Middle East. "Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome it," said a Samsung Group company executive.

Top management at Samsing Display Co., Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co. and Samsung SDS Co. will adopt the six-day work week as early as this week. Samsung Life Insurance Co. and other financial services firms under the Samsung Group will likely join them soon. Executives of Samsung C&T Corp., Samsung Heavy Industries Co. and Samsung E&A Co. have already been voluntarily working six days a week since the start of this year.

Samsung Shifts To Emergency Mode With 6-day Work Week for Executives More | Reply

Samsung Shifts To Emergency Mode With 6-day Work Week for Executives

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  • Because that is what a 6-day week does. Stupid.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HBI ( 10338492 )

      Useless office drones are the people affected. They'll get cut based on numbers just as effectively as the workers lower down, so they're trying to put a good face on things. Someone sees bad stuff on the horizon.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      "We're the new Boeing!"

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by techno-vampire ( 666512 )
      Funny, workers were quite productive on six day weeks back in the 40s and 50s when that was the norm. It wasn't until the 60s or so when regular workers started getting five day weeks, largely because of union efforts. Now, five day weeks are normal and workers feel put upon if they're asked to work six in an emergency.

      • "workers were quite productive on six day weeks back in the 40s and 50s when that was the norm"

        Worker output kept increasing even though hours worked decreased. So no, they were NOT quite productive in the 40s and 50s.

        An actual capitalist would recognize that worker output is what you sell, not worker hours. Why do you have capitalism?

        • Do you have any objective evidence to back up your assertion? Just because some stranger on the Internet insists that something is true, doesn't make it so. And yes, that includes my claims as well.

          • Okay, first the personal anecdote: In the military, in my career field, they tried very hard to not work us any more than 60 hours a week, because they found that beyond that point, the average marginal return was negative due to increased errors. IE we'd make a mistake because we were tired or whatever, then have to spend the next hour fixing said mistake, then we'd make another, etc... Turned out that giving us some time off to sleep worked better.

            But some other sources: Employee Productivity vs. Hours [scoopforwork.com]

            • Depends what you are actually doing.
              The office measures your hours by how many hours you spend in office.
              But many intellectual work can happen when you are out of office.
              What I mean: you are sitting on a bench in a park, but think about "your project".
              You read a book about something completely unrelated, and suddenly have an idea about "your project".

              Obviously a taxi driver or factory worker has to be on his machine ...

              In my experience software development and similar things is best with 6h work days. I per

              • Well, obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but generically speaking, productivity per hour going down with more hours worked is pretty much universal. The exact form of the slowdown, when it occurs, and how severe it is will vary, of course.

                Fixing the bugs introduced because people were working tired isn't true productivity - I mean, it's productive use of the worker, but it's like the broken window fallacy - fewer bugs would be better yet, because fixing a bug can easily cost more time than

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        They were not. There is a reason Ford introduced the 40h 5 day week and it was not to coddle workers. It merely was the identified peak-point of efficiency for manual labor. There are too many virtue-signalling idiots around that do not even know these basics. Incidentally, for desk work the optimum is 6h for 5 days a week. You can bring that up to 8/5 by doing 2h of low-productivity desk work per day, but that is it. Work more and you produce less.

        • Nonsense. It was unions that gave us the 40 hour work week

          .

        • One of your insightful posts :P

          My problem is that I do not get the mind shut off, so on weekends I'm still "working". And I live in Thailand, only banks and governments have weekends here. Of course, workers have a random day off (not related to the normal "week schedule") and if you see a house being build: the construction workers work every day. Well, there is basically every month a holiday around full moon ... and another holiday related to the royal family.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            One of your insightful posts :P

            I am just citing really old established facts. Obviously, the really broken US "work ethics" suppresses information like this, but it is out there for anybody that looks.

      • Now reconcile what you said, which is true, against the steady productivity gains that have been made since the time period you speak of.

        Due to massive gains in efficiency, we get WAY more done in 5 * 40 than anyone ever did in 6 day work weeks.

        As it turns out, efficiency of time matters.

    • we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis

      There wasn't anything in the summary about it accomplishing work or making people productive. Their long hours are just to make a statement.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        In times of crisis you should _not_ drive productivity down and error-rate up. They are doing both.

    • It's a great way to encourage people to find another job.

  • Yeah I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturd (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:30AM (#64407758)

    Yeah I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday

      “Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. Ahh, I’m also going to need you to come in on Sunday too.”

    • Came here just for this. Wasn't disappointed. Corporate enshitification redux like the early 2000's and late 1970's all over again. Makes me want to become a construction worker.
  • It doesn’t seem to get to these alpha males that we need to SLOW DOWN to save the planet.

  • What are they supposed to do on Saturday and Sunday? Take a trip over to Ukraine or Israel and spend a day in the military? That's what Samsung said is the source of their problem.

    • It's actually in the article, "review their business strategies", and modify plans accordingly.

      I'd expect to see things like determining underperforming products, product line consolidation, labor saving measures, cost cutting, maybe even new product lines to try to expand into.

      In Korea, Samsung is crazy wide, producing everything from cell phones to military vehicles. [wikipedia.org]

      Reading, they've at least recognized that asking normal workers to work past 40 hours/week is counterproductive, but, well, executives can be

  • meetings everyday (Score:5, Funny)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:39AM (#64407798)

    We are going to have meetings everyday until we figure out why no work is getting done!

  • 6 days a week x 6 hours per day = 36 hour week. Winning!

  • Koreans work long hours then are expected to go out drinking with the boss. Adding another work day just means another a perfect reason to not have a family.

    Korea needs to break up the chaebols before it destroys them or degrades them further.
    • Its already too late for Korea, their demographic is going the way of Japan and now China (too many elderly, not enough babies/young adults to backfill). They hit peak output already. Burning out the the population and making high living cost (relative to income) does not have a price.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Yup, and last we heard, S. Korean women were not popping out babies like they used to. Why should they marry someone who is married to a job?

  • I would immediately resign. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:52AM (#64407848) Homepage Journal

    That kind of action means the CEO is incompetent.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by boskone ( 234014 )

      Yes, or if their consumer products weren't hot garbage. All their domestic appliances are unreliable nightmares. they could DOMINATE that market for the upper mid end with just $5 worth of attention on not ripping off their customers.

    • Re:I would immediately resign. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday April 19, 2024 @02:06PM (#64408404)

      No. That kind of action means their CEO is Korean. We get it. A good ol' American CEO would miss the profit and delivery targets for the quarter, simply fire 10000 people, recall their most anticipated hot Cybertruck, and then go crying to shareholders to approve the world's largest remuneration package for his incompetence instead.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      You would have had zero chance to get hired into these jobs. Executive jobs at Samsung are some of the most elite, well paid, high profile jobs in Korea. Korea is a society that values big companies like no other. There are a million people that would take your job in a heartbeat. Your next job has nowhere to go but down. You would quite because you'd have to work a couple of weekends?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      A good part of the management should resign since it is clear they are only there to rubber stamp the CEO and not push back on stupid things he does.

  • Management is here 6 days a week generating mountains of paperwork. Why can't you be more productive like them?

  • It might be a way to reduce leadership pay. Thin out the less committed executives.
  • until morale improves.

  • Is there ANY precedent for this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday April 19, 2024 @12:08PM (#64407918)

    Today it is the executives, tomorrow it will be the workers. /s

    1. Has ANY company tried this and it saved them?
    2. How many TOTAL hours per week is this?? I highly doubt this will be 6 2/3 hours x 6 days but the article doesn't say. What happened to the 6 hour workdays [fastcompany.com] ?

    Switching to 8 hours x 6 days isn't going to fixing the fundamental problem. Someone in management needs to read "From Good to Great", "Built to Last" among other management books. IMHO Samsung needs to:

    * look at their core business,
    * look at their entire supply chain costs,
    * pivot their (core?) business where it makes sense.

    Working even more hours is a "Hail Mary" pass pretty much guaranteed to fail causing more burnout as home-life balance is nonexistent. Don't be surprised if Samsung is out of business in 10 years. I'll miss their NVMe drives.

    • Re:Is there ANY precedent for this? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Friday April 19, 2024 @12:45PM (#64408060)

      Someone in management needs to read "From Good to Great"

      Many of the companies featured on "From Good to Great" went bankrupt (Circuit City!, Fannie Mae) or faced legal problems (Wells Fargo), or have not fared well (Walgreens stock is down 76% since 2015). A few others he profiled in the book have done much better, but if I threw darts at a wall with a list of companies, I probably could have done just as well in making picks.

      He then wrote a second book - after facing much criticism from the failure of the supposedly good companies - called "Built to Last" where he tried to excuse the issues of the companies he profiled in Good to Great that didn't continue success by claiming those that failed let their guard down or did something else wrong. So I guess it is a win-win for Collins, either way he gets to write more books?

      He does get one thing right, though: most business leaders are idiots and are terrible at managing their businesses.

      • Thanks for the update!

        I didn't think Circuit City [wikipedia.org] would last when they did their artificially limited play time with their proprietary DIVX set-top players. Looks like CC shutdown in 2009 and got sold/rebranded as TigerDirect.

        I see there is a documentary called "A Tale of Two Cities: The Circuit City Story" where the website pokes fun of Collin's "From Good To Great" label by saying it is a tale of two cities:
        * from good to great
        * from great to gone

        Ouch!

        > if I threw darts at a wall with a list of compani

      • I don't have links for the following, I'm just going from memory here. There was an academic who looked at a bunch of those books like "From Good to Great" after the fact. He analyzed how the companies performed long-term after the books (which wasn't always good), and what processes had been claimed in the books as the causes of their initial successes. He found that the specific processes were not really responsible for their success in many cases. Instead, it was a handful of good decisions that turn

      • It's not so much that Wells Fargo "faced legal issues" so much as Wells Fargo did illegal shit to their customers and got caught.

        The "legal issues" didn't happen in a vacuum.

    • 1. Has ANY company tried this and it saved them?

      You'd be surprised. It just normally doesn't make the news, but there are plenty of companies which go through crisis like this which result in upper management working weekends to build plans to recover and successfully make it out the other side. Executives don't normally get to clock off at 5pm. Fuck em, they get paid enough, let them work for it.

      The only unique thing here is that it made the news.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by c10 ( 595575 )
      I was with you until I saw "pivot".

  • I don't know if one can eventually get used to it, but when I work long hours or weekends, my brain doesn't work as well, and as I get older, my eyes get tired so that it takes longer to switch focus, and I make more typo's. It's the old joke: "If you want it badly, that's exactly how you'll get it".

  • I could not imagine a better idea that the entire leadership of a company going into short-term / burned-out / micromanagement / panic "Mode".
    The evidence of those measures doing wonders for innovation, morale, talent retention and productivity can hardly be overstated.

    In fact, give it 3 weeks and the first "eureka" moment will be the realization that, you know, "if we can do this, so can and should all of our employees, it is for the greater good. Feels great to lead by example."


    [sarcarsm trigger
  • That's a lot of golf, pity the caddies, they will have to work the extra days too

  • Is it finally time? (Score:3)

    by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Friday April 19, 2024 @01:35PM (#64408274) Homepage

    Are they finally going to attempt quality control?

    Samsung refrigerators are going on a decade of having the same failures due to a design defect. There's an entire Facebook group dedicated to helping people get full refunds on their failed refrigerators.

    My Google Pixel 6 Pro constantly loses cellular and requires a reboot or Airplane Mode because they went with Samsung's 5G chip over Qualcomm's.

    Their TVs look nice but have their own string of failures - not just with the backlights failing prematurely.

    The one product that seems to be consistently very good is their solid state drives. And they overproduced those so much that they didn't make any money off of those.

    • It's the Apple model of planned defects and obsolescence to encourage more repairs and shorter lifecycles.

      PS: Don't drop that phone because independent screen repair shops can't repair it economically.

    • About their drives, same experience here. All good, fast and reliable. In the company I work for the main monitor brand is Samsung. There is is even one 1280x1024 monitor that is still working well enough after 18 years. It was actively used for 12 years of that time, it moved into a server room and still works well for a few hours per week.

      I have not seen another brand of monitor achieving such a feat. Especially if you realize that it is doing well in a South American electricity grid that is riddled with

  • How does executives working more increase production? Reminds me of whenever Congress does a similar farce, it's always to screw us in the ass. These idiots have an inflated sense of self. If anything productivity will decrease.

  • Look up "Parkinson's law" if you don't see the irony in the title. Something about work expanding to match the time available to complete it.

  • Imagine how bad they'll feel when they get laid off after working six-day weeks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CQDX ( 2720013 )

      Actually, perhaps they'll be relieved! Then they can pick up a second career frying chicken.

    • Only a goof would work extra hours without compensation.

      When I was in a similar position for a year, I just rode it out until the sweet layoffs. We were told to stay late, so I slacked off even more. I did my 8 hours of work and felt morally comfortable. And shock horror, whipping an entire workforce to save a sinking ship didn't make a difference. About 150 were laid off. I got a new job a couple days later and banked the severance. I appreciate I was quite fortunate.

  • When you don't know the problem... (Score:3)

    by OneOfMany07 ( 4921667 ) on Friday April 19, 2024 @02:48PM (#64408570)

    Pushing the mistake down the line is the obvious solution, right?

    Meaning more time spent looking at results, and yelling at subordinates, will solve their problems. And less time enjoying life, or doing anything creative outside of work. Those are the keys to broad profitability, creating oil from thin air, and getting people to lend you money for cheap.

    "Don't just stand there... Do something!!!" is only useful when you know what to do.

    It's like the repairman that comes in, turns a single screw, and wants $10,000 for the repair bill. Most of the money isn't for the turning of the screw. It's for knowing why, which screw, and how much to turn it.

    These executives don't know how to fix the problem so they're doing something visible to pretend they'll fix anything.

    • The executives putting in more hours could indeed be a move more designed to placate investors and lenders.

      That said, it's quite likely that true improvements can be made, though this requires analysis.

      Basically, an old management book I read talked about the tendency for executives, management, and employees to tend to lose tract of what's really important, what the true goal is.

      For example, a web developer might have the goal of developing a kick-ass site for the business.
      The production manager might be f

  • Pushing workers to burn out is not a brilliant way of handling human resources, even for executives.
  • Since I've been trying to make noise about the #GSOD [youtube.com], maybe too many people stopped being or avoided to become clients ?

  • What is surprising is that Samsung has held on as long as it has. It makes TV's that record you in your private spaces, phones that have so much unremovable crapware that the user is within inches of spontaneous seizures, is plagued by rampant managerial corruption, and makes appliances that fail quickly and repeatedly.

    The general quality of the company's entire product line has turned to complete shit over the last couple decades, and the company has shown no signs of identifying and correcting the problem

  • Have some more meetings? Dream up some more KPIs?

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