[Square] Minister's Office Coffee Service Guidelines and Flexibility

In 2002, when I was working at the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and met with the Nigerian Minister of Power along with a plant order delegation, I experienced something memorable. Just as the meeting was about to start, a secretary began serving coffee. However, instead of bringing several cups at once, this staff member brought only one cup each time to serve the coffee. There was a coffee service guideline that instructed to serve exactly one cup politely when important guests arrived. Our group had more than 50 people, so we wondered when we would be able to drink coffee. Before long, we found ourselves paying more attention to the staff member’s movements than the meeting content.

If daily life proceeded in this manner, Nigeria would remain a developing country forever, I thought. That staff member seemed to be focused solely on the guideline to serve just one cup politely. Having no experience hosting many guests at once, the guidelines were probably not diverse. Why are guidelines necessary for such a trivial task as serving coffee? Wouldn’t they reduce initiative, creativity, and even work achievement?

Recently, the environment surrounding our industry has been rapidly changing. As income rises, consumer demand has become differentiated and individualized. With China’s expansion and the spread of cross-industry competition, competitors have increased and competition patterns have diversified. National policies are also rapidly changing. After liberalism reigned, protectionism is now gaining ground. Economic uncertainty has increased. This demands agile corporate responses to rapidly changing environments. With climate change emphasized, GM announced it will produce only electric vehicles by 2035, and Volkswagen plans to increase the proportion of electric vehicles to 70% of its production by 2030. The number of companies adopting smart factories and utilizing big data is also growing. They are responding flexibly to the rapidly changing environment.

How can such flexibility be secured? It is certainly thanks to technological progress. The introduction of smart factories that reflect customer order data in real time during production has become possible through IT, and data-based decision-making has become feasible with the advancement of artificial intelligence.

Does technological progress alone guarantee flexibility? It does not seem so. Support through awareness and systems is necessary. Especially, the flexibility of labor organizations is an issue. Individualized and differentiated customer orders may cluster in specific seasons or time periods due to various factors such as economic fluctuations. Flexible labor organizations can respond to such surges in orders, but it is difficult to respond in the opposite case. Corporate survival itself may be at risk. Even if smart production systems are introduced through IT development and data-based decision-making systems are established, agile response is difficult without labor organization flexibility. This is why awareness and institutional transformation must proceed in parallel.

Whether to serve coffee politely one cup at a time or to bring many cups at once is not a matter of technology but of awareness and guidelines. Would it not be more effective to give comprehensive autonomy that allows appropriate responses according to the situation without making guidelines at all? In this case, the employee’s situational response capability would improve over time, and coffee service would be provided very pleasantly to everyone in any situation.

Industrial society is transitioning from the 20th-century mass production era to a multi-product small-quantity production era, and now to a customer one-to-one customized production era. Are our labor organizations and systems properly responding to this era of rapid technological change? It is necessary to examine whether they are causing a decline in people’s autonomy and capabilities to the extent that flexible responses become impossible.

It is worth examining whether various norms and legislative productions such as the Worker Dispatch Act, flexible and selective working hours systems, substitute work, regulations related to wage and labor negotiations, and the 52-hour workweek system excessively control people’s creativity and behavior, or whether they, like Nigeria’s coffee delivery guideline, are destroying people’s autonomy and capabilities.

Jung Manki, Chairman of the Korea Automobile Manufacturers Association (Former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy)