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By Choi Sung-jin
From now on, Samsung Electronics workers should not press a drink _ not to speak of a "bomb shot" or boilermaker _ on their colleagues during office dinners.
Personnel of different sex, especially male executives and female employees, will be banned from sharing a ride home after company meetings.
Department chiefs ought to report to directors in charge before having get-togethers, and whether all participants have returned home safely. The chiefs should appoint a "dinner custodian" from among participants and have him or her control time and participants to prevent "accidents," and report violators, if any, to the company.
This is the gist of new rules for company dinners laid down by the world's largest cellphone maker recently, as part of its drive to innovate organizational culture, according to company officials and industry sources Sunday.
These rules are mainly aimed at preventing accidents resulting from drinking, and reflect in part the management's thinking that office dinners have served as the breeding ground of a military culture that top managers want to root out in the course of renovating corporate atmosphere.
Samsung has long attempted to change its drinking culture.
A case in point was its "119 rule," which calls for employees to drink only one kind of drink, finish it with just one sitting and go back home before 9 p.m. Since the company introduced its flexible work system, it has revised 119 to the "112 rule," limiting the entire time for dinners to two hours.
The latest set of rules has moved one step further from the "112 rule," aimed at preventing "safety accidents" such as sexual harassment or violence, and eliminate the military culture that tends to rear its ugly head at out-of-office dining events.
Samsung Electronics is pushing for cultural renovation based on a startup spirit, by shifting from "military Samsung" to "Silicon Valley Samsung" and becoming a lighter and softer organization.
In this regard, the nation's largest business entity is changing everything, ranging from position system to titles, meeting culture, job instructions and performance appraisal.
The company will implement the new personnel management system, including these and other rule changes, starting next March.
