| Kakao co-CEOs Yeo Min-soo, left, and Joh Su-yong / Courtesy of Kakao |
By Nam Hyun-woo
Kakao is struggling over a deepening conflict with its employees regarding the company's personnel evaluation system, which some workers claim encourages office bullying.
With the controversy being made public, management held a meeting with the employees and pledged "improvements in the evaluation system and stern countermeasures to deal with office bullying." But the company's union criticized this response, saying managers just reiterated theories without offering any practical solutions.
Kakao held the meeting between co-CEOs Yeo Min-soo and Joh Su-yong and 100 employees online Tuesday and discussed the company's personnel evaluation system and corporate culture.
The meeting came after a number of posts on Blind, an online community for office workers to share information anonymously, criticized Kakao's personnel evaluation system, describing it as "murder."
According to one post, the evaluation system is comprised of peer reviews and contains a question asking the reviewer "Do you want to work with this employee again?" The system provides data on how many people said yes and how many colleagues did not want to work with the employee compared to the company average.
Employees claim revealing this data is excessively harsh and encourages office bullying. Since the review is done on condition of anonymity and doesn't reveal the reasons for why the reviewer doesn't want to work with the employee, the system is not working as a tool for improvement, but instead grows distrust between colleagues, the union said.
During the meeting, employees demanded improvements and management pledged to change it to ensure "crews" (employees) can feel more stable and optimistic about the expression of the questions, while maintaining the strength of peer review."
Also, the company promised stern countermeasures against office bullying, saying it has already set up a taskforce to eradicate this.
However, the union said the company did not provide concrete answers or solutions to improve its personnel evaluation system, while reiterating "principles."
A Kakao spokesman said the meeting was initially arranged with the intent to hear various opinions from employees and not aimed at offering immediate solutions.
| Kakao's messenger app Kakao Talk / Courtesy of Kakao |
During the meeting, employees also complained about the company's incentives, saying it was not offering them appropriate compensation despite posting a record high 456 billion won in operating profits last year.
Last month, Kakao provided 10 treasury shares, worth 4.5 million won, to each employee as an incentive. But workers said this was not enough compared to other info-tech companies, where developers account for the majority of payroll. Game company Krafton recently made headlines after announcing a 20 million won hike in developers' annual salary.
Kakao negotiates with each employee over the specific amount of incentives they receive, and the union is planning to demand the company reveal its method for calculating these.
"The company will make further efforts to freely communicate with employees over the peer review system and incentives," the spokesman said.
Kakao's rival, Naver, is also struggling with employees demanding higher incentives. Naver's union sent a letter to management Feb. 6 claiming the company's incentives lagged far behind the level of the company's record-high earnings and demanded it make public its incentive calculations.