SKC

● Through increased communication and cooperation, the company encourages employees to come up with new ideas. It removed designated seats to flexibly react to external environments.

●  With the establishment of base offices, SKC aims to expand communication with customers. The ‘Era of Gwanghwamun Building 2.0’ has begun in preparation for the next big step.

SKC has introduced the smart office system and plans to accelerate innovation in ways of working. SK Group has been transforming their workplaces as part of efforts to improve work efficiency. SKC, which unveiled its new vision “Global Specialty Marketer” in 2016, is gearing up for the next big step with the adoption of smart office.

SKC held the launch ceremony of smart office at its headquarters in Jongno-gu on March 11, marking the start of the “Era of Gwanghwamun Office 2.0.” After four months of construction since last November, SKC turned the five floors of its headquarters into smart offices with an aim to create an environment where employees can work more creatively and effectively with increased communication and cooperation.

First, SKC replaced the previously designated seating by unit—team, office, and division—with shared seating, in which employees can sit anywhere they want to work. The company removed dividers between seats and doubled the number of co-sharing project rooms to 34. In addition, a comfortable staff lounge like a café was established on each floor in an effort to increase communication between staff members.

This is intended to promote everyday communication among members of different teams, offices, and divisions so that they can share indirect experiences and different perspectives. An SKC official said, “Conversations between members of different divisions can create synergy, such as helping develop new business ideas. Our new workstations were designed in a way that as long as employees, including global site members, bring their own laptop, they can conveniently work anywhere they want.”

This also highlights the company’s commitment to reacting more promptly to new business environments. The SKC official added, “In the past, whenever we had new teams, we experienced physical limitations, such as having to reallocate or create new seats. Now that we don’t have designated seats, we can create and run agile organizations like project teams when it’s necessary. This will allow us to react to changing business environments more flexibly.”

Furthermore, SKC has taken steps to enhance communication with customers. Considering that most of its customers are based in the south side of Gyeonggi Province, the company opened base offices in Pangyo and Suwon. “Reducing travel time while increasing communication time can allow us to introduce products that meet the demands of customers. This is in line with SKC’s new vision that we should bring the voices of markets/customers and technology together creatively,” explained the SKC official

The introduction of smart office is a follow-up to the reform of the company’s work position structure in 2017. At that time, SKC established an environment where staff members can exert their full potential by allowing an employee who worked for the company for more than eight years to be able to become a team manager. The SKC official expressed, “We aim to make SKC where individual capabilities become the company’s competitiveness, which will, in turn, drive the big growth of SKC.” [End]

< SKC employees are having a conversation at a staff lounge>

SKC replaced its designated seating by unit—team, office, and division—with shared seating, in which employees can sit anywhere they want>