S. Korea seeks better work-life balance to ease falling birth rate

Tax incentives and subsidies for SMEs and doubling of paternal leave among measures

- Wendy Teo

At K-beauty brand Ma:nyo, employees can take time off from work to look after their children, run errands, or pop out for a yoga class or tennis lesson during office hours.

They are free to manage their work schedules, as long as they complete the mandatory number of working hours stipulated each month, which averages about 171 hours. This works out to roughly 8 1/2 hours a day.

"It is about focusing on the work tasks, rather than the work hours, so I think that makes my company more efficient and more effective," Ma:nyo's senior vice-president Choi Jin-ho told The Straits Times.

The company, known for its best-selling cleansing oil product, was named an exemplary employer for its work-family balance policies by the South Korean government in September.

Ma:nyo's flexible working arrangement bucks the trend in South Korea's notoriously demanding corporate culture. One in four workers is not able to leave the workplace on time, a poll released in October found, with respondents citing excessive workloads and office culture as the primary reasons.

Poor work-life balance has been cited as a key reason for South Korea's nose-diving fertility rate, which hit a record low of 0.72 birth per person in 2023, a situation that politicians have called a national emergency.

South Korean workers put in an average of 1,872 hours annually in 2023, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), when the average for OECD countries was 1,742 hours.