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Title Ulsan to Transform Organizational Culture through Administrative Innovation
Posting Date 2022.06.22
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“Ulsan to Transform Organizational Culture through Administrative Innovation” 

Establishment of ‘2022 Master Plan for Organizational Culture Innovation’ through All-staff Inclusive Survey

Elimination of Unreasonable Practices, Creation of Horizontal Organizational Culture, Innovation of Work Processes 

“Spreading Healthy and Autonomous Organizational Culture” 


Ulsan has set out to establish the ‘2022 Ulsan Metropolitan City Master Plan for Organizational Culture Innovation’ in hopes of fostering healthy and autonomous organizational culture. 

Ulsan will alleviate unreasonable practices and authoritarian culture of public offices, becoming a healthier organization with minimized generational gaps. 

Last year, a public official in his 20s took his own life due to in-office bullying after refusing the unreasonable order to “come in early to work and the superior a cup of coffee.” Ever since this incident, corrupt practices in public offices have risen as social issues. 

Although the proportion of generation MZ workers (born between 1980-2000), who take the work-life balance very seriously, are on the rise, old practices that are overly conservative and authoritarian still linger. 

To this end, Ulsan is to implement 11 tasks in 6 areas to achieve abolition of unreasonable practices, creation of a horizontal organizational culture through communication and empathy, and innovation of work processes. 

The 6 areas of implementation would include the creation of communication windows, self-diagnosis of organizational culture, simplified work processes, automation of simple/repetitive work, creation of autonomous working environments, and alleviation of authoritarian culture. 

More detailed tasks include the expansion of the ‘Ulsan Youth Innovative Leader’ program purposed to create a window of communication. 

Last August, Ulsan organized the ‘Ulsan Youth Innovative Leader’ group, consisting of 30 public officials belonging to the MZ generation, to actively include opinions of the younger generation in public offices. This year, Ulsan aims to expand the number of its members to 40 and allow the group to hold their monthly regular meetings at restaurants or cafes rather than the previous setting of conference rooms at city hall in order to encourage a more flexible meeting culture. 

Moreover, Ulsan will establish and operate the ‘Open Communication Forum’ an anonymous staff-exclusive forum located on the online administrative work system. 

The ‘Open Communication Forum’ began its operation in May, and on this forum, anyone can post their opinions regarding the improvement of the organizational culture, compliments, words of encouragement, or work-related information anonymously so that all staff can freely communicate. 

Furthermore, to diagnose the organizational culture, city hall will be running a quarterly ‘organizational culture survey for all staff.’ The staff survey will be shared with the executive officers to lower the barrier between generations and raise the organization’s will and interest in improving the organizational culture. 

To enhance work efficiency, formal and/or duplicate reports shall be lessened in numbers and electronic reports will be used to shorten delays caused by face-to-face reports. 

Additionally, simple/repetitive work processed by low-ranking officials will be processed automatically through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) once it is introduced. The plan is to alleviate the work burden of staff by selecting and automating three work tasks by the end of this year. 

To create an autonomous work environment, all department heads will be leaving office at 6 o’clock, except for cases of emergency such as disasters and/or civil complaints, so that lower-ranking officials may leave work without being pressured to stay longer. 

Handing out work just before the end of business hours shall also be discouraged as it is often the cause of overtime. 

When applying for leave, staff will no longer need to elaborate on their reasons for doing so, and a face-to-face interview will also be unnecessary. Staff will be encouraged to go out, leave work early, or use flexible working hours for any personal reasons. 

To improve upon authoritarian culture, upon any discovery of cases that may undermine the public officials’ discipline, such as abuse of authority, bullying, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment, offenders will be immediately reported to the auditing department for investigation. 

Other than what is mentioned above, Ulsan will be putting various policies, such as mandatory notices of a week before for work dinners, to foster reasonable and autonomous organizational culture while also expanding this to the local communities. 

Acting Major of Ulsan, Jang Su-wan stated that “Improving organizational culture is the primary task required to realizing a ‘competent and hard-working government’ ordered by the new government. We will continue to put our efforts in innovating the public sector with the belief that changes among the public officials will bring changes to Ulsan.” 

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