Samsung Electronics will launch massive innovations to its human resource (HR) management to create an organizational culture befitting its identity as a global information technology company. They will break away from the traditional seniority-oriented system and introduce a horizontal HR system that can maximize the autonomy and creativity of their employees. The company will simplify its job rankings from the previous seven stages to four stages and will call people by their name with the suffix "-nim," which shows respect in Korean, instead of calling them by their job titles, such as manager or director. They will eradicate the culture of staying late at the office just because their supervisors and bosses are still there, and will allow shorts in the summer. This is the result of Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong's thoughts to make Samsung into a global corporation whose organizational culture can compete with that of Google and Facebook, rather than remain as a physically big company.

Samsung Electronics announced on June 27 that it would reform its human resources management system, moving on to a task and role-centered system in order to improve its global competitiveness and to create a creative and horizontal organizational culture. The changes centered on the simplification of job ranks and the adoption of nonhierarchical titles.

The reason for the latest changes was due to an internal awareness that the company's culture, the software of the company, fell behind compared to its outward growth in size and reputation. Samsung is well known around the world for its management and system. The company remained strong in overcoming crises and quantitative growth based on such features, but the company is viewed to be weak in innovation based on the autonomy and creativity of its employees due to its rigid culture.

Vice Chairman Lee had hosted a debate on the topic of “Innovations for a Global HR Policy” on Mosaic, the company's online community forum last July seeking to change the organizational culture. Over 26,000 employees took part in the debate pouring in over 1,200 ideas and suggestions. The company collected the ideas from the debate and officially declared the “Start-up: Samsung Culture Innovations” this March. They created a team to oversee this task and have studied ways to innovate its HR policy.

The new policy simplified the job ranks in Samsung from its existing seven-stage system of direct, assistant director, manager, assistant manager, and employee 1~3 to a four-stage system (CL1~CL4) of career development depending on the development of job competency. According to the new system, directors will be classified as CL4, assistant directors and managers will be CL3, assistant managers and employee 3 will be CL2, and employee 1~2 will be classified as CL1.

All employees will now call each other by their name followed by the suffix "-nim," which shows respect in Korean. The company will allow each department to freely decide on a horizontal and respectable title such as "-nim," "Pro," "colleague" and English names depending on the nature of their task. However, they will continue to call the head of teams, groups, parts, and executive directors by their titles.

The company will also change its meeting culture and reporting culture. They will promote a meeting culture where only those that are really necessary attend, freely express their thoughts, reach a conclusion, and abide by such decisions. They plan to recommend that meetings end within an hour.

The company will also work to eradicate the culture of staying late at the office just because a supervisor or boss has not left as well as unnecessary overtime. They also plan to allow employees to take leave any time of the year and beginning this summer, employees will be allowed to wear shorts to work for their own comfort.

A representative of Samsung Electronics said, "The final goal of the changes to our human resources management system is to work to quickly implement decisions and encourage communication like start-up companies and to continue to seek innovation. The new system will be implemented next March."