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Gaming on Work Stimulus - Employers Get Behind the Joystick
By Pierre Mario Fitter, South Korea
It's just before lunch at the Tata Daewoo truck factory in Gunsan, South Korea. An electronic sign above the factory floor tracks how many trucks have been made so far - 15. The day's target is 49. There's a lot of noise on the assembly line. At each work station, robots and men in hard hats work to the beat of music coming from their boom boxes. Suddenly, the musical and robotic symphony is drowned out by Beethoven's 5th, which cuts in over the PA system. It's lunch time.
"Tata Daewoo’s rules only allow workers into the game room during longer breaks such as lunch. At all other times, the room is off limits so that the younger employees stay focused on their work." -Pierre Fitter
Most of the workers head to the washrooms to get cleaned up. But a smaller group heads off in another direction - Tata Daewoo's gaming room. "In Korea, computer and video games are a big part of the youth culture," says Seong-Kook Kim, HR head of Tata Daewoo. "So, we have a game room for our employees to relax in their personal time." The average age of workers at the Tata Daewoo factory is 33 although many employees are much younger. Some have only just graduated from the local technical school. Tata Daewoo's game room seems to help keep the day-to-day job stress-free.
Koreans don't take stress lightly. A Tata Daewoo staffer says that, recently, one man was successfully sued for braking suddenly on a highway. The charge against him was that he had caused undue stress to the driver of the car following him.
"Stress is a very big part of HR managers' jobs in Korea," says Subir Ganguli from Tata Motors in India. Ganguli has been sent over from India to look after business process excellence at Tata Daewoo. He says that the game room, personal stereos at workstations and a gym help his employees work off the rigors of each work day.
Korea is perhaps the most wired nation in the world. Ninety nine per cent of its house holds have 8 mbps broadband connections. Thanks to such super-fast internet connections, online games such as World of Warcraft have become wildly popular in the country. In fact, within a few weeks of its Korean launch, the multiplayer-oriented World of Warcraft sold over 1 million copies. Most other games sell only around 15,000 copies.
But in a country where community discipline is more important than personal freedom, computer games have had an unfortunate side-effect on the youth. Many young Koreans have lost their jobs and, in some cases, their lives because of their addiction to games.
In 2001, 24-year-old Kim Kyung-jae died after playing video games for 86 straight hours at a cyber café. In 2005, a four-month-old infant suffocated after her twenty-something year old parents, who were busy playing games at a neighborhood cyber café, didn't return home on time. That same year, the government-funded Korean Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion reported that well over 12,000 people had sought help to get over their game addiction.
De-addiction camps have now sprung up across the country. At these camps, joystick-crazy youth spend a few days completely cut off from the digital world. There they meet other computer game and internet addicts in the hope that this real-world interaction will help them get over their virtual-world addictions.
Despite the problems, Tata Daewoo claims that games have a positive effect on its workers. "These games help us break the monotony of work and get us recharged. Also, they give us a high level of energy and motivation," says one worker. Tata Daewoo's rules only allow workers into the game room during longer breaks such as lunch. At all other times, the room is off limits so that the younger employees stay focused on their work.
Ganguli has suggested taking the concept of the game room and music at work stations back to Tata Motor's factories in India. This has not yet happened, in part because PC penetration rates are low, and the popularity of gaming consoles is even lower. Further, owning an X-box 360 in India costs as much as 30 to 40 times the average school year fees in a government run school where most Indian students study.
Few companies outside of the IT industry look at employee perks, such as a game room, to allow employees to de-stress. Indian companies certainly aren't known for that. "Tata Daewoo has been able to combine fun along with work very well," says Ganguli. "Maybe, one day you will see workers in our Indian factory also playing away!"
