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SK Telecom President and CEO Park Jung-ho presides over a seminar on the post-corona world at the company’s Seoul headquarters on June 3. (provided by SK Telecom)

SK Telecom is pursuing a plan to reduce the commute time for all its employees to less than 20 minutes by redistributing them from their current base of operations at the company headquarters in Euljiro, in downtown Seoul, to locations throughout Seoul and its suburbs. If corporations with offices in downtown Seoul follow suit, it would probably ease traffic during rush hour and also impact the real estate market.

“The contact-free trend is both a crisis and an opportunity for ICT [information and communications technology] companies that provide ultra-connectivity,” said Park Jeong-ho, president of SK Telecom, during a seminar on the post-COVID-19 world at the company’s headquarters on June 3. SK Telecom said on June 7 that Park had accepted the proposal to disperse employees into branches around the Seoul Capital Area (SCA).

During the four-hour remote seminar, only 20 or so executives attended in person, with company and affiliate staff tuning in through group chats, video calls, computer and mobile phone streaming, and in-office telecasts.

As part of this plan, SK Telecom has agreed to add “hub offices” in the Seoul districts of Gangnam, Songpa, and Gangseo and Ilsan District, Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, as well as other areas. Hub offices are currently located in Jongno and Mapo Districts in Seoul and in Bundang District and Pangyo, Seongnam. More hub offices will free up space at the Euljiro headquarters, which the company will turn into a “shared office” that can serve as a workspace for Seoul-based employees of SK Telecom and its affiliates.

“Employees can go to their closest hub office to work, instead of going all the way to the headquarters at Euljiro. We expect that completing the hub office expansion will reduce all employees’ commute to 20 minutes or less,” said Kim Dae-ung, a company manager.

SK Telecom’s office dispersal program also represents a strategic response to the era of working from home, which is likely to be more widely adopted during the coronavirus pandemic. In order for developers and other employees to work effectively at home, they need to have two large monitors and a space that’s completely separate from children, conditions that aren’t easy to meet at home.

“When we asked employees about their experience with working from home, which we’d asked them to do to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, quite a few said that, when they needed to concentrate, they’d gone to cafés near their house to get away from their kids. When people are telecommuting in the future, they can drop by a hub office when they have work that requires concentration,” Kim said.

On Sunday, SK Telecom also decided to use data based on employees’ telecommuting experience to optimize work methods in an initiative the company calls Digital Work 2.0. It will also be strengthening contact-free business areas including O2O (online-to-offline) marketing platforms and contact-free security solutions and setting up a “junior board” composed of young employees who belong to the “digital generation.” Board members will be empowered to review new services and decide whether they should be launched.

SK Telecom will also be working to improve its model for assessing the competitiveness of telecommunication programs by taking into account not only average revenue per user (ARPU), the number of users, and user market share, but also each program’s unique features.

By Kim Jae-seob, senior staff writer

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