Topic of the Month

K-water, a Workplace that Fosters
a Work-Family Balance

Family-Friendly Management

May is family month in Korea. K-water has a range of family-friendly management policies in place to help employees maintain work-family balance. These policies are designed to help create an ideal community for parents to raise kids and for children to have fun growing up.

📝Text by. Editorial Team.  /  📷Photos. Ji-hyeon Hwang

Reliable and Convenient Daycare Service
If you walk past the main gate of K-water’s head office building for 10 minutes, you will see the Mulsarang Daycare Center. K-water employees bring their young children to the daycare center when they come to work in the morning. At the daycare center, small groups of 3 to 5 kids were having fun putting together blocks and folding paper. The daycare center run by K-water offers a safe environment as well as high-quality care services. The head office in Daejeon and Nakdonggang River Basin Headquarters are each running a daycare center. The centers take care of newborn babies and children aged up to 5 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. With the service extended until 9 p.m. starting September 2024, employees can have their kids taken care of even when they have to work overtime unexpectedly.

K-water as a Family-Friendly Workplace

K-water employees are working at various locations across the country to respond to water disasters and ensure seamless supply of safe, clean water. Only 13% of all its workplaces nationwide are located in cities, and employees are required to work on rotation. As a result, a high portion of employees work at locations where they have no personal ties and they are forced to live apart from their families. To address the difficulty faced by employees struggling with work, childbirth, and child rearing, K-water's labor and management jointly declared “family-friendly management” in May 2024 and launched a family-friendly project. Additionally, the company has been making efforts in different aspects over the past year to make K-water "a great place to work and raise children.”

Parental Leave Made Simple and Easy
One of the most salient changes introduced by K-water to make a family-friendly workplace is the “One-Stop Parental Leave System,” which combines three different types of parental leave—prenatal parental leave, childbirth leave, and postpartum parental leave—as employees had to apply for each separately prior to the one-stop system. Moreover, employees are allowed to split the entire parental leave of three years per child into up to four different timeframes to fit their childcare needs. It has also been made mandatory for male employees to take a parental leave, which has been increased from the previous 10 days to 20 days so that they can better help their spouses with postpartum recovery and care for their newborn babies.

No Pressure over Choice between Promotion and Parental Leave
Previously, taking a parental leave ahead of a possible promotion meant a delayed promotion or even a lost chance of being considered for promotion. Under the new policy, however, parental leave is counted into the service period regardless of how many children for which they have taken a parental leave; employees who are qualified for a promotion will be considered for promotion in a promotion evaluation even when they are on parental leave. If an employee’s score in the performance evaluation in the year immediately preceding the year of parental leave is higher than the average score of the peer group, the higher score will be used for the promotion evaluation. This way, employees who are on parental leave are not put at a disadvantage in promotion.

Flexible Work Schedule and Other Family-Friendly Policies
A series of family-friendly policies have been introduced to provide practical support for employees with heavy childcare needs. These policies include a flexible work schedule that allows a four-day workweek and the option to work from home. Particularly noteworthy is the Childcare 3·3·6 Program under which employees are required to work 2 hours less per day for a total of 12 months including 3 months during infancy, 3 months around their child’s entrance to elementary school, and 6 months following their return to work, without a pay cut. The goal is to ensure adequate time for childcare when parental care is most needed.

Furthermore, K-water has expanded the welfare benefits for employees preparing for pregnancy, including increasing the number of days off allowed for employees for prenatal checkup, financial support for prenatal checkup and infertility treatment, and childbirth grant in order to promote the health of pregnant women and their babies. As a result of all these innovative policies and changes in attitudes to parental leave, 202 employees took a parental leave in 2024 compared to 126 in 2019. The number of male employees who took a parental leave jumped almost threefold from 17.3% in 2019 to 44.1% in 2024. The Flexible Childcare Work Schedule* has been used by a growing number of employees: 32.5% of all eligible employees in 2022, 48.8% in 2023, and 55.1% in 2025.
In recognition of all these innovative changes, K-water won the best prize at the HR Innovation Contest hosted by the Ministry of Personnel Management in December 2024 for its “K-water Type Family-Friendly Work System for Zero Childcare Blindspot” theme. The award recognizes K-water’s efforts to eliminate childcare blind spots for employees and build a family-friendly corporate culture. Going forward, K-water will keep reinventing itself into a workplace where all employees can strike work-family balance through family-friendly management that employees can relate to.

* Flexible Childcare Work Schedule

Employees with children aged under 8 or in the 2nd grade or below in elementary school are allowed to adjust their work schedule so that they can use up to 2 hours a day for childcare for a period of up to 36 months.

Interviews with Children at the Mulsarang Day Care Center

  • My mom is a great cook. The beansprout dish she makes is especially good. I am happiest when I play with my mom and dad. We play with blocks and dolls, and we go to kids’ cafes. I’m glad we're one happy family.

  • My mom and dad are the best! They always take good care of me and cook tasty food for me. Actually, I have so many things to say in my letter for them, but I couldn’t say them all. I want to go to the beach in summer, but I couldn’t say that in the letter. Mom and dad, let’s go to the beach and pick some seashells.

My dad knows a lot about water. He says he has handled water a lot. My mom is good at everything. She is so smart. My family often goes camping. Dad can make great meat BBQ. I love to eat BBQ during camping.

My family often plays sports together. My dad, my mom, my brother, and I play soccer, baseball, and badminton together. When we play sports together, I feel like we're getting stronger and healthier together. I’m going to be a good kid for mom and dad and help clean the house.

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