Tick tock! The minute and hour hands indicate that the clock has just struck 6 p.m.

"Time to head home," says Morris Chang, chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd., as he slowly rises from his seat, takes the hand of wife Sophie Chang, and ambles out of the office.

For years a culture of ultra-long working hours had been deeply insinuating itself within technology companies throughout Taiwan. It wasn't long before the philosophy behind such platitudes as "If you strive, you'll win!" and "Working hard is an achievement in itself" evolved into "death from overwork." When the tragic phenomenon became a common staple of news headlines, it rattled TSMC chief Chang.

In 2009, an entry-level engineer's letter of resignation landed directly in the TSMC chairman's mailbox, and its contents would send shockwaves throughout the company. The letter outlined in great detail the outrageous overtime hours that had come to be expected of the company's engineers, infuriating the top TSMC executive, who demanded a re-evaluation of the company's management structure.

"I said we don't need to make our employees work this hard. But they still weren't entirely convinced. Some believed what I really meant was that the harder people worked, the better," Chang recalls.

That's when he decided it was time to start telling everyone his own story.

"Over the past 50 years my workweek has seldom if ever exceeded 50 hours, whether working as an entry-level engineer, company president or chairman," Chang says, adding: "If a person works such long hours every day, can you really have faith in the quality of work accomplished in those last few hours?"

Beginning last year, Chang has sought to drive change through a gentle yet constant reiteration of a principle of "life, work, and commitment."

Chang also chose to address these themes outside the company, when delivering a speech at National Central University. The initially skeptical and circumspect TSMC employees eventually began to believe, to act and, indeed, to change.

In less than six months, the average workweek among TSMC employees was reduced from more than 50 hours per week to just 50, and this despite the fact that some units had exceeded that number due to work on seasonal or special time-sensitive projects.

Encountering familiar faces while walking through the TSMC campus, company vice president for human resources L.C. Tu is always asked one question: "Can the 50-hour workweek really be done?"

Outside company grounds, on university campuses, the 50-hour workweek remains a topic of conversation. On a recent recruiting tour, J.K. Wang – TSMC's vice president for operations/300mm (12-inch) fabs – visited the campus of National Cheng Kung University. When he met with professors, the first subject they mentioned centered on the 50-hour workweek.

As economies recover, global competition is spurring efforts to protect and retain valuable human resource assets. In this context, creating an improved corporate culture and better working conditions has clearly become even more important.

Last year, while TSMC operating revenue was clearly surging to a new historic high in excess of NT$400 billion on the back of a production capacity usage ratio surpassing 100 percent, the average working hours among TSMC employees were paradoxically reduced.

"The Chairman has repeatedly reminded all executives to think about doing the right thing. That doesn't mean extending working hours and getting the job done . Those are two completely different things," L.C. Tu says. "In the past, everybody thought it was okay to just finish the task at hand, forgetting that hidden beneath the surface was a lot of wasted effort and inefficient work."

Approach 1: Reduction of Ineffectual Meetings

Responsibility for overtime hours invariably rests not only with the work habits of employees; an even greater cause lies within the corporate culture and the work template itself. An approach to reducing working hours could begin with reducing the numbers of ineffectual meetings.

At just past 9 a.m., 30 or so employees file out of a conference room at a TSMC 300mm (12-inch) fab. On this day their meeting has lasted less than half an hour. Compare that to six months ago, when this same group would gather in the same conference room each morning for meetings lasting from one to two hours.

At each TSMC plant as many as 70 or 80 employees are required to attend the daily morning production meetings, yet the substance of those meetings is not necessarily always relevant to all of those in attendance.

Now, the content of TSMC production meetings, and the personnel required to attend them, are divided into three stages. The first stage involves presentation of an overall production benchmark report, emphasizing that day's production line priorities, bringing everyone up to speed within 20 minutes. At this point, nearly half those in attendance can be dismissed and begin their day's work. The second stage focuses on equipment issues, and the time is similarly limited to less than 30 minutes. A final, third stage involving more in-depth discussions requires more time, but also a more streamlined group of participants.

"Reducing the frequency of meetings, the numbers of those in attendance and the duration of reports can save some time," says J.K. Wang.

Lightening the workload does not necessarily require rebuilding the entire management structure. What is actually needed is getting back to the basics. On a variety of fronts, the point is to root out the cause of a problem, and not just treat it as a normal occurrence.

Approach 2: Using Tech to Reduce Workload

While it's said the devil is in the details, the reality is that waste resides there as well.

Ah-ooga, ah-ooga, ah-ooga, the alarm sounds and engineers hustle off toward the problem fab machinery and work feverishly to fix the irregularity. In earlier days, when there was no particular emphasis on work efficiency, everyone became accustomed to the sound of the alarm and engineers viewed handling irregularities as simply part of their job description while forgetting that their mission was actually to aggressively and thoroughly eliminate the cause that tripped the alarm in the first place. Now, in-depth understanding of the causes of irregularities and their complete resolution has reduced the frequency with which the alarms sound, effectively reducing the workload for the troubleshooting engineers.

"The implementation of the 50-hour workweek has prompted a ‘work smart' mentality among us, one in which we figure out how to better use our brains to accomplish higher value tasks," J.K. Wang believes. Engineers should not be spending long hours gathering information but rather applying their intellects toward diagnostics, he says.

Additionally, TSMC has modified its long-standing mentoring system, developing a new training system to reduce mentors' workloads.

Previously, before new employees could actually take up positions on the production line as full-time employees, they would be stuck like glue to their mentors and guided through each and every potentiality, significantly increasing the mentor's workload. And if the mentor was too busy, the new employee's training would be dramatically slowed.

Now, the training system allows new engineers to learn the ropes on their own and obtain certification online. TSMC is continuing to develop and expand this system to encompass even more training materials.

Even R&D engineers, who work the longest hours, no longer need to work overtime just to wait for the experimental data from a 24-hour production line run, thanks to a new monitoring system.

Now they can knock off at the end of their regular shift, wait for the completion of the test product and simply remotely access the monitoring system to review the data and status of the product.

"I think the lives of most people have improved as a result. Now they can head home at six or seven in the evening and have dinner with their families, spend time with their kids," Wang says. "Compared to before, that's an extra couple of hours a day, and these are truly ‘quality hours.'"

Wang is now out of the office before seven each evening so he can enjoy his quality time.

Letting Employees Take Back Their Lives

Compare that to the scene at a typical consumer electronics firm in Taipei. Each evening the boss rises from his desk, stretches, and sets off for a stroll around the office. His purpose is not to check up on who's still hard at work at their desks – he's checking out whose desks are vacant, who's knocked off "so early."

The atmosphere of nobody daring to leave until the boss has gone home has been gradually softened at TSMC.

"A lot of people used to check and see if their boss had gone home before they would leave," L.C. Tu says. "But after the Chairman related to everyone his experience and encouraged his executives to follow suit, a lot of execs have changed their ways, and then it led tens of thousands of others to change too."

Translated from the Chinese by Brian Kennedy