Three flagship names under Korea’s second largest conglomerate Hyundai Motor Group have been testing out work-only internal messaging platform to separate work and personal messaging.

Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors and Hyundai Mobis have begun to adopt ‘flow’, a new online collaboration tool developed by a Korean startup, to determine how it will be useful to increase employee productivity against freely available instant messaging tools like KakaoTalk.

The paid enterprise collaboration tool is similar to ordinary chatting and social media apps but it supports flexible and quick communication and decision making while ensuring the separation between work and personal life, which is the strongest factor behind people’s choice as a workplace tool to replace email and messenger systems. Security is another reason for more companies to embrace enterprise collaboration tools although they are paid services.

According to industry sources on Thursday, the three Hyundai Motor Group companies recently selected flow as their new collaboration tools for employees and are recruiting pilot users. Flow was chosen over rival solutions such as Microsoft Teams because the Korean collaboration tool supports on-premise environments as well, meaning the companies can keep data in their own servers.

A new industry trend this year is a growing penetration of such collaboration tools into large brick and mortar manufacturers and financial companies, which are conservative by nature.

Line Works, a collaboration tool developed by Naver’s subsidiary Works Mobile, was introduced to several business units of KEB Hana Bank, where some 200 tellers and employees use the tool to support one-stop customer services by communicating between headquarters and retail branches.

Demand for these enterprise collaboration tools is increasing as more organizations put an emphasis on cross-functional cooperation and organizational flexibility. Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google G Suite, as well as homegrown solutions like Toss Lab’s Jandi are competing in this fast-growing market.

By Oh Dae-seok and Minu Kim

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]