The phrase “Work-Life Balance+4.5” has not yet been confirmed as the official name of a finalized statutory system. But the direction it points to is clear. The discussion around a 4.5-day workweek is moving beyond an abstract welfare slogan and becoming a concrete operating challenge: can a company reduce actual working hours and still keep work moving?
The Work24 work-life balance job subsidy provides a practical reference point for reading this shift. Broadly, the program has two tracks. One reduces prescribed working hours for reasons such as caregiving, health, study, retirement preparation, pregnancy, or childcare. The other reduces actual working hours, combining prescribed hours and overtime. The point HR needs to examine is not simply “whether employees get one more day off,” but where the work itself is actually reduced.
Actual working hours matter before the 4.5-day workweek label
The 4.5-day workweek debate is often translated into operating formats: leaving Friday afternoon open, taking one day off every other week, or shortening daily working hours. Work24’s actual-working-hour reduction track uses a more direct standard. The key question is whether actual working hours, including prescribed work and overtime, have been reduced by at least two hours.
That standard asks companies an uncomfortable question. Even if a system is called “4.5 days,” it is hard to call it a real reduction in working hours if overtime from Monday to Thursday increases. Conversely, even if a company keeps a five-day workweek, it may already be close to the essence of the 4.5-day debate if meetings, reporting, waiting time, and repetitive work are reduced and actual working hours fall.
From an HR perspective, the first thing to check is not the number of workdays but actual working-hour data. HR should look at overtime by department, peak hours by role, unapproved after-hours work, nighttime use of messaging and collaboration tools, and workload concentration around deadlines. Work-life balance programs may seem to begin with the calendar, but their success depends on reallocating workload and priorities.
The subsidy is closer to a workload redesign cost than a welfare benefit
Work24’s actual-working-hour reduction track offers a fixed monthly subsidy of KRW 300,000 per eligible employee. The number of supported employees is calculated based on 30% of the total eligible workforce, up to 100 employees. For workplaces with fewer than 10 employees, the standard is three employees. The prescribed-working-hour reduction track provides up to KRW 500,000 per shortened-hours employee per month, consisting of a KRW 300,000 subsidy and KRW 200,000 in wage-loss compensation.
These amounts may look small if the program is viewed only as a welfare cost. But from a workload redesign perspective, the meaning changes. Reducing working hours can require substitute staffing, work automation, fewer meetings, streamlined approval steps, adjusted customer response hours, and manager training. The subsidy is closer to a mechanism that offsets part of this transition cost.
Therefore, HR should not stop at checking whether the company can apply for the subsidy. It must also estimate the hours reduced, essential work that cannot be reduced, work that should be automated or stopped, and customer or field-response risks. More important than the money provided by the program is the company’s internal answer to the question: how will we absorb the reduced time?
If individual needs and organizational workload are separated, the system will wobble
The prescribed-working-hour reduction track is based on employees’ individual needs, such as family care, health, retirement preparation, pregnancy, or childcare. According to Work24 guidance, for general reasons it includes reducing weekly prescribed working hours to 15–30 hours for employees who worked at least 35 hours per week for six months before the reduction. Electronic or mechanical attendance management and restrictions on overtime are also important requirements.
This point connects directly to organizational culture. If an employee requests shortened hours but the team’s total workload remains unchanged, the work shifts to colleagues or returns to the employee as after-hours labor. The system exists, but inside the organization it becomes a choice people hesitate to use. For a work-life balance program to function in practice, the employee’s right to request and the team’s workload adjustment must be designed together.
The manager’s role also changes. It is not enough to say that shortened-hours employees will be accommodated. Team leaders need to reduce priorities, rearrange meeting times, and reset customer response standards. HR should prepare not only approval procedures for shortened hours, but also operating guides for managers, standards for sharing work among colleagues, and principles for adjusting performance evaluations.
What HR must decide now is not the day off, but the operating standard
If a company is considering Work-Life Balance+4.5 as an internal system, the first question should not be “Should we adopt a 4.5-day workweek?” Four things need to be decided first. First, in which roles can actual working hours be reduced? Second, what work will be eliminated so that the reduced time does not become a productivity loss? Third, how will the company prevent evaluation and reward imbalances between shortened-hours and non-shortened-hours employees? Fourth, what alternatives will be provided for areas where uniform application is difficult, such as customer-facing, field-based, or shift roles?
The Work24 program focuses on priority-supported enterprises and mid-sized companies, while also requiring attention to support periods, application cycles, exclusion conditions, and attendance-management requirements. This means working-hour reduction must be a verifiable operating system, not a declarative welfare message. The actual-working-hour reduction track, in particular, provides support for up to one year and uses a three-month application cycle, making it suitable for HR to compare data by quarter.
The internal indicators companies should prepare are also clear. They should review weekly actual working hours by department, overtime approval rates, meeting time, workload reallocation cases, shortened-hours applications, approvals and withdrawals, customer response delays, and performance changes by team. They also need to check the program reference date, eligible roles, exclusion conditions, and monthly attendance-record gaps to reduce application risk. Work-Life Balance+4.5 is not simply the name of a benefit program. It is closer to an operating experiment that asks whether a company can reduce working time while maintaining performance and fairness.
