🇰🇷 South Korea · 🇬🇧 UK
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
South Korea finished bottom of a global remote work ranking published by HRM Asia. The UK, meanwhile, now has 63% of workers doing at least some of their work remotely, and British workers average 1.8 days working from home per week — more than any other country in Europe. This is not a gap in remote-work technology, access, or basic organisational capability. It is a gap in cultural interpretation of what it means to be at work, and for whom the office exists. In South Korea, the office is where commitment is performed. In the UK, commitment has, somewhat surprisingly, become more legible through outcomes than through location.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Understand the generational divide before assuming the company culture around flexibility — MZ generation managers and employees may have genuinely different norms from their senior colleagues | Assume that formal remote work policies translate to cultural permission; even where WFH is technically allowed, presence norms may persist informally |
| Check your specific company and industry — tech firms, startups, and international companies in Korea often have significantly more liberal remote work policies than traditional chaebols or government-linked organisations | Request remote work in your first three months without understanding whether this is norm in your team; visibility matters early in Korean corporate culture |
| Know your legal rights — Korea's Labour Standards Act includes flextime provisions, and the government has subsidised 4.5-day workweeks from January 2026 for eligible companies | Log off at a time your manager is unlikely to notice if you are working remotely; the association between visible presence and commitment does not disappear when the laptop comes home |
| Use remote work as part of a broader argument about performance and output, not just preference; Korean managers are more receptive to flexibility framed as productivity than as lifestyle | Expect that policies accepted in pandemic emergency will automatically continue; many Korean companies have returned to office-first norms and explicitly rolled back pandemic-era flexibility |
| Recognise that the MZ generation's pushback is real and ongoing — Korea's political environment around working hours has shifted measurably since 2023 | Underestimate the social signal of being in the office; even as Korea changes, being visible remains a career-relevant behaviour in most traditional organisations |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Negotiate hybrid working arrangements at the point of hire or at the six-month mark — the UK Employment Rights Act (2024) gives employees the right to request flexible working from day one | Assume that all UK employers have fully accepted hybrid working; return-to-office pressure is real, with 53% of employees reporting manager pressure to increase office days |
| Use the right to request flexible working as a formal mechanism if informal requests fail — the law requires employers to respond within two months and justify any refusal | Interpret flexibility as complete autonomy over location; most UK hybrid arrangements still involve a specified minimum of office days, typically two or three |
| Take the legal entitlements seriously — paid sick leave, parental leave, and holiday entitlement are well-established rights in the UK | Conflate different types of flexibility; remote working, flexitime, and compressed hours are separately negotiated and not automatically bundled |
| Know your company culture — UK organisations vary enormously; a London fintech may be effectively fully remote; a Northern manufacturing firm may have never offered it at all | Expect clear rules; UK hybrid working arrangements are notoriously informal and exist on a spectrum of written policy, verbal agreement, and tacit understanding |
| Understand that performance expectations have shifted to outcomes — most UK managers now evaluate on results rather than hours logged, which creates genuine flexibility but also genuine accountability | Disappear entirely during working hours on remote days; the presumption of availability remains and being unreachable for long periods is noted |
South Korea's relationship with remote work is a compressed version of its broader working culture: hierarchical, visibility-dependent, and currently under substantial generational pressure from workers who reject the equation between physical presence and professional commitment. According to Statista data from 2023, approximately 19.9% of South Korean wage workers used flexible work arrangements including remote work — a number that has grown since the pandemic but remains far below comparable OECD economies.
The structural explanation is Confucian hierarchical culture, in which presence is a form of respect and absence — even productive absence — is a social signal of lower commitment. This manifests as sabisu zangyo (unpaid overtime) at the office, reluctance to leave before senior colleagues, and managerial discomfort with team members who are not physically visible. A 2021 survey of South Korean managers found that even those who had successfully managed remote teams during COVID lockdowns remained ambivalent about continuing the practice, citing concerns about productivity monitoring and team cohesion.
The MZ generation has pushed back explicitly and effectively. A 2023 government proposal to raise the maximum working week met with immediate backlash from younger workers who described it as "inhumane" — forcing a political retreat. The Korean government subsequently introduced subsidies for 4.5-day workweek trials beginning in January 2026. The trajectory of Korean working culture is clearly changing; the pace and depth of that change varies enormously by sector, company age, and management generation.
Britain arrived at hybrid working through a combination of pandemic necessity, legal reform, and a workforce that discovered remote work was compatible with, and in some cases improved, professional performance. A 2025 CIPD report on flexible and hybrid working notes that the UK has institutionalised hybrid arrangements to a degree that few other comparable economies have matched: 63% of workers do some remote work, with an average of 1.8 days per week at home.
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The Employment Rights Act 2024 formalised the right to request flexible working from day one of employment — previously a right triggered at 26 weeks — and requires employers to justify refusals within two months. This legal scaffolding has shifted the default assumption: flexibility is no longer a benefit but a right, and the burden of justification has moved from the employee (explain why you want to work from home) to the employer (explain why you need them in the office).
The UK's hybrid culture is not without its tensions. Office attendance has crept upward since 2022 as employers — including several large banks and professional services firms — have introduced formal return-to-office mandates. A 2025 Hays UK poll found that 48% of professionals would consider leaving their job if forced to return full-time. The negotiation between employer preference and employee expectation is actively live, with no clear resolution in sight.
The contrast is partly generational and partly structural. The UK arrived at hybrid working through legal rights, cultural normalisation, and demonstrated productivity data; the conversation about remote work is largely settled. South Korea is in an earlier and more contested phase of the same transition, in which the cultural norms and the workforce expectations are moving in opposite directions, with different generations in the same office applying different rules.
For a Korean professional moving to the UK, the freedom is genuine but also requires recalibration: absence of presence-based surveillance does not mean absence of expectations, and the British manager who never asks where you are is still tracking whether you are delivering. For a British professional moving to South Korea, the adjustment is more acute: the cultural equation between being seen and being committed is real, and working smartly from home will not substitute for being visibly present in the first six months.
r/korea — A Canadian expat at a Seoul tech company described discovering that his company had a formal WFH policy — two days per week permitted — that nobody used except international employees. "The Koreans all come in every day. I started working from home on Tuesdays and Fridays, which was entirely within the rules, and somehow became quietly marked as the person who 'wasn't really here.'"
Quora — A South Korean professional who relocated to London described the reverse adjustment: the first time she sent a Slack message to her UK manager at 9am with a question that wasn't urgent, and her manager replied at 11:30am with a note that she had been "in a flow state this morning, sorry for the delay." In Seoul, a two-and-a-half hour response time from a junior to a senior would have been a significant issue.
Internations UK — An expat who had worked in both Seoul and Edinburgh described the British hybrid meeting format as "the most confusing thing I encountered professionally": half the team in the room, half on Teams, cameras optional, no clear hierarchy of who could interrupt whom. "In Korea, the meeting structure tells you everything — who speaks first, who speaks last, who is expected to be silent. The British meeting told me nothing except that everyone seemed comfortable with ambiguity."
r/unitedkingdom — A thread on return-to-office mandates attracted several observations from workers in hybrid roles who described the informal surveillance that replaced formal attendance recording: managers' Slack activity monitoring, comments about "not being around much," and the subtle career signal sent by being the person who always joined video calls from home. "The office isn't mandatory," one wrote, "it's just strongly encouraged by the people who decide your bonus."
welcometothejungle.com — A Korean HR director described the MZ generation's pushback on traditional working norms as the single most disruptive force in Korean corporate culture in a generation: "They do not believe that being in the office late is evidence of commitment. They believe it is evidence of inefficiency. They are not wrong. But telling that to a 57-year-old chaebol manager is a different conversation entirely."
If you are moving from the UK to South Korea, accept that physical presence is a professional signal as much as it is a working condition, at least until you understand your specific company's culture well enough to navigate it differently. Visibility in the first six months is not optional; it is your primary career investment.
If you are moving from South Korea to the UK, enjoy the flexibility genuinely — but understand that outcomes-based management requires you to deliver outcomes that are hard to miss. The British system does not watch your hours. It watches your results. The accountability is real; it is simply less visible than you are used to.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.