Both Countries Bond Over Alcohol. Only One Makes It Optional.

🇰🇷 South Korea · 🇬🇧 UK

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Seventy-eight percent of British workers polled say after-work socializing is a good way to make professional connections, and 74 percent of Gen Z employees claim their best ideas arrive at the pub, not the desk. In South Korea, hoesik — the after-hours dinner-and-drinks ritual — has functioned for decades as one of the only venues where hierarchy visibly softens, and workers who repeatedly skip it risk being quietly labeled "cold-blooded" by colleagues. Both rituals involve alcohol, informality, and genuine bonding. Only one of them comes with a real professional cost for opting out.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇷 South Korea

🇬🇧 UK

South Korea

Hoesik translates roughly to "gathering to eat," but its function runs well beyond the literal meal: it exists specifically to build trust and soften the rigid hierarchy that governs daily office interaction, giving junior employees rare access to bosses in an informal setting where the usual rules of deference bend slightly. The ritual carries its own etiquette, often stricter than the office itself — junior staff wait for the most senior person to eat or drink first, and status is performed continuously even while everyone is nominally relaxing.

The pressure dynamics are real and documented: workers describe feeling that repeated absence could carry negative consequences for promotion and evaluation, and Samsung's own internal policy restricting drinking after 9pm is itself a tacit admission of how far the culture had drifted toward excess before companies started reining it in. The good news for anyone dreading the stereotype is that change is underway — younger employees increasingly favor shorter, optional, non-drinking formats, and a 2021 survey found nearly a third of workers cited "not being forced to attend" as the main reason they were now comfortable with hoesik at all.

UK

British after-work drinking culture operates on a very different social contract: expected but not compulsory, valuable but not weaponizable against your career if skipped. The pub functions, per multiple accounts, as a genuine extension of the workplace — hierarchies blur over a pint in a way they don't in a meeting room, and a striking number of workers, especially younger ones, report their best professional ideas surfacing there rather than at a desk.

The ritual's low-stakes framing is part of what makes it durable: nobody is formally required to attend, nobody tracks attendance against your next review, and declining occasionally carries close to zero professional cost. Some London finance firms have even begun actively discouraging the older habit of a beer over a working lunch, suggesting the culture, if anything, is trending toward more restraint rather than less — the opposite trajectory from Korea's hoesik, which is loosening from a much stricter starting point toward something more like the British model.

The Reckoning

Both countries have built a workplace ritual around informal socializing lubricated by alcohol, and both genuinely believe it produces better collaboration and looser, more honest communication than the office allows. The difference is entirely in the cost of non-participation: in Korea, hoesik has historically functioned as a quasi-mandatory extension of work itself, with real reputational consequences for skipping it; in the UK, pub drinks are a genuine but optional social layer that most people can dip in and out of without professional penalty.

Interestingly, the two are converging from opposite directions — Korean hoesik culture is actively loosening under generational pressure toward something more optional, while some corners of British finance culture are tightening around excessive lunchtime drinking specifically. Neither country has landed on identical norms, but the gap between them is narrower today than it would have been a decade ago.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

r/korea — A foreign employee at a Seoul firm described attending his first hoesik expecting a casual dinner and instead finding himself at a norebang (karaoke room) past midnight, having learned only in retrospect that the entire evening had functioned as an unofficial evaluation of how well he fit with the team.

Quora — Someone answering a question about being a foreigner in Korea described the awkwardness of not knowing the seating and pouring etiquette at his first company dinner, and said a kind colleague quietly coached him through it under the table rather than letting him embarrass himself in front of the boss.

Internations London — A South Korean professional who'd relocated to a UK firm wrote that she was almost suspicious, at first, of how casually colleagues treated declining a pub invite — it took her months to trust that turning down a Friday drink genuinely wouldn't be held against her later.

r/AskUK — A British worker recounted a Korean colleague visiting the London office and being visibly surprised that nobody waited for the most senior person in the room to order first at the pub — a small detail that opened into a longer conversation about how differently hierarchy operates in each setting.

r/expats — An American who'd worked in both Seoul and London summarized the contrast bluntly: in Korea, showing up to the social event was part of the job; in the UK, showing up to the social event was a nice bonus on top of a job that didn't require it.

Conclusion

If you're moving to South Korea, treat hoesik invitations as something closer to a work obligation in your early months — attend, learn the etiquette, and build the relational capital it offers, while trusting that the culture is genuinely loosening if it's not for you long-term. If you're moving to the UK, enjoy the lower stakes: join the pub crowd when you can, because real relationships do form there, but don't stress about the invites you skip. The honest version, for a friend packing their bags: in Korea, the social ritual is part of how you're evaluated, whether anyone says so out loud or not; in Britain, it's just a nice way to spend a Friday, and nobody's taking attendance.