In Germany, You Need an Appointment to Make a Friend. In South Korea, You Need a Liver.

🇩🇪 Germany · 🇰🇷 South Korea

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Two of the world's most disciplined economies have arrived at opposite solutions to the same problem — how do you get colleagues to like you outside a spreadsheet — and both consider their solution obviously correct. Germany's answer is to join a club with bylaws. South Korea's answer is to hand you a shot glass and watch what you do with it. According to InterNations' Expat Insider survey, 55% of foreign residents in Germany find it difficult to make local friends, against a 36% global average, while South Korean workplaces run on hoesik, the after-hours team dinner where, per a JobKorea survey of workers, only 45% felt genuinely free to skip it. Neither country is unfriendly. Both have simply routed friendship through institutions — the Verein in one case, the company dinner table in the other — and expect newcomers to find the door themselves.

🇩🇪 Germany

🇰🇷 South Korea

Germany

Germany's approach to workplace friendship is best understood as a filing system: colleagues go in one folder, friends in another, and the two are not meant to touch. The OECD's Better Life Index finds 90% of Germans report having someone to rely on in a time of need, essentially at the OECD average of 91% — so the social fabric is intact, it's just not woven at the office. Hofstede Insights scores Germany 67 on individualism, well above the global midpoint, consistent with a culture that treats personal time as a right rather than an extension of the job. Sociability, in other words, is not absent; it is scheduled elsewhere, usually through a Verein.

That's not a metaphor. Destatis counts roughly 25.2 million memberships in German sports clubs as of 2024, and organized club life — football, choir, hiking, volunteer fire brigades — functions as the country's actual social plumbing. The unwritten rule is that colleagues become friends only after years of parallel proximity, not through any single gesture. InterNations data puts a number on the resulting friction: Germany ranked 50th out of 53 countries in the 2024 Expat Insider survey, doing particularly badly on local friendliness and ease of making friends. None of this means Germans are cold. It means the invitation to real social life comes stamped, dated, and issued through an institution — not handed across a desk.

South Korea

South Korean workplace culture runs on the opposite premise: that trust cannot be built through calendar invites alone, and must instead be marinated in soju. Hoesik — the after-work team dinner, often followed by a second or third round elsewhere — remains the primary mechanism through which hierarchy softens and colleagues become something closer to family, according to reporting in the Korea Herald. The custom is generational, though: a 2020 JobKorea survey found 65.6% of workers in their 20s said they'd prefer a sober lunch hoesik over a boozy dinner one, versus just 34.4% who wanted the drinking version — a preference reversed among older cohorts. Hierarchy still governs the table regardless of format: seniors drink first, juniors turn away to sip, and nobody pours their own glass.

Hofstede Insights scores South Korea just 18 on individualism, a stark contrast with Germany's 67, and that number shows up directly in how relationship-building gets organized: collectively, repeatedly, and through shared ordeal rather than individual choice. Statistics Korea's Time Use Survey recorded average daily leisure and social-participation time falling to 441 minutes in 2019, down 25 minutes from 2014 — even as hoesik persists as a load-bearing social ritual. The OECD's Better Life Index puts South Korean social support at 80%, notably under the OECD average of 91%, suggesting that for all its intensity, the hoesik system doesn't fully compensate for long hours and thin personal time outside work.

The Reckoning

Here is the irony neither country would appreciate being told: Germany, the culture of firm boundaries, produces workers who report struggling to build any social network at all outside pre-existing structures, while South Korea, the culture of mandatory bonding, produces workers with plenty of enforced proximity but measurably less unstructured leisure time to enjoy it. Germany optimizes for depth over years; South Korea optimizes for intensity over hours. One asks you to prove commitment through repetition (five seasons in the same Verein); the other asks you to prove commitment through endurance (staying for the third round).

The truly counterintuitive divergence is who ends up better off as an outsider. A newcomer in Germany who invests in a hobby club can, per Quora accounts from long-term expats, expect a real friendship within a year of consistent showing-up. A newcomer in Korea who attends hoesik faithfully gets faster inclusion in the group's rhythm, but — per Blind threads describing brutal working hours stretching from 8am to 11pm — less actual free time to convert that inclusion into anything resembling rest.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A longtime resident in Germany noted that colleagues rarely invite you home; when it happens, treat it as a genuine gesture of hospitality, not a norm. They added that even Germans find it slow going, and it typically takes a coworker a few years, not months, to become an actual friend.

Quora — Someone who moved to South Korea described trust with coworkers building slowly through repeated hoesik and group outings rather than any single conversation, with language barriers making the jokes, teasing, and vulnerability that friendship depends on much harder without solid Korean.

The Local (via the InterNations Expat Insider survey) — Foreign residents in Germany rated the country among the worst in the world for making friends and local friendliness, with a majority saying they found it genuinely difficult, in a nation that otherwise ranks well on jobs and finances.

Blind — A user who worked at both a small and a large Korean company said they would never go back, citing brutal work-life balance with days stretching from around 8am to 11pm — hours that leave little room to enjoy the very relationships hoesik is meant to build.

Quora — One expat's advice for South Korea was blunt: join a structured, recurring group — a language exchange, a hobby class, a sports team — because repeated low-stakes contact, not individual effort, is what actually turns acquaintances into friends there.

Conclusion

If you're relocating for work, the practical takeaway is this: in Germany, invest early in a club with a regular schedule, because that — not the office — is where your social life will actually happen, and be patient, since real friendship there is measured in years. In South Korea, show up to the dinners, learn to read the room, and understand that the relationship-building is front-loaded into your calendar whether you asked for it or not — the harder task is finding time to rest once you're in.

The honest version, the one I'd give a friend over a drink: Germany will make you lonely quickly and reward you slowly; South Korea will make you exhausted quickly and include you immediately. Pick your poison, and in one of these two countries, that's not a figure of speech.