🇰🇷 South Korea · 🇬🇧 UK
By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
In South Korea, 87 percent of employees drink with colleagues at least once a week, and skipping the ritual dinner can, in some organisations, be treated as a more serious transgression than missing a day of work. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, 43 percent of professionals believe there is too much pressure to consume alcohol when socialising with colleagues — a statistic that manages to be simultaneously principled and very British. Two countries, two drinking cultures, two entirely distinct mechanisms for making the act of relaxing with coworkers feel quietly compulsory. The distance between Seoul and London is roughly 8,700 kilometres. The conceptual distance, it turns out, is considerably shorter.
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#### 🇰🇷 South Korea
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't | |---|---| | Accept hoesik invitations, especially in the first months — attendance signals commitment and willingness to belong | Decline without a credible reason; "I'm tired" is not a credible reason | | Pour drinks for colleagues older or more senior than you; wait for someone to pour yours | Pour your own drink or let your glass sit empty without offering to pour for others | | Pace yourself but keep your glass available; quietly diluting or nursing a drink is more acceptable than outright refusal | Announce that you don't drink soju; find a workaround instead | | Join a dongari (club or interest group) — sports, hiking, or alumni associations are how Koreans form bonds outside the hierarchy | Expect workplace friendships to transfer seamlessly to personal life; the two operate on different tracks | | Learn enough Korean to manage small talk; even rudimentary effort is read as genuine respect | Congregate exclusively with other expats; it accelerates comfort and forecloses connection simultaneously | | Show up consistently to recurring social contexts — trust in Korea accumulates through repeated presence, not a single good impression | Interpret warmth at a hoesik as a signal of close friendship; it may be hospitality rather than intimacy |
#### 🇬🇧 UK
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't | |---|---| | Accept the first after-work pub invitation; it is a test, even if nobody will admit it | Interpret "you should come out sometime" as an actual invitation — wait for a specific time and place | | Participate in the round system; buy your round without being asked, and do not track drink-for-drink arithmetic aloud | Skip your round; this is remembered longer than most professional failures | | Find a local pub quiz team short a player — structured activities bypass British aversion to cold conversation | Approach a group of strangers at a pub expecting conversation; the pub is for going out with people you already know | | Become a regular somewhere; the British warm to familiarity over time rather than charm on first meeting | Interpret polite enthusiasm as friendship — "we must do this again" rarely contains scheduling information | | Ask about football, the commute, or the weather with genuine curiosity; these are load-bearing topics | Express strong feelings in public, push for emotional depth early, or ask direct personal questions | | Join a club, charity, or hobby group where repeated attendance builds the kind of trust that the pub merely suggests | Expect British colleagues to separate work from social; the two overlap slowly and on their own schedule |
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South Korea scores 18 on Hofstede's individualism index, placing it among the world's most collectivist societies. The UK, for comparison, scores 89. This gap does not merely describe cultural preference; it describes the entire architecture of how relationships are formed, maintained, and leveraged at work. In Korea, where group harmony and hierarchical belonging are the gravitational forces of professional life, personal bonds are not incidental to career success — they are integral to it. The mechanism through which these bonds are forged has a name: hoesik.
Literally translated as "gathering to eat," hoesik is the institutionalised after-work dinner-and-drinks session that serves as Korea's primary social glue. These events, typically featuring grilled meats, soju poured by juniors for seniors, and a carefully calibrated progression through multiple venues, are not optional in any meaningful sense of the word. A 2020 survey by job portal JobKorea found that only 45 percent of workers described themselves as "free to choose" whether to attend — while 41 percent admitted they worried how non-attendance would be perceived. Declining a hoesik invitation has been linked to exclusion from informal information networks and, eventually, from promotion considerations. Korea's uncertainty avoidance index sits at 85, and few things feel more uncertain than being the only person who went home early.
The human cost is not trivial. South Korea's official 2024 Social Indicators report recorded that 21.1 percent of the population feels lonely — up from 18.5 percent the year before, with the share of people who say "nobody really knows me" rising to 16.2 percent. An estimated 540,000 young Koreans are socially and economically inactive, largely confined to their homes. One is tempted to observe that a country with mandatory group dinners several times a week has still managed to produce a loneliness epidemic, which suggests that attendance and connection are not quite the same thing.
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The United Kingdom's approach to post-work socialising is in many respects the photographic negative of Korea's. Individualism at 89, uncertainty avoidance at a serene 35: the British do not, in principle, like being told what to do, and they are fairly comfortable with ambiguity. What they have instead of hoesik is the pub — an institution so deeply embedded in national life that its closure during the pandemic prompted genuine grief, documented in academic literature and several very long think-pieces in the Guardian.
The after-work pub round is the UK's answer to the question of how to socialise with colleagues without acknowledging that you are doing so. Its genius is its deniability. Nobody announces that tonight's drinks are a trust-building exercise. The round system — a ritual in which participants take turns buying drinks for the group, with social consequences for those who fail to reciprocate — creates obligation through implied contract rather than corporate mandate. Research suggests that some 22 million people across the UK regularly socialise with colleagues after work, though that figure has dipped around 5 percent from pre-pandemic levels. Hybrid work, it turns out, is the enemy of the casual Friday pint.
Class dynamics complicate matters further. Workplace friendships in the UK are, per research from the Behavioural Insights Team, one of the more effective mechanisms for cross-class social mixing in a society not otherwise inclined toward it. The pub is, in theory, an equaliser. Many Brits have deeply entrenched friend groups that go back to their school or university days; while they are happy to be friendly with new people at work or in the pub, integrating into the core group is a slow process measured in years rather than evenings. Gen Z workers are also rethinking their relationship with after-work alcohol: 49 percent report that their online presence is "always at the back of their mind" when drinking with colleagues — a consideration that would not have troubled previous generations.
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Put the two systems side by side and a pattern emerges: both cultures have found ways to make optional things feel obligatory, and both are now watching younger workers refuse to play along. On Reddit threads and expat forums, the accounts rhyme with eerie consistency. A British expat in Seoul describes attending a hoesik: "You can feel the hierarchy in every pour. My boss fills my glass, I can't refuse, and I'm expected to fill his too when it's empty. The whole thing is choreographed social debt." A Korean professional who relocated to London offers the inverse: "The British say the pub is casual and nobody has to come. But if you don't come, they notice. They say nothing, but they notice."
The OECD's data on social connections suggest that neither system is delivering quite what it promises. South Korea's loneliness figures are rising despite — or perhaps because of — intensive group socialising that prioritises harmony over honesty. The UK sits at the more individualistic end of the spectrum but has its own quiet crisis in meaningful connection, particularly for men and older workers. What both countries share is an arrangement in which the social rituals around work have been gradually revealed as proxies for belonging — and proxies, by definition, are not quite the real thing.
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> <small>r/korea — Moved to Seoul for work and spent my first three months confused about why everyone seemed friendly at hoesik but distant at the office the next morning. Eventually someone explained: the warmth is real, but it belongs to the evening. The two modes run in parallel and do not merge on their own.</small>
> <small>Quora — The honest answer to "is it hard to make Korean friends as a foreigner" is: yes, but not because Koreans are unfriendly. It's because Koreans form their core friendships early — school, university, military service — and those groups are essentially closed. You can be liked, welcomed, included in activities. But getting inside the actual circle is a different project, and it takes years.</small>
> <small>Internations Seoul — The hierarchy at a Korean company dinner is visible in things you wouldn't expect. Who sits closest to the boss, who pours first, who laughs first when he makes a joke. I learned more about my team's internal politics in one hoesik than in six weeks of morning meetings.</small>
> <small>r/expats — Took me a year to realise that when my British colleagues said "we should grab a drink sometime," they meant it in the same way they meant "how are you" — as a pleasantry, not a proposal. The ones who actually wanted to meet up just named a pub and a Thursday.</small>
> <small>LyncMe (UK expat community) — The British social system runs on regularity. You have to become a known face somewhere — a pub, a club, a running group — and let familiarity do the work. Trying to accelerate the process by being warm or direct tends to produce polite withdrawal. It is the opposite of what you'd expect, and it takes a specific kind of patience.</small>
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For someone moving to Seoul, the practical summary is this: go to the hoesik, pour the drinks in the right direction, and understand that genuine friendship is a separate, slower project running alongside the professional ritual rather than emerging from it. Language matters more than most expat guides admit — Korean friends made in Korean are qualitatively different from Korean friends made in English. Join a dongari for something you actually care about. Let time do more work than effort.
For someone moving to the UK, the advice is almost precisely inverted in method and identical in conclusion: do not try too hard, do not move too fast, find a recurring context and show up to it reliably, and interpret the pub as a starting point rather than a destination. The British do not reward enthusiasm; they reward consistency. In both countries, the underlying truth is the same — the official social ritual, whether mandatory dinner or voluntary round, is the scaffolding, not the building. What gets built inside it depends on patience, proximity, and a tolerance for ambiguity that neither culture will openly admit to requiring.
Both systems, in the end, are elaborate arrangements for the same human problem: the difficulty of liking people you did not choose. Seoul has institutionalised the attempt. London has made it look accidental. Neither has quite solved it.
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Sources: OECD Social Connections and Loneliness Report (2024); Statistics Korea Social Indicators 2024; JobKorea survey 2020; Embrain survey 2021; Hofstede Insights; Hays UK market research; Behavioural Insights Team UK (2025); Korea Herald; NPR; SSIR; Business Matters Magazine UK; YourKorea.Life; LyncMe Blog; Expatica.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.