The Chair Is Empty and Everyone Is Fine With It: Denmark vs. Indonesia on Remote Work

🇩🇰 Denmark · 🇮🇩 Indonesia

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Copenhagen, telling your manager you're working from home tomorrow is a courtesy notification, not a request. In Jakarta, until quite recently, staying visibly late at a desk you'd already finished working at was itself the job — a company that measures dedication with a fingerprint scanner and a daily "attendance allowance" is not making a subtle point about where it thinks productivity lives. Denmark built a system that assumes you'll do the work unwatched. Indonesia is only now, unevenly, unlearning a system built on the opposite assumption.

Do's & Don'ts

🇩🇰 Denmark

🇮🇩 Indonesia

Denmark's remote-work culture is not a pandemic-era accommodation; it is the surface expression of a much older cultural bet on trust. Hofstede scores Denmark at just 18 on power distance — one of the lowest in the world — and strongly individualist on top of that, a combination multiple sources tie directly to Denmark's willingness to let employees manage their own time. The OECD has long recorded Denmark's average full-time work week at roughly 37.2 hours, the shortest among member states, and Danish employees have a legal right to request remote or hybrid arrangements, with employers obligated to give a reasoned response — a policy that, per multiple relocation guides, has normalized hybrid work rather than turning it into a perk to be negotiated. A Copenhagen tech employee quoted in workplace coverage put it plainly: managers care whether the project is finished, not whether someone logged eight hours at a desk to prove it.

Indonesia's starting point is close to the opposite. Hofstede scores the country high on power distance and low on individualism, reflecting a workplace culture where hierarchy and group cohesion have historically outweighed individual autonomy — and multiple Indonesian workplace analyses describe a pre-pandemic norm in which physical presence was treated as a direct proxy for productivity, reinforced in some companies by fingerprint-tracked daily attendance allowances. The pandemic forced a real shift: research on Indonesian office workers found companies increasingly evaluating output over hours logged, and a Cisco-cited survey found hybrid arrangements measurably improved employee-reported productivity and work quality. But the shift is generational and uneven — younger Indonesian workers are driving most of the push for flexibility, with a majority reportedly willing to leave a job that doesn't offer it, while older management layers in more traditional firms remain closer to the presence-equals-dedication default.

The Reckoning

The sharpest contrast isn't the policy on paper — plenty of Indonesian firms now technically offer hybrid work, just as Denmark does — it's what happens when an employee actually uses it. In Denmark, using your flexibility is unremarkable; the system was built assuming you would. In Indonesia, using it can still carry a quiet cost, particularly if your manager came up in a system where staying late was the visible signal of commitment. A Danish employee who works from home for a week without comment is simply working. An Indonesian employee doing the same at a more traditional firm may find that comment arrives anyway, indirectly, in the next round of who gets noticed for a promotion.

The other divergence is who is driving the change. In Denmark, remote flexibility is institutional — legally codified, generationally uncontested, baked into the shortest average workweek in the OECD. In Indonesia, it's a live negotiation being fought largely by younger employees against an older organizational instinct, which means the experience of "remote work culture" in Jakarta depends enormously on which generation is running the office you land in.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Reddit — A Copenhagen-based tech employee described the absence of any check-in ritual around remote days as the single hardest thing to get used to: no one asked whether they'd put in eight hours, only whether the project had shipped, which took months to stop feeling like they were getting away with something.

Quora — Someone who returned to Indonesia to work after years abroad described the reverse culture shock of being expected back at a physical desk for a job that could clearly be done from anywhere, and realizing the expectation had less to do with the work itself than with a manager's comfort seeing people present.

Fortune (interview coverage) — Danish workplace researchers cited in coverage of the country's work-life balance model described trust as functionally inseparable from remote work in Denmark: without an assumption that people are doing what they said, the entire flexible system would not hold together.

thedanishdream.com (expat guide) — A guide aimed at foreign hires in Denmark noted that requesting a full work-from-home day is typically granted without friction, but cautioned that the same trust runs in both directions — missing a deadline lands harder in a system with so little oversight, precisely because no one was checking on you along the way.

Saibumi (Indonesia-focused outlet) — Coverage of Indonesia's shifting work culture noted that the "uang hadir" attendance-allowance system, once nearly universal, is being phased out at more companies embracing output-based evaluation, but still persists widely enough that a new hire should ask about it directly rather than assume it's gone.

Conclusion

The practical question for anyone weighing these two isn't "does this country allow remote work" — both increasingly say yes on paper — it's whether the culture around you actually believes an empty chair means nothing. Denmark's answer is an unqualified yes, backed by law, by the shortest average workweek in the OECD, and by a management style that treats oversight as almost rude. Indonesia's answer depends heavily on who signs your offer letter and how old the org chart above you is. If a friend asked me over drinks: in Denmark, go home; in Indonesia, ask first — quietly, and more than once.