The Right to Ask vs. the Duty to Show Up: Remote Work in Germany and South Korea

🇩🇪 Germany · 🇰🇷 South Korea

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

A quarter of Germany's workforce now works from home at least part of the week, and the government is actively pushing employers to justify any refusal rather than the other way around. South Korea, by contrast, sits near the bottom of global remote-work rankings, and "office seat warming" — being visibly present regardless of actual output — remains a real expectation at plenty of firms. Both countries survived the same pandemic. They drew almost opposite conclusions from it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇩🇪 Germany

🇰🇷 South Korea

Germany: From Discretionary to Default

Germany's remote-work culture has moved further and faster than its legal framework technically requires. As of 2025, there is still no blanket statutory right to work from home, but the direction of travel is unmistakable: the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs has been pushing toward a "right to request" model, in which employer refusals increasingly need to be justified by genuine operational necessity rather than simple preference. Destatis, the federal statistics office, put home-office usage at roughly 24 to 25 percent of all employees in 2025 — nearly double the pre-pandemic rate of about 13 percent in 2019 — with hybrid patterns, not fully remote work, now the clear norm; the typical home-office user works remotely about 1.4 days a week.

The legal distinction that trips up newcomers is between "Homeoffice," informal and occasional remote work, and "Telearbeit," a permanent, contractually defined, employer-furnished home workstation. The two carry different obligations and expectations, and conflating them in a negotiation with HR is a common early misstep.

South Korea: Presence as the Default Signal

South Korea's remote-work adoption tells a strikingly different story. Multiple 2025 studies rank the country near the bottom of global work-from-home time distributions, a gap researchers attribute to collectivist workplace norms, hierarchical corporate structures, and an enduring emphasis on in-person supervision. The phrase "office seat warming" — being visibly present at your desk regardless of whether it materially improves output — captures a real, if fading, expectation at more traditional firms, particularly large conglomerates.

The picture is not uniform, though. Hybrid schedules have become common at tech companies, design firms, and multinationals operating in Korea, and flexible arrangements that were introduced experimentally as early as 1997 finally saw meaningful uptake after COVID forced the issue — the number of employees under flexible arrangements reportedly quadrupled by August 2021. Hofstede Insights scores South Korea at a striking 18 on individualism against Germany's 67, alongside South Korea's very high 85 on uncertainty avoidance versus Germany's already-elevated 65 — a profile that favors group cohesion, visible conformity, and risk-averse conservatism over the individually negotiated flexibility Germans increasingly expect.

The Reckoning

The two countries have landed on nearly inverse defaults for the same basic question: does remote work need to be justified, or does office presence? Germany has shifted the burden of proof onto employers who want to say no. South Korea, outside a genuinely progressive tech and startup minority, still largely places the burden of proof on employees who want to work from home.

What's easy to miss is that both cultures are mid-transition, not static. Germany's shift is being actively formalized through policy; South Korea's is happening more organically, generationally, company by company, with younger workers pushing for flexibility that older colleagues and traditional employers still resist. A newcomer evaluating either country needs to ask not "what's the national norm" but "where is this specific employer on that trajectory right now."

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone who negotiated a hybrid arrangement with a German employer said the useful lesson wasn't the policy itself but the vocabulary — asking for "Telearbeit" specifically, rather than vaguely requesting "to work from home," got a faster and more concrete answer from HR.

teamblind.com — A poster describing the internal culture at a major Korean e-commerce company said remote work was technically permitted but functionally discouraged, since promotion conversations still leaned heavily on who was visibly present and available in person, regardless of what the written policy said.

teamblind.com — Someone working for a US company while living in South Korea noted the strangest adjustment wasn't the time difference but explaining to Korean acquaintances that they simply didn't go to an office at all — a concept some found difficult to reconcile with what a "real job" was supposed to look like.

Quora — A remote worker who relocated to Germany for a US-based role described local colleagues as surprised not by the remote arrangement itself but by how casually the American side treated it — no formal Telearbeit contract, no defined equipment stipend, just an assumption things would work out informally.

Conclusion

The practical takeaway is less about the country and more about where your specific employer sits on each nation's trajectory. In Germany, ask precisely which category of remote work you're being offered, and don't assume "hybrid-friendly" means what it would at home. In South Korea, ask how flexible arrangements actually function day to day at your specific company, not what the policy page says, since the gap between the two can be significant outside tech. If a friend asked which country to bet on for genuine flexibility today, Germany's policy is already halfway there; South Korea's is still being negotiated, generation by generation, inside individual offices.