The Soju Round and the Long Lunch: Team Bonding in South Korea and Chile

🇰🇷 South Korea · 🇨🇱 Chile

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Seoul, real trust with your team is built at 9pm, three rounds into a hoesik, over grilled pork belly and soju poured for you by a junior colleague using both hands. In Santiago, real trust is built at 2pm, over a two-hour lunch nobody is rushing to end, where the conversation drifts from a client deliverable to someone's kids without anyone noticing the transition. Both cultures treat bonding as functionally mandatory for getting real work done — you simply cannot skip the socializing and expect to be fully trusted on the team. They disagree completely on when, how long, and how much alcohol that bonding should involve.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇷 South Korea

🇨🇱 Chile

South Korea

Hoesik — literally "eating together" — is the structural backbone of South Korean workplace bonding, and it is considerably more than a company dinner. According to Korean workplace culture guides, a full hoesik unfolds in numbered rounds (cha): a first round centered on food, typically Korean barbecue, that nearly everyone attends regardless of drinking preference; a second round that often shifts to drinks; and sometimes a third. The Korea Herald describes hoesik as capable of both genuinely "blowing off steam" and, when mismanaged, sparking real workplace friction — its social function cuts both ways.

What makes hoesik distinctive is its semi-official status: it happens after hours, is nominally optional, and yet functions as a real extension of the workday where hierarchy softens, promotions are discussed informally, and managers reveal personalities the office never shows. Hofstede scores South Korea just 18 on individualism — deeply collectivist, rooted in Confucian values around loyalty and group harmony — which explains why declining hoesik repeatedly carries real professional cost even though no memo ever says so. The custom is visibly moderating in 2026: shorter dinners, lunch gatherings replacing late-night sessions, and legal protection against forced drinking under the Labor Standards Act. But moderating is not disappearing — the underlying expectation that real trust gets built outside the office, on company time that isn't officially company time, remains fully intact.

Chile

Chilean workplace bonding runs on a different clock and a different register: less alcohol-driven, more daytime and relational, built through long lunches, individual greetings, and — when the relationship reaches a certain point — an asado, the Chilean barbecue that functions as a genuine milestone in a work relationship rather than just a social event. Business culture guides consistently describe Chile as relationship-first: significant business dealings are expected to follow, not precede, real personal familiarity, and rushing past that step is read as a subtle disrespect of the relationship itself.

Hofstede's data places Chile as group-oriented and hierarchical, with individual preference-asserting seen as less important than belonging and maintaining harmony — a profile that shows up daily in small, easy-to-miss rituals like greeting each colleague individually on arrival rather than a single wave to the room. Chile's long-term orientation score sits notably lower than South Korea's near-maximum figure, according to comparative Hofstede analyses, which tracks with a bonding style that's warm and present-tense — built meal by meal, greeting by greeting — rather than accumulated through years of ritualized obligation the way Korean hoesik seniority operates.

The Reckoning

The real divergence isn't collectivism versus individualism — both countries score firmly collectivist on Hofstede's scale. It's where the bonding obligation lives in the day. Korean hoesik colonizes the evening: real trust-building happens after hours, is quasi-mandatory, and often involves real physical stamina (alcohol, late nights) as an implicit test of commitment. Chilean bonding colonizes the middle of the day: the long lunch, the individual greeting, the unhurried small talk before business — all daytime, all lower-stakes in any single instance, but cumulatively just as necessary for being trusted.

The other irony: Korea's bonding ritual is more visibly hierarchical in structure (seniors pour, juniors pour back, rounds proceed in order) yet the actual content of hoesik conversation often flattens hierarchy temporarily. Chile's bonding is less ritually structured but hierarchy stays intact even in warmth — a Chilean colleague can be personally warm over a long lunch while still expecting to be addressed formally and deferred to on decisions. Warmth, in other words, doesn't erase rank in Chile the way alcohol temporarily suspends it in Korea.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone who worked as a foreign teacher in Korea described hoesik as the fastest way to actually understand a Korean workplace, saying you could "learn a Korean office faster at a dinner table than in three polished meetings," but noted the pressure of an "optional" invitation everyone understood as not optional at all.

Medium (SOKO: South Korea newsletter) — A contributor described the specific discomfort of being a foreign hire trying to navigate hoesik drinking etiquette: not wanting to offend by declining a poured drink, while also not wanting to seem like they were performing enthusiasm for a ritual they didn't yet understand the stakes of.

Expat.com forum (Santiago, Chile thread) — A newcomer asking how to make friends in Chile was told repeatedly by longer-term expats that showing up to the office lunch consistently, not just occasionally, was what actually moved them from "the new foreign hire" to someone colleagues would vouch for internally.

Quora — Someone comparing relaxed versus hierarchical work environments across Europe and Israel drew an indirect but useful contrast for anyone weighing Chile: cultures where personal warmth and formal hierarchy coexist can read as confusing to newcomers who expect friendliness to signal flattened rank, when in Chile it often doesn't.

A Korea-focused workplace guide (Dojeon Media) described a common foreigner misread: assuming declining alcohol at hoesik would be treated as a serious offense, when in current practice a clear, one-time statement of "I don't drink" is now typically respected without further pressure — the bigger risk is skipping the gathering itself, not the drink.

Conclusion

If you're moving into either of these cultures, the practical move is the same in shape though opposite in timing: figure out where the real relationship-building happens on the clock, and show up for it deliberately, because skipping it — even when nobody says you have to attend — has a real cost in both places. In Korea, that means treating the first round of hoesik as functionally mandatory even when the invitation says otherwise. In Chile, it means protecting the long lunch and the individual greeting as actual work, not time stolen from it. Priya's line for a friend packing for either move: find out whether the real meeting happens after the meeting, over soju or over sobremesa — and show up for that one too.