You Can Leave the Office at 5:01. Whether You Should Is a Different Question.

🇺🇸 USA · 🇰🇷 South Korea

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

An American who transfers to a Seoul office and a Korean who transfers to a New York one will both, within their first month, misread a silence. In the American office, the silence after a bad idea means disagreement. In the Korean office, the silence after a good idea might mean the junior staffer is waiting for someone senior to speak first. Neither silence is empty. Both are just doing different jobs.

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Do's & Don'ts

🇺🇸 USA

🇰🇷 South Korea

The United States runs on Hofstede's low power-distance, high-individualism combination — a 40 on power distance against a 91 on individualism — meaning the average American office assumes flat access to decision-makers and rewards people who advocate for themselves. According to Gallup's workplace research, US employees are more likely than most of the developed world to say they feel comfortable raising disagreement with a manager directly, and performance is judged overwhelmingly on individual output rather than group harmony. The OECD puts average annual US working hours at roughly 1,800 — long by European standards, short by Korean ones — with the difference coming less from mandated hours and more from a culture that treats unused vacation days as a personal failing rather than an employer's problem.

South Korea sits at the other end of the same scale: a power-distance score of 60 and an individualism score of just 18, according to Hofstede Insights, reflecting a Confucian hierarchy in which age, title, and tenure determine who speaks first, who eats first, and who is blamed last. According to the Korea Development Institute and reporting from the Korea Herald, South Korean workers logged around 1,833 hours in 2025 — down from prior years but still 33 hours more than their American counterparts and well above the OECD average of 1,736. The country has been actively trying to shrink this gap through reforms like the 52-hour workweek cap, but enforcement is uneven, and overtime remains a marker of loyalty in many traditional firms, particularly outside the Samsung-and-LG tier of employer that gets the international press coverage.

The reckoning is that both systems produce exhausted workers, just via opposite mechanisms. The American version is self-inflicted — nobody tells you to skip lunch or answer Slack at 9pm, but the incentive structure quietly punishes anyone who doesn't. The Korean version is structural — the hours are baked into the org chart itself, hoesik and all, and opting out reads as a statement rather than a preference. An American who prizes visible hustle will find Seoul's hierarchy stifling in a new way: your best idea, however good, waits its turn. A Korean employee used to earning trust through tenure will find that in an American office, trust is earned through a single good quarter and lost through one bad one, regardless of how long you've been there.

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The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — An American who joined Samsung's Seoul headquarters described the work itself as technically world-class, but said the harder adjustment was realizing that career progression ran through relationship-building with seniors as much as through the work product — something no onboarding deck mentioned.

Quora — Someone working under Korea's seniority-based reporting structure wrote that raising a disagreement with a manager, even diplomatically, was treated as a breach rather than input, and that they eventually learned to phrase every objection as a question instead of a statement.

teamblind.com — A Coupang Seoul tech employee described five- and six-day weeks with 12-hour days as unremarkable by local standards, noting that colleagues coming from US tech companies were the ones who seemed shocked, not the Korean staff.

teamblind.com — A Korean professional with six years of domestic corporate experience who transferred to a US office wrote that the instincts that had served them well at home — staying humble, not pushing back, reading the room — actively worked against them in America, where the same behavior got mistaken for a lack of opinions.

r/korea — One American expat's account of their first hoesik described three rounds of drinks, a norebang stop, and a 2am taxi home, and said understanding hoesik's real function — building the trust that Korean coworkers withhold from people they haven't drunk with — did more for their standing than any project deliverable that quarter.

Conclusion

The practical question for anyone weighing this move isn't which system is more humane — both have real costs — but which kind of exhaustion you're better equipped to manage. If you thrive on visibility, self-advocacy, and being judged on output rather than seniority, the American system will feel less oppressive even as it demands you police your own hours. If you're comfortable letting relationships and rank do some of the talking for you, Korea's structure offers a kind of certainty American offices don't: everyone already knows where they stand. Go in prepared to have a drink you didn't want, or a meeting where you say less than you'd like — and know which one is coming for you.