'Assume everything is being recorded': Korea's Gen Z rewrites the rules of office life

"Whenever you talk to an employee in their 20s, it's probably best to assume the entire conversation is being recorded."

It is a warning increasingly shared among Korean managers in their 40s and 50s as they try to make sense of a generation of young employees whose workplace habits can seem baffling — and sometimes unsettling — to their bosses.

Some older managers see low loyalty to the company and a lack of respect for senior colleagues. Gen Z workers, however, see something very different: a desire for clear communication, boundaries between work and private life and relationships based less on hierarchy.

From recording conversations with bosses and avoiding unnecessary apologies to skipping team lunches and continuing to use honorific speech even with close colleagues, young Koreans are quietly rewriting some of the unwritten rules that have long governed the country's offices.

Why record a conversation with your boss?

For some middle managers, discovering that a young employee is recording a conversation without saying anything can be uncomfortable.

Some even wonder whether the employee is collecting evidence to use against them later.

But the young workers who participated in a Hankook Ilbo roundtable said the motivation is often much less confrontational.

"They don't start recording because they're looking for something to make an issue out of," one participant said. "If you don't say anything problematic, there won't be anything to use against you. Gen Z has been accustomed to recording lectures since university."

Another said younger workers tend to prefer certainty and documentation.

"That's also why Gen Z prefers reporting work through messaging apps," the participant said. "There are plenty of cases where, after you report something verbally, a boss says, 'When did you ever tell me that?' So people want to leave evidence."

Another participant said that was one reason for preferring KakaoTalk, Korea's dominant mobile messaging service.

"If it's urgent, though, I'd probably send a message and then call," another said. "I'd do both."

Why ‘I'm sorry’ is disappearing

Another complaint from older managers is that new employees increasingly respond with a simple "yes" when corrected instead of saying, "I'm sorry."

Young workers said there may be more behind that apparent reluctance to apologize.

"Maybe they simply dislike the awkwardness of the situation so much that they can't bring themselves to say they're sorry at that moment," one participant said. "It doesn't mean they think there's no need to apologize."

Another was more cautious about apologizing at work.

"Unless it really was my mistake, I try not to apologize as much as possible," the participant said.

The participant pointed to interactions with customers as an example.

"If you say, 'I'm sorry,' it doesn't always end with, 'That's OK.' Sometimes it becomes, 'Why did you do something you have to apologize for?' and they act as though they've suddenly gained the right to demand compensation," the participant said.

Older generations, the participant added, may not be so different once they rise into management themselves.

Gen Z doesn't necessarily hate company dinners

Few Korean workplace traditions illustrate generational tensions better than the "hoesik," the company dinner that traditionally combines food, alcohol and team bonding after work.

One participant questioned why attendance should be expected at all.

"A lunch gathering is fine, but I think there's a problem when a company dinner continues after regular working hours," the participant said.

Another pointed out that younger workers have never had a monopoly on disliking late-night company gatherings.

"New employees in the 1990s didn't go to late-night company dinners because they loved them either," the participant said.

Some Gen Z workers even see value in such gatherings.

"I don't agree that Gen Z dislikes company dinners," one said. "It's an opportunity to hear people talk after they've let their guard down a little. You can hear things you wouldn't hear in a formal setting. That's information, too."

The bigger issue appears to be how long the gatherings last and whether drinking is compulsory.

One participant said friends generally attend because they worry that refusing could affect their lives at work. But many would prefer dinner to end after one round, with no pressure to drink.

One friend, the participant said, described a particularly frustrating contradiction.

"When she makes a mistake at work, they say, 'Did you come to the company to have fun?' But at a company dinner, they say, 'We're having fun, so why aren't you coming?' She said she doesn't know what she's supposed to do because it's so contradictory."

Another participant said getting together for a good meal once a month or once a quarter was perfectly reasonable.

"But I don't like it continuing into a second and third round," the participant said. "I'd like to go to a restaurant around 6 p.m., eat and finish by 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. at the latest."

Do coworkers really need to be friends?

For many younger Koreans, the answer is no.

"Isn't it enough for everyone to do their own job well?" one participant said. "I think a relationship where you share only work matters at the office and completely switch off after leaving work can be enough."

That attitude extends even to lunch.

One participant said eating alone was simply more comfortable, whether that meant bringing a packed lunch or choosing a restaurant independently.

Another said a friend's workplace had developed a culture in which employees largely worked and ate separately.

"When you eat together, you have to match everyone else's pace, and even if there's a cafe you want to visit, you can't necessarily suggest going there," the participant said. "My friend said the conversations also feel like empty small talk."

Others favored a compromise.

One participant said the team often orders food separately or visits convenience stores when busy, while setting aside a particular day to eat together.

And some Gen Z workers acknowledged that completely separating themselves from colleagues could make office life lonely.

"I think work would be boring and difficult if I didn't share some of my daily life," one participant said. "But no matter how close I am to a colleague, I won't tell them something I don't want becoming gossip."

The participant described a friend who told a coworker something about a romantic partner, only to discover the next day that the entire workplace knew.

"After that, even at private gatherings outside work, my friend became much more careful about sharing personal things," the participant said.

For older employees, however, there is a practical concern: Can people really work well together without developing personal relationships?

New recruits do not arrive knowing a company's systems, one participant pointed out. Much of that knowledge has to be taught by more experienced colleagues.

A younger participant pushed back against the idea that learning the job should require personal closeness.

"Properly training new employees is part of the company's job," the participant said. "Of course they don't know how to do the work — they've never worked at that company before. It's difficult for me to understand why you have to become personally close to someone in order to learn your job."

Even close coworkers keep the honorifics

Perhaps one of the more surprising changes involves language itself.

Korean has an elaborate system of honorific and informal speech that can signal age, hierarchy and intimacy. Traditionally, two people who become close — particularly when one is older — may agree to switch to informal speech.

Some Gen Z workers see little reason to do so.

"Unless they're one of the few people I'm genuinely close to in my private life, I don't really switch to informal speech even with people my own age," one participant said. "I don't like people speaking informally to me just because I'm younger, either. That's especially true in professional relationships."

Another said even close friendships formed through work may remain linguistically formal.

"I'm genuinely close to people I met when I was an intern, and we still use honorific speech," the participant said. "It doesn't feel uncomfortable. I might call someone 'unni' or 'oppa,' but I still end my sentences with the polite '-yo' form."

"Unni" and "oppa" are terms women use to address older women and older men, respectively, and can signal familiarity without necessarily eliminating polite speech.

One participant suggested there may even be an advantage to maintaining that linguistic distance.

"When you start speaking casually, the way you treat each other becomes more casual, too," the participant said. "Maybe senior employees know that, which is why they're actually careful to use honorific speech at work."

Becoming too comfortable, the participant said, can blur the boundary between professional and personal relationships — and eventually lead to personal feelings or favors entering the workplace.

For older managers, Gen Z's behavior can look distant, distrustful or even disrespectful. For the young workers themselves, however, many of the same habits serve a different purpose: making expectations explicit and keeping professional relationships professional.

The disagreement may ultimately be less about whether Gen Z respects the workplace than about what "respect" at work is supposed to look like.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, was translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.