My weekly Everything Korea Office Chat was just picked up in Korea Media.
With a year of pandemic workplace restrictions in place, many norms and practices have changed dramatically. Zoom conferences vs. meeting in person, fewer group meetings, events and gatherings virtual or limited in size, and of course social distancing.
Forming and maintaining relationships under COVID, too, has proved a challenge especially for Korean teams with limited after-work dinners and opportunities to bond and mingle in person.
To give a perspective from the past on the demand fueling networking, I once supported a Korean Task Force Team (TFT) in a global rollout. I recall one of the team, a sawon (an entry-level staff member), sharing how frustrated they were with needing to spend an hour in the morning networking to stay current. More so, important time was spent probing for a heads-up on what projects were rumored to move forward and which ones might be axed.
Layer on the fact that as a non-smoker they opted out of standing in sub-zero temperatures as fellow workers—cigarettes in hand—clustered and huddled outside the corporate HQs and networked. This meant missing out on key information.
Staying Informed
Still, with Korean business and amid COVID, staying informed matters. But, how does one stay informed when in-person face-to-face meetings are not possible? In particular, how does one stay informed when a pending issue would be best addressed through informal one on one conversation and networking?
To add nuance to the complexity, with globalization westerners who had once relied on company-wide internal communication and high transparency and are now supporting Korean companies but lacking the close personal ties we see in Korea, it is not uncommon to feel there is a trust issue as information is late in coming, withheld, or filtered. In some cases, this can actually be 1) challenges in connecting due to varied time zones, 2) a general feeling that some Korean teams—to avoid any potential risk—find it is best to keep things in person, verbal, informal, and between friends, and 3) what I often see is that these discussions are subject to change—shifting and pivoting priorities are a common norm in Korea.
An Opportunity for Change
No doubt as pandemic restrictions roll back teams will be able to interact more as before, not to mention the resuming of international travel. That said, in the wake of COVID as we have seen with teams embracing services like Zoom and video conferencing to conduct meetings and hold virtual events, so too, I see other opportunities.
For one, the expanded use of Internet messaging chat services and my go-to favorite, Kakao Talk. One benefit is that both western teams and their Korean colleagues can communicate real-time one-on-one, less formally, with a degree of confidentiality.
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