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What a Korean Company Gives You Twice a Year

 

What a Korean Company Gives You Twice a Year

Twice a year, around Chuseok in autumn and Seollal in late winter, something changes at every Korean company I have ever worked for. Not the work itself. The work keeps going right up until it stops. What changes is that a gift shows up.

Everyone gets one. Junior staff, senior staff, the same box handed down the same line, more or less. What's inside that box, though, turned out to say more about each company than almost anything else I could point to.

Five companies, five boxes

At the furniture company, it was department store vouchers. Emart, specifically — a set amount, spend it on whatever you needed for the holiday table, and nobody thought twice about it.

LG did it differently, and the difference told you something about the company before you even opened anything. You picked your own gift from a list. A real list, with real options, and the value was noticeably higher than what I'd seen elsewhere. It wasn't flashy about it. It just quietly cost more.

At the food company, we gave people the products we made. Soy sauce sets, mostly — the same gift boxes that sat on shelves for customers to buy, just handed to employees instead. There's something almost circular about that. You spend the year selling soy sauce, and then the company hands you soy sauce as thanks for selling soy sauce.

At the fitness equipment company, the last one, you got to choose between a Starbucks gift card and a box of pears. I want to sit with that pairing for a second, because it's a strange one — a coffee chain gift card on one side, a very traditional Korean fruit gift on the other, and you picked whichever one matched your life better that year.

Five companies. Five completely different ideas of what a thank-you should look like, and I never once got a bonus attached to any of it. I know plenty of people who did, at other companies. It just never happened to be mine.

Getting out of the city on time

I'm from the countryside, which in Korea usually means a real drive on the day before a holiday, sometimes a long one, everyone trying to leave the city at more or less the same hour.

Because of that, I was always someone who left early on the day before Chuseok or Seollal. Sometimes just an early finish. Sometimes I'd take the full day off, especially if the drive was going to be bad, which around a major holiday it usually was.

I don't remember this ever being a fight. Everyone in Korea understands what the roads look like on that particular day, and a colleague heading home to see aging parents isn't treated as someone slacking off. It's one of the few places where the culture actually bends toward you rather than the other way around.

The other kind of gift

There's a version of this that has nothing to do with what the company gave employees, and it only came up in one of my jobs.

At the food company, I also handled some of the legal work, which meant working with outside lawyers on contracts and disputes. We used one of the big law firms in Seoul — Kim & Chang, the kind of firm whose name alone tells you the case was serious enough to warrant it.

Every year around both holidays, we sent them gifts. Not a small thing, either — this was a standing part of how you kept that relationship warm. You don't hand a major law firm a company gift card. You send something that shows you thought about it.

It's a strange kind of gift-giving to explain to someone outside Korea. Sending a holiday gift to your own lawyers looks, from outside, almost backwards — shouldn't the service provider be the one thanking the client? But that's not really what it was doing. It was maintenance. You keep the relationship in good repair before you need it, not after.

What the gifts actually measured

Looking back at all five of them lined up, I don't think the gifts were really about the holiday at all. They were a fairly accurate readout of where each company sat — how much it had, how it wanted to be seen, and in the food company's case, what it happened to have lying around in a warehouse.

The vouchers, the choose-your-own list, the soy sauce, the Starbucks-or-pears — none of it was random. It was every company, twice a year, telling you exactly what kind of company it thought it was.

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