The Times recently put a question to British business leaders that UK managers rarely get asked directly: what could you learn from the way other countries work?

Morningmate's CEO, June Lee, answered from Seoul.

"Silence in a meeting could mean agreement, disagreement, or just uncertainty. It depends entirely on who's reading it."

He was one of several leaders quoted in the piece, and the format allowed only a few lines each. So here is the fuller version of that answer — because it points to something bigger than a cultural curiosity. It explains why so many international teams feel slower than the sum of their parts.

Read the feature in The Times (subscription required).
 

The hidden engine of high-context workplaces

In Korea, Japan, and many other high-context work cultures — where meaning is carried as much by shared assumption as by explicit words — teams run on a common sense nobody had to write down. Everyone grew up with similar norms about hierarchy, deadlines, feedback, and what silence in a meeting actually means.

That shared context is an invisible engine. Alignment is cheap, because most of it never has to be said out loud.

A manager says "let's move this forward," and everyone knows who owns what, how urgent it is, and when to flag a problem. Nobody wrote any of that down. Nobody needed to.

International teams don't get that luxury

Put people from Seoul, London, and Austin on the same project, and the invisible engine disappears. The same behaviors now carry different meanings:

• Silence. In one culture it signals respectful consensus; in another, disengagement; in a third, "I disagree but won't say so here."

• "I'll try." A polite yes, a soft no, or a literal statement of effort — depending on who said it.

• Status updates. Some teams volunteer progress constantly; others report only when asked, or only when something breaks.

None of these people are working badly. They're working differently, and the team is paying an alignment tax on every interaction — extra meetings, clarification threads, misread commitments, and the quiet frustration of "why didn't they just say so?"

The wrong fix: making everyone the same

The instinctive response is standardisation. Pick one culture's working style and train everyone into it. More meetings, more check-ins, more pressure to communicate "the right way."

This fails for a simple reason: it treats difference as the problem. It asks half the team to constantly perform a style that isn't theirs, which adds friction instead of removing it. You get compliance, not alignment.

The right fix: connect different people around one shared goal

The answer isn't uniformity. It's structure. When the work itself carries the context — who owns what, what's blocked, what was decided and why — people no longer need to share a culture to share an understanding.

In practice, that means three things:

1. Make progress visible by default. When status lives in the workspace, nobody has to guess whether silence means "on track" or "stuck."

2. Let decisions leave a trail. A written record of what was agreed removes the ambiguity that cultural reading habits create.

3. Make the source of truth async-first. Teams across time zones can't align in real time, so the shared record has to be permanently available — not locked inside a meeting nobody in London attended.

Do this well and efficiency stops depending on pressure. It comes from removing friction — the misreadings, the redundant check-ins, the alignment tax — rather than pushing people to work harder at communicating.

 

This is how we're building morningmate

This thinking sits at the heart of Morningmate. We're building a work platform where context is embedded in the work itself — tasks, updates, decisions, and conversations in one shared space — so a team in Seoul and a team in London can work differently and still move as one.

We don't try to make everyone the same. We connect people who aren't.

June Lee shared this perspective in The Times, in a feature on what British businesses can learn from overseas workplace culture. Read it here (subscription required).

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