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Watching the Koreans

Korean Offices Erased Job Titles. The Hierarchy Underneath Never Moved.

In short

Since the 2000s, major Korean companies have replaced job titles with flatter alternatives — "nim," "manager," nicknames — specifically to sound less hierarchical. In at least one documented case, the underlying rank structure quietly stayed exactly as complex as before. The rename didn't touch the hierarchy. It just took its name tag off.

In this article

1. The reform, as advertised
2. The part that didn't actually change
3. Why the rename alone was never going to be enough
4. What happened to the experiments that went further
5. What actually changed, then

Starting in the early 2000s, a wave of Korean companies made a specific, symbolic change: they stopped calling employees by their job title and started calling nearly everyone the same thing. CJ Group began attaching the honorific "nim" to every employee's name in 2000, regardless of rank. SK Telecom went further in 2006, formally abolishing job-title hierarchy in favor of a single title, "manager," for most of the workforce — a change other SK affiliates later adapted into their own simplified systems. Kakao had employees address each other by nickname instead of title or rank entirely. On paper, this was a hierarchy-flattening movement, and it was reported that way at the time — a clean break from a system that had, until then, marked exact rank on every business card, every email signature, and every sentence spoken out loud in the office.

The reform, as advertised

The stated logic behind these changes was consistent across companies: junior employees speak up more freely, and disagree with superiors more comfortably, when the conversation isn't constantly reminding both people which one of them outranks the other. Removing the title was meant to remove that reminder — replacing "Deputy Director" or "Section Chief" with a flat, universal "nim" or "manager" that theoretically put a new hire and a twenty-year veteran on the same linguistic footing in daily conversation.

The specific choices companies made reveal what they were actually trying to fix. Some, like CJ, kept the existing rank system fully intact and just changed the honorific everyone used out loud — "nim" attached to a first name instead of a title, regardless of whether you were a new hire or a division head. Others, like SK Telecom, went a level further and tried to formally collapse the title system itself into one universal label, "manager," theoretically eliminating the vocabulary of rank altogether rather than just softening it. Kakao's nickname system pushed furthest of all, replacing not just titles but surnames and honorifics with something closer to how close friends address each other. Each version represents a different bet about which part of the problem — the label, the rank structure, or the entire register of formality — was actually driving the stiffness junior employees complained about.

The part that didn't actually change

Here's the detail that complicates the story. At least one company that publicly announced it was reducing its rank structure to just three tiers — team member, team lead, and executive — was later found, according to reporting on the gap between announced reforms and internal reality, to still be operating a twelve-tier system underneath: vice chairman, president, vice president, executive managing director, and multiple grades of managing director, down through team lead, deputy general manager, manager, assistant manager, and staff. The public-facing title had been simplified. The actual promotion ladder, reporting structure, and pay grade underneath it had not moved at all.

You can rename the rungs on a ladder. The ladder is still exactly as tall, and everyone's still standing on a specific rung.

Why the rename alone was never going to be enough

This isn't really a story about one company being dishonest — it's closer to a structural limit on what a title change can accomplish by itself. A job title is a label for something that already exists independently of the word used to describe it: who approves whose vacation request, whose performance review carries more weight in a promotion decision, who gets cc'd on which emails as a courtesy versus who gets cc'd because they have actual authority over the outcome. Changing everyone's business card to say "manager" doesn't touch any of that underlying machinery. It just removes the most visible, easiest-to-read signal of where a given person sits inside it — which means the information didn't disappear, it just moved from an explicit label to something people have to work out through nunchi instead.

That shift has a real cost for anyone new to a workplace like this, including foreign employees or first-year hires who don't yet have the instinct built up. Under the old system, a title told you immediately, reliably, who to defer to in a meeting. Under a flattened one, that same information still exists — someone in the room still has more actual authority than everyone else — but you're now expected to infer it from seating position, who speaks last, whose suggestions get quietly adopted without argument, and a dozen other unlabeled cues instead of a printed rank. The hierarchy didn't get easier to navigate. It got harder to see, which isn't automatically the same thing as friendlier.

What happened to the experiments that went further

Some companies tried changes with more teeth, and the record on those is decidedly mixed. Several Korean firms experimented with assigning employees English first names or nicknames specifically to disrupt the reflexive, rank-coded way Korean address terms work — and multiple such programs were later quietly abandoned. Commentary on why points to a fairly blunt conclusion: swapping the label without changing the underlying reporting lines, evaluation authority, or decision-making culture tends to produce an awkward, cosmetic result rather than a genuinely flatter workplace — employees using a first-name-basis nickname with a boss who still has total authority over their bonus and promotion, which doesn't actually feel casual so much as slightly performative.

There's an instructive contrast in how differently these reforms landed depending on what else changed alongside them. Companies that paired a title change with genuine shifts in decision-making — junior staff actually getting real input on projects, meetings actually restructured so more people speak — tended to describe the new address system as sticking. Companies that changed only the label, leaving approval chains and evaluation power exactly where they were, are the ones more often cited as having quietly reverted or let the new nicknames fall out of daily use. The title reform's success rate, in other words, tracked closely with whether it was a symptom of a real culture change already underway, or an attempt to manufacture one out of vocabulary alone.

What actually changed, then

None of this means the reforms were pointless. Something did shift: the day-to-day linguistic friction of constantly marking rank in every sentence eased somewhat, and companies that made these changes are generally described as having somewhat less rigid daily communication than ones that didn't bother. But the core claim behind the original reform — that flattening titles would flatten the actual hierarchy — doesn't hold up against the twelve-tier example, or against the abandoned nickname programs. What got flattened was the vocabulary. What stayed exactly as steep as before was almost everything the vocabulary used to describe: who has power over whose career, and who still has to read the room to figure out where they actually stand.

That's worth keeping in mind for anyone reading this from outside Korea and assuming a "nim" or a friendly nickname signals an actually flat, Silicon-Valley-style workplace underneath. It might. It might just as easily be the exact same twelve-tier structure as always, now conducted in softer, harder-to-read language — the same instinct behind reading a room for an unstated "al-jal-ttak-kal-sen" expectation just gets pointed at figuring out who's actually senior, since the title stopped telling you outright.