Seven in 10 workers receive no additional compensation when they absorb the duties of colleagues on parental leave, according to a survey reported by The Korea Times. The finding puts a number on a long-silent side of parental leave policy: while leave-takers' rights dominate legal and compliance discussions, the coworkers who cover their workloads mostly do so for free.

For HR leaders, the data point lands at the intersection of two pressure points — pay equity conversations and workload management. If roughly 70% of employees stepping in for absent colleagues see no financial recognition, the question is no longer whether parental leave is offered, but whether the organization has budgeted for the operational reality around it.

What does the survey actually measure?

The survey, as reported by The Korea Times, focused on workers who took on responsibilities covering for colleagues out on parental leave. The core result: about 70% reported receiving no extra pay for that added work.

That single statistic touches several people-process decisions at once:

• Compensation design: whether temporary workload increases trigger allowances, bonuses, or temporary salary adjustments.
• Workload planning: how teams redistribute tasks when a member is on extended leave, and whether redistribution is formalized or informal.
• Retention risk: employees who consistently absorb unpaid extra duties are obvious flight risks and burnout candidates.
• Leave culture: if covering leave is punished financially, employees may quietly discourage colleagues from taking entitlements — undermining the leave policy itself.

The survey does not, per the available reporting, break down results by industry, company size, or whether the covering workers were volunteers or assigned. Those gaps matter for benchmarking, and HR analytics teams will want to ask them of their own workforce data.

Why the covering-worker problem is an HR problem

Parental leave systems are typically built around the leave-taker: statutory entitlements, job protection, return-to-work guarantees. The Korea Times finding reframes the picture from the perspective of everyone else on the team.

When no one pays for coverage, one of three things usually happens. The work gets spread informally and invisibly across a team. A manager quietly pushes deadlines and standards down. Or the organization hires temporary cover — the only option that carries a budget line.

The survey suggests the first scenario is the most common outcome, with roughly 7 in 10 workers absorbing extra duties without financial recognition. That creates a compliance-adjacent exposure too: unpaid added responsibilities can feed grievances, especially where role descriptions and pay grades are formalized.

There is also a gender dimension HR teams should consider carefully. In most labor markets, including South Korea, women take parental leave at far higher rates than men. If the burden of unpaid coverage falls disproportionately on remaining staff, and if that burden compounds over multiple leave cycles, the leave system can quietly transfer cost onto workers who never signed up for it. The Korea Times reporting does not segment its result by gender, but the structural question is unavoidable for any employer designing coverage rules.

What should employers ask next?

The finding is most useful as a prompt for internal diagnostics. Several concrete questions follow from the 70% figure:

• Do we know, in numbers, how work is redistributed during parental leave in each department?
• Do covering employees receive any form of recognition — pay, time off in lieu, or performance credit?
• How long do coverage arrangements typically last, and do they stack across overlapping absences?
• Are managers equipped and authorized to request temporary staffing or budget for coverage?
• Does our leave policy create incentives that discourage take-up because colleagues fear the coverage load?

For multinational employers, the survey is a reminder that parental leave norms vary sharply by jurisdiction — and that Korea's leave framework, with its statutory parental entitlements, creates coverage patterns that may differ from US or European operations. Any global leave policy needs local workload math attached to it.

The design question hiding in the number

A 70% non-payment rate is not necessarily evidence of employer malice. In many organizations, coverage is handled informally precisely because no one owns the process: finance sees no requisition, HR sees no headcount change, and the manager sees only the work that still needs doing.

That informality is the risk. Workload redistribution without recognition shows up later as engagement survey drops, exit interview themes, and — where added duties cross into materially different roles — pay complaints.

Employers that formalize coverage tend to use a short menu of tools: a defined temporary-duty allowance, comp time, explicit performance credit for interim responsibilities, or pre-approved contingent staffing for leaves beyond a set duration. Each carries a cost; the survey's implicit argument is that the current alternative — no recognition for 7 in 10 covering workers — carries a cost too, just one that never appears on a budget line.

The Korea Times finding gives HR a rare quantified anchor for a conversation that usually stays anecdotal. As parental leave take-up continues to expand under policy pressure in Korea and elsewhere, expect coverage compensation to move from a quiet managerial workaround to a visible design question in total rewards.