Coffee Is Mandatory in One Country, Beer Is Mandatory in the Other: Sweden vs. Vietnam at the Office Social Calendar

🇸🇪 Sweden · 🇻🇳 Vietnam

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

There are two ways a country can tell you that showing up to work is not, strictly speaking, enough. Sweden does it with a coffee break so structurally load-bearing that skipping it repeatedly is read as a personality flaw. Vietnam does it with an after-work beer that arrives, unbidden, roughly one meeting after you've been hired. Neither ritual is written into your contract. Both will quietly determine how far you get in the company. Anyone weighing a move to either country for work should know that the real onboarding happens not at the desk but at the coffee table or the plastic stool on the sidewalk — and that fluency in one ritual will not transfer to the other.

Do's & Don'ts

🇸🇪 Sweden

🇻🇳 Vietnam

Sweden

Sweden's signature office ritual is fika, a twice-daily pause for coffee and a cinnamon bun that functions less as a snack break than as a standing meeting with no agenda and, not infrequently, more real decision-making than the meeting that follows it. It is not optional in any practical sense: according to accounts from expats navigating Swedish offices, skipping fika repeatedly marks you as antisocial, and plenty of companies build it into the workday's structure by default. The payoff, per the OECD, is a workforce that is strikingly resistant to overwork — only around 1% of Swedish employees regularly work more than 50 hours a week, one of the lowest shares in the OECD, whose average sits closer to 11%.

The social logic underneath the coffee cups is consensus, not hierarchy. Hofstede Insights scores Sweden at just 31 on power distance and a notably low 5 on masculinity — the lowest of any country Hofstede measures — reflecting a culture that prizes cooperation, flat structures and understatement over competition and visible rank. First names for everyone, including the CEO, are standard. Meetings favor long pauses and indirect feedback over instructions barked from on high, which reads, to newcomers from more hierarchical or expressive cultures, as either refreshingly egalitarian or maddeningly opaque, often both in the same week.

Beyond fika, the calendar is sparse but non-negotiable: an occasional Friday "afterwork" drink that politely concludes by early evening, and the julbord, the company's Christmas dinner, which functions as the one mandatory-in-spirit social event of the year. There is no equivalent of a raucous, alcohol-driven team night — Swedish social life at the office runs on frequency and moderation rather than occasional intensity, which is either the healthiest possible model or faintly exhausting, depending on how much a person enjoys small talk about the weather at 10am sharp, every single day.

Vietnam

Vietnam's workplace sociability runs on a different clock: longer, later, and considerably more communal. Vietnam's General Statistics Office and CEIC data put the average working week at roughly 45 hours historically, and the country's 2024 Labour and Employment Survey found nearly 29% of workers logging more than 48 hours weekly, with foreign-invested enterprises averaging over 50 — figures the ILO has also tracked as part of a broader regional pattern of long formal hours. Socializing is not scheduled around the edges of that time; it is woven through it, from the shared midday meal (often followed, without embarrassment, by an office-wide nap) to the after-work drinking sessions known as nhau, where colleagues gather over beer and grilled food to do the relationship-building that the office itself, structured around hierarchy, doesn't always permit.

That hierarchy is measurable. Hofstede Insights scores Vietnam at 70 on power distance and just 20 on individualism — almost a mirror image of Sweden — indicating a culture where deference to seniority and group harmony outrank individual assertion. Junior employees are far less likely to voice disagreement openly in meetings, not from a lack of opinion but because indirect communication and quiet respect for the hierarchy are the expected register; foreign managers who mistake silence for agreement are, per multiple accounts of foreign professionals working in Vietnam, making a specific and recurring mistake. A Navigos Group survey found that 60% of foreign workers in Vietnam reported experiencing culture shock, with mismatched expectations and misread silence among the leading causes.

None of this makes Vietnamese office culture cold — quite the opposite. Company retreats are lavish by comparison to the Swedish julbord: multi-day trips for entire departments, complete with award ceremonies and karaoke, are a standard employee benefit rather than a rare treat. The drinking culture that surrounds nhau is genuinely inclusive in intent, even if it comes with its own etiquette — everyone drinks together, refusing outright can read as standoffish, but nobody expects a new foreign hire to keep pace with colleagues who have been doing this for years.

The Reckoning

Put the two countries side by side and the Hofstede scores tell a story that the daily rituals confirm almost point for point: Sweden (power distance 31, individualism 71) organizes its social life around equality and personal boundaries, while Vietnam (power distance 70, individualism 20) organizes its around hierarchy and group belonging. The counterintuitive part is which ritual actually feels more mandatory in practice. Sweden's fika looks like a relaxed coffee break and functions as an unmissable social obligation with real professional consequences for skipping it. Vietnam's after-work beer looks like a boisterous, optional night out and functions, for a newcomer, as a comparatively forgiving on-ramp — moderate participation is enough, and nobody is quietly tracking your attendance the way Swedish colleagues track your fika presence.

The other reversal is around what "long hours" buys you. Sweden's official working culture is short and protected, but its social culture demands near-daily, low-key participation stretched across the entire year. Vietnam's official hours are considerably longer, and yet the social culture concentrates its highest demands into occasional, high-intensity events — the annual retreat, the milestone nhau — rather than a twice-daily standing appointment. Neither country asks less of you socially. They simply spread the bill differently.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — a contributor describing Swedish workplace adjustment noted that arriving from a more direct culture like the US, Germany or the Netherlands typically takes several months to calibrate to, with the understated, consensus-driven style of Swedish meetings and the expectation of remaining visibly calm under pressure.

forwardtherapy.se, a Sweden-based expat counselling blog — one described pattern is the quiet exclusion some foreign professionals feel around fika: technically invited, physically present, but never quite pulled into the easy banter, leaving newcomers unsure whether they're intruding simply by sitting down.

VnExpress International — a British professional who resigned from a media job in Ho Chi Minh City after two months described the office as unnervingly silent, with colleagues offering only brief replies before returning to their screens; he later realized the quiet was a Vietnamese norm read as politeness, not the personal coldness he initially assumed.

VnExpress International — a Vietnamese-American intern recalled being startled to see coworkers pull blankets and pillows from their desks for a post-lunch floor nap, and dismissing the idea at first — only to find, within two weeks, that the siesta noticeably improved her own afternoon focus.

VnExpress International — a relocation consultant who advises foreign professionals moving to Vietnam recommends a three-month trial stay before committing, plus deliberately building a network of other foreign workers early, since full adjustment to the local office culture typically takes six to twelve months.

Conclusion

The honest version of this choice comes down to which kind of social debt you'd rather carry. In Sweden, the obligation is small, frequent, and permanent — two coffee breaks a day, indefinitely, with real professional cost for opting out too often, in a culture whose flat hierarchy will otherwise leave you feeling pleasantly, almost suspiciously, unsupervised. In Vietnam, the obligation is larger and less frequent but comes wrapped in genuine warmth — a beer here, a three-day retreat there — inside a hierarchy that expects deference in the room and rewards patience with it over time.

If a friend asked me over drinks which one to pick, I'd tell her to be honest about her tolerance for two different kinds of discomfort: the low hum of daily small talk with people who take a long time to warm up, or the occasional intensity of karaoke with a director she's not allowed to interrupt. Both countries will teach her to read a room. Sweden will just make her do it quietly, every single day, whether she has the energy for it or not.