Colombia Respects Its Elders at Work; Canada Would Like a Word With HR First

🇨🇴 Colombia · 🇨🇦 Canada

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Colombia's offices still run on a fairly old operating principle: whoever is oldest or most senior generally gets the last word, correct or not. Canada's offices are quietly renegotiating the same principle in reverse, as a wave of retiring Boomers hands the floor to a Gen Z cohort with more leverage than any entry-level generation has had in decades. The result is two very different generational contracts. In Colombia, 56% of Gen Z employees say their manager closely oversees their day-to-day work, and most of them would rather it stopped (Deloitte, 2025). In Canada, millennials — who spent a decade being told they were entitled — have started saying almost exactly that about the generation below them, apparently without irony (The Globe and Mail).

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇨🇦 Canada

🇨🇴 Colombia

Hofstede Insights scores Colombia 67 on power distance, more than double Canada's 39, and that number is not an abstraction confined to an onboarding slide. It structures who speaks first in a meeting, who is allowed to disagree with a client out loud, and how long it takes a 26-year-old analyst to get her numbers accepted without a 55-year-old director re-deriving them himself. Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that Colombian employees want far more coaching than they receive: 69% of Gen Z and 74% of millennials say they want managers to provide guidance and support, against only 32% and 26% who say they actually experience it. The same managers are simultaneously read as hovering — 56% of Gen Z and 57% of millennials say theirs closely oversees day-to-day tasks — a style that lands as thoroughness to the boss and surveillance to the employee.

The friction has an economic floor underneath it. DANE, Colombia's national statistics department, put the employment rate for people aged 15 to 28 at 46.2% for the August–October 2023 quarter, meaning well over half of the country's youngest working-age population isn't formally employed at all. Deloitte adds that 46% of Colombian Gen Z workers and 44% of millennials live paycheck to paycheck. Bargaining leverage, in that context, sits firmly with whoever already has the job, which tends to discourage the blunt generational pushback that's become routine in wealthier labour markets — you learn to nod through the 9 a.m. meeting that didn't need to happen.

The line is moving fastest in Bogotá and Medellín's export-facing tech and outsourcing sectors, where remote, US-client teams have imported flatter reporting structures ahead of the broader economy. Younger professionals there increasingly expect the direct feedback and scheduling flexibility their parents' generation would have found presumptuous to ask for — a generational gap layered on top of an already steep hierarchy, which makes it feel sharper in Colombia than the same shift feels in flatter cultures elsewhere in the region.

🇨🇦 Canada

Canada sits near the opposite end of Hofstede's scale, at 39, which should make it one of the more consultative, egalitarian workplace cultures in the hemisphere. In practice, flat doesn't mean calm: a record run of Boomer retirements has pulled Gen Z into the workforce faster than most companies have adjusted for, and the group absorbing most of the resulting friction isn't the retiring Boomers — it's millennials, now supervising the generation below them and sounding, by several accounts, exactly like the Boomers who once scolded them (The Globe and Mail). The complaints are strikingly symmetrical: "they don't listen," "why are they telling us what to do," recycled one generation down with barely a word changed.

A Future Skills Centre "Working Together" survey of 1,500 Canadians found 49% agreeing that young workers hold unrealistic expectations about career advancement, against just 16% who disagreed — a stereotype that persists even though 54% of older millennials themselves conceded that older workers resist change. Loyalty has reshuffled in step: 70% of Boomers said they'd want to stay at one organization as long as possible, a sentiment far less common among cohorts hired after two recessions taught them that loyalty rarely gets reciprocated.

Where this actually bites for anyone relocating into a Canadian office is the return-to-office fight, which has become the proxy battle for every other generational disagreement — flexibility, trust, and who gets to define "productive." A historically tight entry-level labour market in several sectors has let Gen Z push back on in-office mandates more successfully than millennials managed a decade earlier, forcing employers to negotiate rather than dictate. Compared with Colombia, it is a remarkably flat fight, fought over calendars rather than standing.

The Reckoning

Line the two systems up and the generational contract inverts. In Colombia, age still roughly tracks authority, and the live question is how quickly that correlation erodes as export-sector workers import flatter norms into a culture still scored at 67 on power distance. In Canada, age barely tracks authority at all; the argument is between two relatively young cohorts, millennials and Gen Z, fighting over management style in a country where the structural deference that organizes Colombian offices was never really on offer to begin with.

For a prospective mover, the practical difference runs by direction of travel. Arrive in Colombia from Canada and you'll need to relearn deference you'd forgotten you ever had, particularly toward people two decades your senior who outrank you on paper regardless of what your résumé says. Arrive in Canada from Colombia and the absence of hierarchy can feel disorienting rather than liberating: nobody is obviously in charge of telling you what to do, which is either freeing or vertigo-inducing depending on how much structure you didn't realize you were relying on.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Hacker News — a founder who hired distributed engineers in Colombia and Ukraine found that flying out to meet the Colombian team in person did more for the working relationship than months of video calls had managed; the hires, he said, visibly "felt appreciated" once he actually showed up.

Hacker News — a different commenter running remote operations across Colombia and Ukraine pushed back on treating distributed hires as interchangeable, pointing out that genuinely caring about the people on a Colombian team, not just the output, is what makes the arrangement last — advice he wished more employers took before, not after, their first resignation.

ExpatArrivals.com — an American working in Bogotá, going by Adam, described the daily pace as "much more slow-paced and disorganised than in the States," and added that management doesn't always treat local staff especially well, though he found expats were typically given more latitude.

The Globe and Mail — a recurring, unattributed grievance from Canadian millennial managers about their Gen Z reports: "They don't listen!" and "Why are they telling us what to do?!" — the exact complaint Boomers lodged against millennials a decade earlier, now handed down a generation with the serial numbers filed off.

Conclusion

Neither country has solved the problem of running an office with four working generations in it; they've just failed at it in characteristically different ways. Colombia's failure mode is a hierarchy eroding unevenly — fast in Bogotá's export sector, slow almost everywhere else — leaving younger professionals caught between global client expectations and local deference. Canada's failure mode is a flattened hierarchy with no agreed substitute for it, so disputes that used to be settled by seniority now get fought out, inconclusively, over Slack threads about who's in the office on Tuesdays.

For anyone actually moving, the honest advice is to pick your discomfort rather than expect to dodge it. Colombia will ask you to defer more than you're used to; Canada will ask you to negotiate more than you're used to; and both will insist, with perfectly straight institutional faces, that it's the other country that's gotten this backwards.