Czechia to Poland: The Buddy System Exists, It's Just Not Guaranteed to Find You

🇨🇿 Czechia · 🇵🇱 Poland

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

A Gi Group and Grafton Recruitment survey found that 84 percent of Czech companies now employ foreign workers — yet 76 percent of those same companies offer no structured integration support once the person actually shows up. Poland's picture looks different on paper but lands in a similar place in practice: 41 percent of Polish employers name the language barrier as their single biggest hiring obstacle, even as individual companies, and individual colleagues, often go well out of their way to make a new arrival feel like they belong. Both countries, in other words, run on the same quiet gamble: whether a new hire's first weeks go well depends enormously on which specific team they land on.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇿 Czechia

🇵🇱 Poland

Czechia

The honest headline from the Czech data is a gap between hiring foreign staff and actually supporting them once they're hired. Gi Group and Grafton Recruitment's figures, reported by Expats.cz, show 84 percent of Czech companies now employ foreign workers, concentrated most heavily in logistics (92 percent) and manufacturing (86 percent), but only 18 percent offer structured support specifically for cross-cultural collaboration, with another 6 percent limiting that support to managers rather than extending it to teams. Roughly half of employees and more than two-thirds of employers cite the language gap as the most significant barrier, alongside differing approaches to work and communication style.

Radka Čechová, a specialist at Gi Group and Grafton Recruitment, frames the core problem plainly: "Integration is not a one-off step but a long-term process," and "an initial onboarding session is not enough." She links the shortfall partly to management culture — a traditionally more top-down leadership style that leans toward competition over cooperation, with less emphasis on the softer coaching skills, like motivating a team or delivering constructive feedback, that international staff often expect as standard from a manager. The practical result, per the same reporting, is that office-based international staff mostly experience integration support as occasional team-building activities, while manufacturing workers lean more on staffing-agency support simply because so much of that workforce is agency-mediated in the first place. Hofstede's data scores Czechia's uncertainty avoidance at 74, a figure consistent with workplaces that prefer established, directive procedure over the more improvisational, trust-building mentorship style that effective cross-cultural integration tends to require.

Poland

Poland's picture is messier but, in places, warmer. A 2025 SW Research survey found 41 percent of Polish employers name the language barrier as their single biggest obstacle in hiring foreign staff, and separate data suggests roughly a quarter of migrants in the country are unemployed, driven largely by that same barrier compounded with qualification mismatches. Yet the lived accounts of people actually inside Polish workplaces tell a more individually variable story than the aggregate numbers suggest. Paola, an Italian professional who joined PwC in Poland, described a "thorough induction program" that included two full weeks of intensive training conducted entirely in English, opening with a team introduction "over coffee and pizza" and structured to "encourage — but not force" bonding among new hires, many of whom reportedly still stay in touch across different offices. She said she "felt integrated from day one" despite being the only Italian on her team, crediting an employer who didn't expect her to arrive fully trained but instead "helped me grow into the role," with colleagues who reach out unprompted when a newcomer clearly needs help.

Not every account is as smooth. One poster on an expat.com forum thread, a UK national of Polish background, described arriving without a lined-up job and landing in a physically demanding factory role on rotating shifts, in what he called a stressful, distrustful atmosphere involving shouting and dishonesty that only worsened over time; he eventually returned to the UK. Another poster on the same thread, an American who joined a Polish subsidiary of his US employer, described demanding, detail-scrutinising interviews but relayed his manager's own observation that younger Polish business owners are shifting toward friendlier, more supportive workplace norms noticeably faster than older ones — a generational split inside the country's management culture that official surveys don't fully capture. Hofstede's data puts Poland's uncertainty avoidance even higher than Czechia's, at 93, alongside a power distance of 68 — numbers consistent with workplaces that can run highly structured and hierarchical on paper, while the actual day-to-day experience of a new hire still depends heavily on which specific manager and team they happen to land with.

The Reckoning

What both countries share, underneath different survey numbers, is inconsistency as the real defining feature rather than any single national style. Czechia's problem is structural and well-documented: a large majority of employers that hire internationally simply haven't built the integration infrastructure to back it up, and the country's own recruitment specialists say so on the record. Poland's problem is less about infrastructure and more about range — a buddy system that works beautifully at a firm like PwC and barely exists at a factory floor two hours away, with the gap between those extremes shaped as much by company culture and generation of ownership as by any national policy.

For a newcomer deciding where to land, the practical lesson is to interrogate the specific employer rather than the national stereotype in either direction. A Czech company's 84 percent participation in hiring foreign workers says nothing about whether that particular employer is in the 18 percent offering real cross-cultural support or the much larger share that isn't. A Polish employer's demanding interview process might be the front door to a genuinely supportive team, or to a shift pattern nobody fully explained up front. Ask about the first ninety days specifically, in both places, rather than trusting the brochure's account of "culture."

The Part the Brochure Left Out

CareersInPoland.com (expat story) — An Italian professional who joined PwC Poland described a two-week induction run "entirely in English" that opened with a team introduction over coffee and pizza, and said she "felt integrated from day one" despite being the only Italian in her office, crediting colleagues who "helped me grow into the role" rather than expecting her to arrive fully trained.

expat.com (Poland forum) — A UK-born poster of Polish background described taking a physically demanding factory job on rotating shifts after arriving without a lined-up job, calling the atmosphere stressful and distrustful, with conditions he said worsened over time until he eventually returned to the UK.

expat.com (Poland forum) — An American who joined his US employer's Polish subsidiary described demanding, detail-focused interviews, and relayed his manager's own view that younger Polish business owners are moving toward friendlier, more supportive workplaces noticeably faster than older ones.

Expats.cz (quoting Gi Group and Grafton Recruitment's Radka Čechová) — A recruitment specialist put the core Czech integration problem bluntly: "Integration is not a one-off step but a long-term process," and "an initial onboarding session is not enough," arguing that existing staff need to be actively briefed on cultural differences rather than left to absorb them informally.

Conclusion

Neither Czechia nor Poland has solved the problem of making a new hire's first ninety days consistently good — they've just failed at it in different, nationally characteristic ways. Czechia tends to fail by never building the support system in the first place; Poland tends to fail by building a genuinely good one and then not making sure everyone gets access to it. Either way, the real onboarding document isn't the handbook HR hands you on day one — it's whoever happens to be sitting at the next desk.