Greece Works the Longest Hours in the EU. The Netherlands Gets the Job Done in 32 — and Still Out-Argues You in the Meeting.

🇬🇷 Greece · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In the second quarter of 2025, 20.9% of Greek workers aged 20 to 64 put in more than 45 hours a week — roughly double the EU average of 10.8% — making Greece the longest-working country in the European Union by a wide margin. The Netherlands, meanwhile, averaged just 32.1 hours a week in 2024, the shortest workweek anywhere in Europe, built on decades of part-time work and flexible schedules. You might expect the country logging the fewest hours to also run the quietest meetings. It doesn't. Dutch colleagues will tell you exactly what's wrong with your proposal in the first ninety seconds, whether you asked or not. Greek colleagues will talk over you, over each other, and over the agenda, and somehow still reach a conclusion. Neither style has anything to do with how many hours anyone worked to get there.

Do's & Don'ts

🇬🇷 Greece

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Greece: Loud, Hierarchical, and Somehow Still Collaborative

Greek meetings run on a logic that looks chaotic from the outside and isn't. Business etiquette guides describe it almost apologetically: "it is normal for many people to talk at once during meetings," and open, passionate debate is treated as stimulating rather than disruptive — a sign the room is actually engaged with the problem, not a breakdown of order. Punctuality is expected in principle but loosely enforced in practice; meetings routinely run over, agendas are rarely circulated in advance, and first meetings exist almost entirely to build the personal relationship that everything else depends on. Negotiation, one guide notes flatly, doesn't begin at the first meeting — Greeks need time to form an opinion of the people across the table before they'll form one about the deal.

Underneath the noise sits a hierarchy that's taken seriously even when the conversation sounds egalitarian. The most senior person in the room tends to dominate discussion and hold the real decision-making authority, and junior staff are expected to defer to that seniority even while energetically arguing their own point seconds earlier. The Cultural Atlas describes Greek business structures as "traditional and generally hierarchical," built heavily around small, family-owned companies where trust and personal networks matter more than formal process. American expat Bree, quoted on a relocation guide, summed up the pace mismatch newcomers feel: "People seem to work slower here," she said, contrasting the rigid 9-to-5 she'd known with colleagues taking an unhurried afternoon coffee break around 2pm — even as, per Eurostat, those same colleagues statistically log some of the longest hours in the EU. Slower-feeling and longer-lasting, it turns out, are not the same thing.

Netherlands: Fast Talk, Slow Decisions, No Hard Feelings

Dutch communication style has a reputation that precedes most newcomers, and the reputation turns out to be accurate. Colleagues "value honesty, clarity, and fairness," on the theory that clear words now prevent long-term problems later, and feedback — in meetings, in emails, in real time — tends to be short, specific, and delivered without much cushioning. The frequently repeated reassurance, from relocation guides and columnists alike, is that "directness does not mean disrespect": a blunt critique of your presentation structure is aimed at the presentation, not at you, even when it doesn't feel that way the first dozen times.

What makes Dutch meetings genuinely distinctive isn't the bluntness alone — it's that the bluntness exists inside a deeply consensus-driven decision process. The polder model, named for the historic practice of Dutch communities jointly managing flood-prone land, means decisions are "rarely handed down from the top without discussion," even in cases where a manager has clear unilateral authority to just decide. Junior staff are expected to openly disagree with directors, and that disagreement is usually welcomed rather than tolerated; the goal is to surface conflict early, while it's still cheap to resolve, rather than let it fester. One Dutch business blog put the trade-off plainly: a project manager might spend a whole afternoon debating a point an executive elsewhere would settle in about five minutes. Arohi Natu, an international graduate student writing about her first encounters with this style, described a Dutch classmate reviewing her group project and saying simply, "I guess we need to redo it, it is not perfect" — a sentence that left her frozen, unsure whether to feel offended, defend the work, or just smile awkwardly. She later arrived at a different read on it entirely: "It's not rude, it's real." Hofstede Insights scores the Netherlands at roughly 38 on power distance against Greece's 60, a gap that tracks closely with which country's junior employees feel safe arguing with their boss out loud — and which one defers to him instead.

The Reckoning

The real contrast isn't loud-versus-quiet or slow-versus-fast — both countries are loud and both are slow, just in completely different places in the process. Greek meetings are loud in the room and fast to a kind of resolution once the senior person has heard enough; the real decision authority is concentrated and personal, so once that person is satisfied, the meeting can end even if the junior staff are still mid-argument. Dutch meetings are calmer in tone but much slower to resolve, precisely because resolution requires that everyone affected has genuinely had their say — the "afternoon of debate" isn't a bug in the Dutch process, it's the entire point of it. A newcomer walking into either room with the wrong model of where the real friction is will misread what just happened in completely opposite ways.

That mismatch is also exactly where a transplant does the most damage to themselves. Someone from a Dutch-style direct culture dropped into a Greek meeting will often read the interruptions and the deference-to-seniority combination as contradictory or performative, when it's neither — it's a single coherent system where passionate argument and hierarchical deference are both just how the room works. Someone from a Greek-style relational culture dropped into a Dutch meeting will often read the blunt feedback as a closed door, when it's actually an invitation: the Dutch colleague who tells you your structure is weak is, by local logic, taking you seriously enough to say so rather than smiling and letting you find out later.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Resource (Radboud University student magazine) — Arohi Natu, an international Master's student from India, described a teammate telling her, "Maybe the professors are not expecting this part, let's change it a bit," feedback she initially took as a personal failure before eventually learning that in the Netherlands, "good job" is only ever said when work genuinely is good.

IamExpat.nl — A piece on cross-cultural workplace stress described a Dutch team leader bluntly critiquing a colleague's presentation structure in front of the group; the team leader experienced it as normal engagement, while a colleague from a more indirect culture experienced the same exchange as a public dismissal that gradually eroded trust between them.

ExpatArrivals.com — American expat Bree, relocated to Greece, said plainly that "people seem to work slower here," describing a shift from a rigid 9-to-5 schedule to a workplace where colleagues take an unhurried coffee break around 2pm as a matter of course.

BusinessCulture.org (Greek meeting etiquette guide) — The guide notes it is simply "normal for many people to talk at once during meetings" in Greece, framing open, overlapping debate as a sign of genuine engagement with a decision rather than a breakdown in meeting discipline.

Reddit and Quora searches specific to Greek-versus-Dutch workplace meeting experiences turned up no fetchable first-person accounts covering both countries directly, so this section relies on a university student magazine, an expat-focused career publication, and named business-etiquette guides instead of inventing matching quotes.

Conclusion

If you're relocating for work, the honest preparation isn't "learn to be more direct" or "learn to be more patient" — it's figuring out, fast, where each country actually keeps its real decision-making power. In Greece, that power sits with a specific senior person, and the loud, overlapping debate around them is texture, not the decision itself. In the Netherlands, the power is genuinely distributed across everyone affected, and the slow, methodical consensus-building is the decision, not a delay before it. Walk into either room assuming the other country's rules, and you'll either miss who's actually in charge, or mistake open disagreement for a crisis that was never happening in the first place.