In Belgium, the Meeting Never Ends. In Kenya, It Starts Late and Ends With Tea.

🇧🇪 Belgium · 🇰🇪 Kenya

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Belgians work, on average, 1,437 hours a year — nearly 300 hours less than the OECD average of 1,736 — and still find time to hold a meeting about whether that number is accurate. Kenyans, meanwhile, are legally capped at 45 hours a week but will cheerfully exceed it if the boss hasn't left the building yet, because in Nairobi's hierarchy-conscious offices, leaving before the senior person does is not really optional. Neither country works less because it cares less. They've just built entirely different machinery for looking busy.

🇧🇪 Belgium

🇰🇪 Kenya

Belgium: Consensus at the Speed of Bureaucracy

Belgium's labor statistics tell a story of restraint: according to the OECD, the average Belgian worker logged 1,436.96 hours in 2023, down from 1,565 the year before, against an OECD average of 1,736 hours. Weekly hours have hovered around 35, and in 2022 Belgium became one of the few countries to legislate a right to compress a full workweek into four days without cutting total hours. On paper, this reads as a workforce optimizing for efficiency. In practice, per Hofstede Insights, Belgium scores a notably high 65 on Power Distance — meaning hierarchy is real and respected — while its corporate culture, particularly in Wallonia, still routes decisions through multiple layers of sign-off even when the initial meeting felt collaborative.

That tension between short hours and long approval chains is the defining feature of Belgian corporate life. Meetings are frequent, well-attended, and treated as the primary venue for actually developing an idea rather than rubber-stamping one drafted elsewhere — a habit that looks like inefficiency to outsiders and looks like due diligence to Belgians. Flemish offices tend to run flatter and faster than Walloon ones, and multinational employers report that the language question (French, Dutch, or English) shapes office culture as much as any management framework does. The result is a workplace that is genuinely humane by hours-worked standards and genuinely slow by decision-speed standards — a trade Belgians appear, collectively, to have made on purpose.

Kenya: Hierarchy, Warmth, and a 45-Hour Ceiling Nobody Fully Believes

Kenya's Employment Act sets standard hours at 45 per week, with overtime paid at 1.5 times the regular rate on weekdays and double time on Sundays and public holidays — a framework broadly consistent with ILO norms, capping total hours at 52 per week (60 for night work). The law is specific. Office practice is looser: expat and local forum accounts alike describe negotiated arrangements that vary company to company, with white-collar offices generally running 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, and client-facing sectors like advertising sometimes adding a half-day Saturday.

What the statute doesn't capture is the texture of the workplace itself. Deference to seniority runs deep — decisions flow top-down, junior staff rarely contradict superiors publicly, and meetings often open with an unhurried round of tea and conversation before business begins. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace puts Kenyan employee engagement at 21%, slightly above the Sub-Saharan African average of 19%, but life satisfaction lags: only 21% of Kenyan employees report thriving overall, against a global average of 34%, with 34% reporting daily stress. McKinsey's 2025 Women in the Workplace research adds a structural footnote: women hold 40% of entry-level private-sector roles in Kenya but only 27% of C-suite seats, suggesting the hierarchy that governs daily office etiquette also governs who eventually gets to sit at the head of the table.

The Reckoning

Put the two systems side by side and the irony sharpens: Belgium, with its shorter legal and actual working hours, feels slower to a newcomer because nothing gets decided without consulting everyone who might object. Kenya, with a longer statutory ceiling and a visibly more hierarchical structure, often feels warmer and more socially fluid day to day, because the hierarchy is explicit rather than procedural — you know exactly whose opinion matters, which, paradoxically, can make meetings move faster once the senior person has spoken.

The honest comparison isn't "efficient Europe versus inefficient Africa" — the data doesn't support that lazy framing. It's "consensus-by-committee versus consensus-by-deference." Belgium slows down because everyone gets a formal say; Kenya can speed up specifically because not everyone does. Anyone arriving from a flat, fast-decision culture like the US will find both systems maddening in mirror-image ways: Belgium for how long it takes to get a yes, Kenya for how quickly a senior "yes" can override a junior "actually, wait."

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone who relocated to Belgium for work wrote that they regretted the move within six months, describing the pace of change as glacial: client approvals that should take days instead crawled through multiple internal decision-makers before anything as small as a contract amendment could go through.

Quora — Another respondent, comparing Belgian offices to Scandinavian and Dutch ones, advised newcomers to bring patience rather than urgency: Belgian meetings mix business with small talk and humor throughout, and a plan that seems agreed upon in the room can still get quietly relitigated at the next level up.

Expat.com forum — A prospective hire moving to Nairobi from India described confusion after HR simply told him working conditions were "fine," with no specifics on hours; other posters in the thread noted that while most local staff work 8am to 5pm with Fridays winding down early, expatriates hired at a premium are often expected to work later and through weekends precisely because they're being paid more.

Expat Arrivals — A guide aimed at new arrivals in Kenya noted a pleasant surprise for many transplants: colleagues who ask after your family by name, meetings that open with shared tea rather than diving straight into an agenda, and a general expectation that relationships get built before business gets discussed.

K24 Digital — A piece on Kenyan office life, written from a local vantage point rather than an expat one, described the same hierarchy that gives meetings their warmth as also making honest upward feedback rare, since junior staff are culturally discouraged from directly challenging a superior's decision even when they disagree with it.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between the two on work-culture grounds alone, the decision comes down to what kind of friction you can tolerate. Belgium will test your patience with process — long consultations, layered approvals, a compressed workweek that looks generous on paper but doesn't necessarily mean faster outcomes. Kenya will test your instincts about hierarchy — warm, relationship-first, but with a chain of command you're expected to read correctly on your first day, not your thirtieth.

Neither is "worse." Belgium optimizes for making sure everyone was consulted; Kenya optimizes for making sure everyone knows their place, and then treats you well within it. The thing I'd actually tell a friend over a drink: if you can't stand being told "let's discuss it further," don't move to Belgium, and if you can't stand not being able to say what you actually think in a meeting, don't move to Kenya — but bring good shoes for standing around the tea table either way, because that's where the real decisions get previewed in both places.