In Buenos Aires the Meeting Starts Whenever; In Cairo, It Never Quite Ends

🇦🇷 Argentina · 🇪🇬 Egypt

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Two countries, two ways of making a 10 a.m. meeting last until noon. In Buenos Aires, it starts closer to 10:30, because punctuality is a virtue everyone endorses and almost no one practices. In Cairo, it starts on time and then simply refuses to end, because the tea has been poured, the pleasantries are not optional, and rushing a conversation reads as a small act of disrespect. Neither approach is inefficient by local standards. Both will test the patience of anyone trained on a 25-minute meeting template.

🇦🇷 Argentina

🇪🇬 Egypt

Argentina's meetings run long for a reason the OECD gestures at without quite saying outright: employee satisfaction there tracks closely with the quality of workplace relationships and whether a manager can be trusted, not with how efficiently an agenda gets cleared. Formal working hours are a tidy 8:30 to 6, with a long lunch gap in the middle, but the actual content of the day is elastic — Argentines treat meetings as venues for building trust and airing a point of view at length, which is a polite way of saying the agenda is a suggestion. Hofstede's data supplies a number for this instinct: Argentina scores unusually high on uncertainty avoidance for the region, meaning the lengthy discussion isn't idle chat but a genuine attempt to reduce ambiguity before anyone commits to anything.

None of this should be mistaken for disorganization. It is, per multiple business-etiquette guides, a deliberate emphasis on simpatía — a norm of mutual warmth that treats brusqueness as a professional liability rather than a mark of efficiency. Korn Ferry's Workforce 2025 research notes that flattened management layers are leaving employees elsewhere feeling directionless; Argentine offices, with their emphasis on face time and relationship capital, have mostly avoided that particular affliction, for better or worse.

Egypt's meetings run long for the opposite reason: not too little structure, but too much hierarchy for anything to move quickly. CAPMAS records a standard workweek of 48 hours across six days, trimmed to 36 hours during Ramadan without a corresponding pay cut, and that same formality carries into the boardroom. Decisions flow from the top, the most senior person speaks first, and — per multiple accounts of Egyptian office life — a step that would take one meeting in a flatter hierarchy can take several, each one opening with tea and closing without a firm answer. Business-etiquette guides are blunt about the arithmetic: a process that runs a week in a Western office can reasonably take two in Cairo.

The upside, less discussed in productivity literature, is that the indirectness is a courtesy rather than an evasion. Saying "no" outright is considered poor form, so counterparts route around it with diplomatic language — a habit that requires visitors to read tone rather than transcript, but which spares everyone the bluntness that, say, Dutch or German colleagues might otherwise consider a professional courtesy in itself.

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the paradox sharpens: Argentina's meetings run long because everyone in the room has roughly equal license to talk; Egypt's run long because only the most senior person is really deciding, and everyone else is waiting their turn. Argentina optimizes for horizontal trust-building among peers; Egypt optimizes for vertical deference to whoever outranks the room. A flat-org transplant from a Northern European or Silicon Valley office would find Argentina merely slower than home, and Egypt actively unfamiliar in structure.

Yet the outcome, oddly, converges: in both countries, the newcomer who tries to run a crisp 30-minute stand-up gets quietly filed under "doesn't understand how things work here," and the actual business still gets done — just on a timeline that would make a McKinsey consultant reach for a stress ball.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A newcomer to Buenos Aires described arriving promptly at 10 a.m. for a client meeting, sitting alone in the conference room for twenty minutes, and genuinely wondering whether they had the wrong day, before realizing this was simply how the schedule worked.

Expat blog (CuencaHighLife) — One relocated professional recalled showing up on time, growing visibly frustrated as the meeting slipped past a half hour late, only to find her Argentine counterparts entirely unbothered by her irritation — a reminder that the frustration was hers alone to manage.

Expat.com forum — A contributor discussing Egypt's work culture noted that colleagues there routinely back each other up on deadlines rather than treating each task as one person's individual burden, a contrast they hadn't expected after working in more siloed offices abroad.

Expatforum.com — An employer running a small operation in Egypt admitted the culture and values on the ground were, in his words, "a million miles away" from what he knew back home, singling out how difficult it was to let an underperforming employee go once hired.

Quora — Someone asking how to find work in Cairo was told, repeatedly, that the honest answer wasn't the job boards but who you already knew — a detail no relocation packet had mentioned.

Conclusion

The practical advice is almost insultingly simple. In Argentina, protect your calendar, not your ego — the lateness isn't about you. In Egypt, protect your timeline, not your patience — the hierarchy isn't going anywhere, and neither is the tea. Both cultures reward the newcomer who stops treating the clock as the point of the meeting and starts treating the relationship as the actual deliverable; the agenda, in both Buenos Aires and Cairo, was always secondary to the people in the room.

Which is either a heartwarming lesson in the primacy of human connection over corporate efficiency, or the two best excuses in the world for a meeting that didn't need to happen. The honest answer is that it's both, and the calendar invite will not tell you which.