In Laos, the Org Chart Hangs in the Lobby. In Australia, the CEO Is in the Coffee Queue, Mate.

🇱🇦 Laos · 🇦🇺 Australia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Walk into almost any workplace in Vientiane and you will find the organisational chart framed and mounted near the entrance, a small shrine to the fact that someone, somewhere, outranks you. Walk into almost any workplace in Sydney and you may struggle to identify the CEO at all, since he is standing behind you in the coffee queue, calling everyone "mate," and would be mortified if you called him "sir." Both offices ship products, hit deadlines, and file annual reports. Only one of them, however, would ever dream of hanging up a chart to prove it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇱🇦 Laos

🇦🇺 Australia

Laos: Respect the Chart, Wait Your Turn

Lao workplaces take hierarchy seriously enough to display it. The organisational chart in the lobby is not decoration; it is a map of who defers to whom, consulted more often than the fire exit sign. According to the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys of Lao PDR, management practices in the country's formal private sector remain heavily centralised around owner-managers, with information travelling up the chain for approval before travelling back down with a decision attached. This is less dysfunction than design: consensus is gathered quietly beforehand, and the meeting itself mainly ratifies what senior staff already decided.

The ILO's work on Laos's garment sector, the country's largest formal employer, describes a workforce where grievances and even safety concerns still route through supervisors rather than direct worker input, a structure that keeps things orderly but slows anything requiring urgency. Face-saving compounds this: naming a mistake, even gently, costs the person who made it standing, so problems get smoothed over rather than named. The upshot is a culture that rewards patience over initiative, and treats "I'll get back to you" as a complete sentence.

Australia: Flat Until Proven Otherwise

Australia scores 38 on Hofstede Insights' power distance index, among the lowest in the world, and it shows in the small rituals of office life: managers share the open-plan floor, first names are compulsory, and any reference to one's own seniority reads as bad manners rather than authority. Cultural Atlas and Commisceo Global's management guides describe Australian bosses as expected to be "approachable," coaching rather than commanding, with status earned through competence rather than title. The catch is that flat does not mean soft: Australian workplaces pair informality with direct, sometimes uncomfortably candid, feedback, on the theory that mateship survives honesty better than it survives a nasty surprise at the annual review.

That informality is under some strain. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report puts Australia and New Zealand's employee engagement in the low-to-mid twenties, near the disappointing global average, and notes manager engagement worldwide has fallen for three straight years. Even a culture built on accessible, mate-like bosses is learning that being liked and being effective are different skills, and that no org chart does not mean no management.

The Reckoning

Put a Lao manager and an Australian manager in the same room and the instincts collide fast. The Lao manager waits for the most senior person present to speak first, a habit built for order. The Australian manager reads that silence as disengagement, since in Australia silence in a meeting is a problem to solve, not a courtesy to extend. The transplanted Lao employee may find the constant invitation to challenge the boss faintly terrifying, while the Australian employee posted to Vientiane may find a five-minute decision stretched into a multi-day approval chain an act of open hostility.

The deeper irony is that both systems optimise for the same thing, harmony, via opposite mechanisms. Laos protects it by concentrating decisions and softening confrontation. Australia protects it by flattening titles and front-loading confrontation as "feedback." Neither country would recognise the other's method as harmonious at all; each would call it chaotic or repressive, respectively.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com forum — A newcomer to a Vientiane office was frustrated that senior staff routinely arrived late to meetings while junior staff were expected to be early; a longer-tenured expat explained this wasn't rudeness but a visible marker of rank, and that copying the behaviour as a junior would land very differently.

Verge Magazine (Cuso International volunteer account) — A Canadian engineer posted to a Lao government office spent his first weeks eating lunch alone at his desk to save time, only to realise he was quietly excluding himself from the informal relationship-building that actually got work approved; once he started joining lunches, understanding barely half the conversation, cooperation improved noticeably.

Verge Magazine (a second Cuso International volunteer) — After multiple postings in Laos, one volunteer's advice to newcomers was to stop measuring progress by the clock they brought from home, since decisions and repairs alike move at a pace tied to consensus-building rather than urgency, and fighting that pace mostly just burns out the newcomer.

Quora — Responding to a question about Australian work culture, one commenter described the shift from a more hierarchical home country as disorienting at first: direct, blunt feedback from a manager felt like a personal betrayal of the friendly "mate" relationship they'd built, until they realised bluntness and camaraderie were meant to coexist, not cancel each other out.

Lemon8 — A Singaporean professional working in Australia noted, as a pleasant surprise, that her manager actively discouraged her from checking email while on leave, a sharp contrast to her previous job where staying reachable during vacation was the unspoken expectation regardless of what the leave policy said.

Conclusion

Neither system is obviously superior; each answers a different question. Laos asks how to make decisions stick without anyone losing face, and answers with hierarchy and patience. Australia asks how to make everyone feel heard without losing efficiency, and answers with flat structures and blunt talk. An employee moving between the two must unlearn almost everything about what "respect" looks like in practice, from where you sit at lunch to how you phrase a disagreement. The honest advice either direction is to watch what longer-tenured colleagues actually do, not what the handbook claims, because in both countries the real org chart is unwritten, and the framed one in the Vientiane lobby is, if anything, the more honest of the two.