In the Netherlands, Team Bonding Is a Friday Beer Nobody Has to Attend. In India, It's a Festival Nobody Would Dream of Skipping.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

The Dutch "vrijmibo" — Friday afternoon drinks — has no guest list, no obligation, and no consequence for leaving after one round. Diwali at an Indian office, by contrast, routinely involves the whole floor decorating a rangoli together, a potluck of home-cooked dishes, and a genuine social cost to being the person who ducks out early. Both cultures will describe themselves as having strong "team bonding." One means an optional beer. The other means a shared calendar of obligations nobody actually experiences as an obligation.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇮🇳 India

Netherlands: Bonding as an Opt-In, Flat Ritual

Dutch workplace bonding runs almost entirely through the borrel — informal drinks and snacks, most commonly on Friday afternoons as the "vrijmibo." Per cultural documentation of the practice, a borrel has no personal invitations, no guest list, and a voluntary, unofficial character: people arrive and leave whenever they like, and attendance is rarely tracked. But the borrel is not merely decorative. It functions as the social infrastructure underneath the country's otherwise low-hierarchy workplace culture — Hofstede scores the Netherlands 38 on power distance and just 14 on masculinity, reflecting a professional culture that prizes consensus, equality, and work-life balance over status display.

The catch for newcomers is that "optional" doesn't mean "inconsequential." Skipping the borrel repeatedly means missing the informal trust-building and network visibility that Dutch colleagues build through it — the strict professional directness of the working week gets its social counterweight here, and opting out entirely leaves a newcomer permanently on the outside of that softened, personal layer of the relationship.

India: Bonding as a Shared, Structural Calendar

Indian workplace bonding is built around the country's dense festival calendar — Diwali, Holi, Eid, Christmas, and regional celebrations like Pongal and Baisakhi — treated by employers as genuine engagement infrastructure rather than optional extras. Per SHRM India and workplace research on the subject, these celebrations blur hierarchical boundaries temporarily: directors and interns decorate the office together, share potluck dishes, and participate in games and rituals that would be unthinkable on an ordinary Tuesday. India's high Hofstede power distance score makes this temporary flattening notable — it's not that hierarchy disappears, but that festivals create sanctioned, bounded windows where it visibly relaxes.

For employees working away from family during these periods, and especially for expatriate or relocated staff, office festival participation also serves a function the Dutch borrel doesn't: creating a substitute sense of communal belonging in place of family celebration. That makes participation carry more emotional and social weight than the Netherlands' deliberately low-stakes drinks culture, even though both are nominally "team bonding."

The Reckoning

The paradox: the Netherlands, one of the flattest, most individualist workplace cultures in the developed world by Hofstede's measures, builds bonding around an event with genuinely no obligation attached — yet skipping it has real professional cost. India, with one of the highest power-distance scores in the comparison, builds bonding around events explicitly designed to erase hierarchy, however briefly — and participation is functionally compulsory in a way the Dutch borrel never quite becomes.

The other trap is duration. Dutch bonding accrues in small, repeated, low-intensity doses — one Friday beer at a time, over months. Indian office bonding arrives in a smaller number of high-intensity, calendar-anchored bursts tied to the festival calendar. Arrive expecting the other country's rhythm and you'll either burn out trying to attend every single Dutch borrel as if it were mandatory, or under-invest in the two or three Indian festival windows a year that actually matter most.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — An Indian professional who relocated to Amsterdam for a tech role wrote that the hardest adjustment wasn't the language, it was realizing nobody would ever explicitly invite them to the Friday borrel — you were just expected to know it was happening and show up, and missing it repeatedly quietly cost them a promotion conversation they never even knew they'd been considered for.

r/Netherlands — A Dutch manager described an international new hire who used formal pronouns at their first vrijmibo, which the whole team found so unexpectedly funny and oddly formal that it became an ongoing office joke, though a kind one, once explained.

Internations — A European expat working in Bangalore described being genuinely moved when colleagues insisted on including them in a Diwali potluck despite having nothing to contribute themselves, and said understanding the reciprocity expected — bringing something the next time — mattered more to being accepted than any single festival appearance.

ExpatCopilot — A contributor advising newcomers to Dutch offices noted that Dutch humour and bluntness during a borrel is often mistaken for rudeness by internationals, when it's actually the clearest sign of inclusion — Dutch colleagues generally don't bother being blunt with people they don't consider part of the group.

r/india — A foreign employee at an Indian multinational described initially treating Diwali office decorations as background noise to work through, until a colleague gently pointed out that helping decorate the team's section of the office was effectively the only real bonding activity of the entire quarter — after that, they never skipped it again.

Conclusion

If you're moving from the Netherlands to India, recalibrate your sense of "optional" — the festival calendar carries real professional weight, concentrated into a handful of high-stakes windows rather than spread thin across every week. If you're moving from India to the Netherlands, recalibrate downward — bonding there is frequent, low-key, and genuinely leave-whenever-you-like, but consistency across many small occasions matters more than showing up hard to any single one.

My honest advice, over a drink: in Amsterdam, go to the beer you don't feel like attending. In Bangalore, bring something to the potluck even if you show up with nothing else prepared. Both cultures are telling you the same thing in different accents — belonging here isn't assumed, it's built one Friday, or one Diwali, at a time.