Jan From Accounting or "Sir, Yes Sir": Formality at Work in the Netherlands and India

🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In one country, you will call your CEO by their first name within the week, drink the same instant coffee as the intern, and be expected to argue with your manager's idea in a meeting if you disagree with it. In the other, several state governments have recently found it necessary to issue formal written policy banning jeans from government offices — one, Maharashtra, went further and designated Fridays for khadi. Formality in India and the Netherlands isn't a matter of degree. It's a different operating system entirely, and mistaking one for a slightly-more-relaxed version of the other is the fastest way to misread a room.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇮🇳 India

The Netherlands runs on what the Dutch call the poldermodel — a consensus-driven approach to decisions, historically rooted in the collective management of land reclaimed from the sea, that has become shorthand for flat, negotiated authority in the workplace. Hofstede Insights scores the Netherlands low on power distance (38), and it shows immediately: junior employees are expected to challenge ideas in meetings, managers are addressed by first name, and — as DutchReview and multiple relocation guides note — your boss drinks the same coffee and eats the same lunch as you. This does not mean hierarchy is absent. Managers retain real authority and still make final calls; they simply exercise it through guidance and consensus-building rather than open command, which can read as a genuine absence of structure to newcomers until the first hard deadline reveals otherwise.

India's workplace formality is best understood as layered rather than uniform. Safeguard Global's culture guide and multiple Quora discussions describe deep-rooted respect for hierarchy and seniority — the widespread use of "Sir" and "Ma'am" in offices traces partly to British colonial administrative culture and partly to broader social norms around respecting elders and superiors. But the degree of formality varies enormously by sector and geography: large IT services firms like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro maintain formal dress and address norms even as newer product companies and startups in Bengaluru or Hyderabad have adopted markedly Western-informal cultures. State governments have moved in the opposite direction recently — both Maharashtra and Haryana issued formal 2023–2024 dress code notifications for government staff, with Maharashtra introducing "khadi Fridays" and both explicitly banning jeans and T-shirts, treating dress as a matter of institutional discipline rather than personal choice.

The Reckoning

Here's the trap for anyone moving between these two systems: assuming "less formal" and "less hierarchical" are the same thing. The Netherlands is genuinely low on both — flat structure, informal address, real appetite for junior pushback. India frequently decouples the two: dress and address can be relatively relaxed in a Bengaluru startup while the underlying decision-making hierarchy remains firmly intact, with the founder's word still functioning as final regardless of how casually everyone dresses around them. Read India's casual dress code as evidence of a Dutch-style flat structure and you will misjudge, in your first month, how decisions actually get made and whose disagreement is welcome.

The inverse trap catches people moving into the Netherlands from more hierarchical cultures: mistaking Dutch informality for weak authority, and either over-asserting in meetings in a way that reads as combative, or staying deferentially silent in a culture that interprets silence as having nothing to contribute.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A respondent explaining India's "sir, sir" office culture traced it partly to colonial-era administrative habits and partly to broader social respect for elders, noting that the practice persists even at companies that otherwise present themselves as modern and flat.

Quora — Someone describing Indian office culture more broadly said the real skill wasn't learning the formal titles, it was learning to read which senior person's disagreement actually needed to be resolved before a decision could move forward, regardless of official reporting lines.

Quora — A contributor comparing address norms across Western workplaces noted that even where "boss" or first names are used casually, an underlying deference to authority is usually still present — it's just expressed through tone and timing rather than titles.

Blind — A thread asking "what's the dress code like in your banking team" drew replies showing a sharp divide even within India itself: several banking and finance posters described strict formal expectations unchanged in years, while posters from newer fintech and product teams described dress codes so relaxed they barely existed.

Conclusion

If you're moving to the Netherlands, prepare to be addressed and to address others informally from day one, but don't mistake that for permission to skip the actual argument-making — Dutch consensus culture expects you to justify your position, not just state it. If you're moving to India, default a notch more formal than feels natural until you've mapped your specific company's real culture, because the range between a Bihar government office and a Bengaluru startup is wider than almost any other country pairing in this series. My honest line for a friend over drinks: in the Netherlands, dress down and speak up. In India, do the opposite until someone senior tells you otherwise — and even then, watch what they do, not just what they say.