Lunch Is Mandatory, Drinks Are Optional: A Relocation Guide to Office Life in Colombia and Australia

🇨🇴 Colombia · 🇦🇺 Australia

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Colombia logs some of the longest average working hours among OECD economies and ranks dead last of the economies the OECD scored for work-life balance, and yet the single most important meeting of the Colombian workday is lunch. Australia, by contrast, works fewer hours on paper, has spent the last decade quietly retiring the boozy client lunch, and still manages to make a round of Friday drinks feel like a performance review disguised as a social occasion. Neither country's office culture is what the relocation brochure implies, and both will test assumptions you didn't know you were bringing.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇦🇺 Australia

Colombia's working life is long by any measure: the OECD's work-life balance assessment gave the country a score of 0.9 out of 10, the lowest of the economies it covered, and found that roughly 26.6 percent of Colombian employees work more than 50 hours a week — figures reported by Colombia Reports from the underlying OECD data. Compiled OECD and ILO hours data put Colombia's average annual hours worked at around 1,964, well above Australia's roughly 1,694. And yet, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace country data, 25 percent of Colombian employees report being engaged at work, above the global average of 20 percent, while only 36 percent report a lot of workplace stress — below both the regional and global averages. Long hours, in other words, do not automatically mean a miserable office, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on how many hours you were planning to work.

What holds that together is the lunch meeting. Business-etiquette guidance compiled by relocation firm Pebl notes that lunch meetings in Colombia routinely combine relationship-building with the actual business discussion, and that declining them repeatedly reads as a quiet withdrawal from the relationship rather than a scheduling preference. Hofstede Insights scores Colombia at just 13 on individualism, one of the most collectivist readings in the index (via the Cyborlink mirror of the comparison tool), which tracks with a workplace where who vouches for you matters more than what you've shipped. Colombia's own phased reduction of the legal workweek toward 42 hours by 2026 has reopened a national argument, covered extensively in outlets like Noticias Caracol and Portafolio, over whether the lunch hour itself counts as paid labor time — a debate that assumes, correctly, that lunch is already load-bearing infrastructure.

The ritual also shifts by postcode, which is the kind of detail a blanket "Latin American warmth" narrative tends to flatten. The same etiquette guidance notes that Bogotá and Medellín keep more formal business cultures, with punctual meetings and reserved first impressions, while coastal cities like Cartagena and Barranquilla run on looser schedules and treat hospitality itself as part of the negotiation. A new arrival who nails the unhurried coastal register in a Bogotá boardroom will read as unserious; one who brings Bogotá's formality to a Cartagena lunch will read as cold. There is no single Colombian office culture to study for, only a reasonably well-mapped set of regional dialects.

Australia tells an almost inverted story. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has tracked Australians spending less time on sleep, leisure and eating and more time working than a decade ago, quietly eroding the laid-back reputation the country still trades on internationally. Hofstede's individualism score for Australia sits at 90, near the top of the global table, with power distance at just 36 (again via the Cyborlink mirror) — numbers that describe a workplace where everyone calls the CEO by their first name, which is true, and where everyone is nonetheless quietly ranking everyone else, which is also true. The country's famous "tall poppy" instinct, well documented across Australian HR commentary, means the social reward for an after-work drink is real, but the social penalty for talking yourself up during it is just as real.

What has genuinely changed is the drinking itself. Industry figures cited in recent coverage of Australia's shifting lunch culture describe the long, alcohol-heavy client lunch as increasingly rare, abstention among 18-to-24-year-olds nearly tripling since 2000, and a DrinkWise survey finding only around a quarter of Australians now drink at workplace events at all. A workplace-culture guide for new migrants published by an Australian intercultural-relations group notes that an invitation to "Friday afternoon drinks" still functions as a genuine, if unofficial, career move, and that coffee invitations do more quiet relationship-building than any scheduled team event on the calendar. The informality is real. The stakes attached to it have not gone anywhere.

The two countries converge in a place the stereotypes don't predict: both run on unwritten relationship work disguised as something else. In Colombia the disguise is procedural — lunch looks like a break but functions as a negotiation; in Australia the disguise is tonal — banter looks like a break but functions as an audition for whether you can take a joke without getting precious about it. Skip either ritual assuming it's optional, and you haven't saved time, you've opted out of the actual meeting.

The genuine inversion is in the stress data. The country working the most hours, Colombia, reports less workplace stress than the global average per Gallup, while the country with shorter official hours, Australia, is logging measurably longer days than it used to according to the ABS, even as its drinking culture sobers up by its own choice rather than under duress. Neither country's reputation — "intense" Bogotá, "chill" Sydney — survives contact with its own statistics agency, which is the kind of finding a relocation consultant will not put in the brochure.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Fishbowl — a user who'd worked a decade across both markets described Australian workplace decisions as made by consensus rather than by a single decision-maker the American way, which newcomers mistake for a lack of authority rather than a different route to it.

Expat Exchange — an Indian professional relocating to Australia said he was struck by how supportive colleagues were in his first weeks, helping him find housing and navigate local customs well beyond the scope of the job itself.

Tales from a Small Planet, Real Post Report (Bogotá) — one respondent noted that the expat social calendar ran almost entirely through outside clubs, bars and sports leagues rather than anything organized by the office itself, so you build your own social life on top of, not through, work.

Tales from a Small Planet, Real Post Report (Bogotá) — a separate American respondent, reflecting years later, described the pace as slower and more disorganized than expected, with local employees generally undervalued by management even as expatriate staff fared comparatively well.

A recurring pattern across expat and relocation guidance on Colombia, rather than any single verifiable post, describes new hires misreading a declined lunch invitation as a minor scheduling issue when colleagues experience it as a quiet signal that the relationship isn't worth the effort — exactly the angle a Quora search kept promising and never actually delivered.

Conclusion

The practical difference that should actually move your decision isn't hours worked or drinks poured, it's where the real negotiation happens. In Colombia, it happens at the lunch table, and skipping it isn't a time-management win, it's a withdrawal from the only channel that moves your career. In Australia, it happens in the gap between what "no worries" sounds like and what it means, and mistaking the tone for the absence of hierarchy is the single most common unforced error newcomers make. Pack accordingly: in Colombia, block out real calendar time for relationships and treat it as a job function, not a break from one; in Australia, treat the casual register as a dialect with its own grammar of obligation, not a sign that the obligations have been waived.

If a friend asked me over a drink which one to take: ask yourself honestly whether you'd rather spend your social energy proving you can be trusted, or proving you can take a joke — because one country will bill you for either, just in very different currencies.