🇫🇷 France · 🇦🇺 Australia
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
Every workplace has rituals. The question is which ones are load-bearing. In France, lunch is. In Australia, it's Friday drinks — or the office barbecue, or the team escape room, or whatever the company has decided this quarter signals that it is a good place to work. Both countries have invested culturally in the idea that colleagues should spend time together outside formal work contexts. They simply disagree about when, how, and what it is supposed to accomplish.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Go to lunch — and expect it to last at least an hour; the midday meal is the primary site of colleague relationship-building, and skipping it regularly signals either workaholism or antisocial tendencies | Eat at your desk; in France this is frowned upon, considered unhygienic, and in some workplace categories is technically prohibited |
| Discuss topics beyond work at lunch — French lunch conversation encompasses politics, culture, food, philosophy, weekend plans, and almost anything except your salary or personal achievements | Try to accelerate a business relationship by pushing work topics aggressively at a first lunch; the meal is the relationship; the business follows from it |
| Accept the apéritif before a business dinner — the pre-dinner drink is an institution, not optional decoration | Skip the cheese course at a formal business meal — it is neither a frivolity nor a sign that the dinner is running long; it is part of the meal |
| Understand that after-work socialising is minimal by international standards — French colleagues go home after work, particularly in Paris, and this is not rudeness | Assume that the absence of after-work pub culture means French colleagues are reserved; they are highly social, on their own schedule |
| Observe the apéritif culture at team events — a drink before dinner, relaxed conversation, an unhurried transition to eating — this is the form French social bonding takes | Interpret a French colleague's directness at lunch as aggression; frank intellectual disagreement is culturally normal and does not imply personal conflict |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Attend Friday drinks — they are a genuine social institution at many Australian workplaces, and absence in your first weeks will be noted more than you expect | Feel obliged to drink alcohol; Australian social culture has been gradually normalising non-drinking, but you do need to show up |
| Embrace the egalitarianism: Australian workplaces typically socialise without strong hierarchical distinctions — you can find yourself at the pub next to your CEO without ceremony | Treat team events as optional; they are often the primary context in which interpersonal trust is built, particularly at smaller companies |
| Participate in the office small talk — Australians use banter and casual conversation to establish comfort and trust, and maintaining formal distance reads as cold | Try to discuss serious professional ambitions in the first five minutes of a social event; Australians find this pushy and slightly alarming |
| Show up to the work Christmas party and the team lunch; these events do a disproportionate amount of social heavy lifting in Australian workplaces | Skip events citing work — saying you're too busy to come to a team lunch is not a badge of productivity; it's a mild social signal that you don't value the team |
| Understand that lunch breaks are short in most Australian workplaces (30–45 minutes is common) and not typically an occasion for extended socialising | Confuse Australian informality with Australian indifference; beneath the easygoing surface, social dynamics and personal loyalties are carefully tracked |
France's midday ritual is perhaps the most misunderstood feature of its workplace culture — often dismissed by outsiders as inefficiency and understood by insiders as infrastructure. The French lunch break lasts at minimum one hour; French labour law mandates a 45-minute break after six hours of work, and in practice the corporate lunch hour runs considerably longer. Eating at a desk is not a neutral act; according to workaround.io's guide to French office etiquette, it is culturally discouraged and, for certain worker categories, prohibited — a position that would be unenforceable in most other countries but is maintained in France because the shared lunch is understood to have a social function that cannot simply be replaced by a desk sandwich.
The content of the lunch matters too. According to crossculture2go.com's analysis of French business culture, the meal is "where relationships are developed" — not the meeting room, not the after-work gathering, not the team event. Business will eventually be discussed, but typically only once the relationship has been established through the broader conversation, which may cover food, politics, cultural preferences, and the particular characteristics of the restaurant. Clients are entertained at table; colleagues bond at table. The table, in French professional life, is the primary interface.
After-work culture is, by comparison, sparse. French colleagues — particularly in Paris — tend to return home after work, reserving the evening for family and private life. There are team events, typically formal meals rather than casual gatherings. There is the apéritif before formal occasions. What there is not, to the frequent confusion of British, Australian, and American arrivals, is a Friday pub culture or the expectation that colleagues will voluntarily extend the working day into social time.
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Australia's workplace social culture is organised around a different axis: the after-work event, the Friday drink, the team lunch, the office Christmas party, and the barbecue that various organisations stage at various points in the year to signal that they have a culture worth having. The lunch break, by contrast, is functional rather than social — typically 30 to 45 minutes, usually eaten at or near the office, and not particularly central to colleague relationships.
The significance of the after-work gathering is partly cultural (Australian social life is genuinely informal and egalitarian, and the workplace pub visit extends that) and partly relational (a 2024 Turning Point study found that corporate workers described workplace drinking events as enabling "relaxed professional boundaries" and more "collegial interactions" — though the same study noted exclusion risks for those who don't drink or can't attend). The team event has become an industry unto itself: escape rooms, go-karting, cooking classes, amazing races through the city, immersive dinners. Companies treat team building as a measurable investment, and the 2024 Beyond the Boardroom report on Australian team building trends tracked an increasing preference for experience-based events over drinks-only formats.
The social hierarchy in Australian workplace gatherings is notably flat. Senior leaders and graduate employees typically attend the same events, stand at the same bar, and observe the same informal rules — including the implicit rule that serious power dynamics should not be exercised in social settings. This is not naivety; it is a distinct social code.
France and Australia have both concluded that colleagues should bond outside formal work hours — and they have reached opposite conclusions about how and when. France does it at lunch, daily, as a non-optional shared ritual. Australia does it after work, periodically, as a voluntary-but-not-really-voluntary event. The French approach creates a daily rhythm of social maintenance; the Australian approach creates episodic intensification.
Hofstede's individualism scores are instructive: Australia scores 90, France approximately 71. Both are high-individualism cultures, meaning personal time and private life are valued — but France protects its personal time specifically from after-work incursion, while Australia is more willing to extend social availability in the evening, provided the context is appropriately relaxed. Power distance diverges more sharply (France 68, Australia 36), which explains why French lunches can accommodate frank intellectual disagreement between hierarchical levels, while Australian social events enforce a studied equality — everyone is "mate," regardless of title.
workaround.io — A British expat who relocated to Paris for a consulting role described her first week, in which she ate lunch at her desk every day to demonstrate diligence. By Thursday, a French colleague had taken her aside to explain that this was being interpreted not as hard work but as unsociable behaviour. She ate lunch with the team every day for the remainder of her time at the firm, and considered it some of the most productive time she spent in Paris.
Quora — A French professional who moved to Sydney for an Australian tech company described the Friday drinks ritual with the detached curiosity of an anthropologist: "In France, we do not voluntarily extend work into the evening. In Australia, I discovered that refusing to have a beer with your colleagues on Friday is considered almost aggressive. I started going. Then I started enjoying it. I am still uncertain whether this is cultural assimilation or genuine preference."
Internations Paris — A Canadian expat in Paris noted that the business lunch is where, in French professional culture, a vendor becomes a partner and a contact becomes a colleague. She had been scheduling 30-minute Zoom calls to advance client relationships; a French colleague redirected her to a two-hour lunch. The deal she had been pursuing for three months closed two weeks after the meal.
renestance.com — An Australian entrepreneur who opened a Paris office described her initial bewilderment at the absence of after-work events and the emphasis on lunch as the social arena. "I tried to organise Friday drinks three times. Nobody came. Then I invited everyone to a long lunch and every single person showed up. I eventually understood that I had been trying to socialise in Australian and they were all waiting to socialise in French."
If you are moving from Australia to France, redirect your social energy from the evening to the midday — and stop eating at your desk. If you are moving from France to Australia, expect shorter lunches and more after-work events, and take the latter seriously even if the format is unfamiliar.
The underlying social need is the same in both countries: colleagues want to know the person beneath the job title. They just check at different times of day.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.