Moving to India or Czechia? Here's How You'll Actually Make Friends (Spoiler: One Country Invites You Home, the Other Makes You Earn It)

🇮🇳 India · 🇨🇿 Czechia

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In India, a colleague you met on Monday may invite you to their cousin's wedding by Thursday. In Czechia, a colleague you've shared an office with for three years may still address you with the formal "vy" and never learn your weekend plans. Neither country is being rude. They are simply running on entirely different operating systems for what counts as a relationship, and the expat who assumes one system works everywhere is the expat eating lunch alone in month four.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇳 India

🇨🇿 Czechia

Start with the arithmetic, because it explains the emotional logic that follows. According to the ILO, the average Indian employee logs close to 48 hours a week, among the highest in the world, trailing only a handful of outliers such as Qatar and Mongolia — compared with roughly 37 hours in the United States and 36 in the UK. Long office hours would seem to leave little room for a social life, except that in India the office frequently is the social life. The ISS Global Workplace Report, covered by People Matters, found 86 percent of Indian employees report a strong sense of belonging at work, well above the 60 percent recorded in Singapore, and 41 percent say they stay in a job specifically because of the friendships that make it bearable.

That belonging is built on porous boundaries: colleagues ask about your marriage prospects, your parents' health, and your salary within weeks, not because they're nosy by local standards but because collectivist social scripts treat such questions as care, not intrusion — a pattern Hofstede's cultural-dimension framework captures in India's comparatively high score on collectivism and hierarchy alongside Czechia's higher individualism and risk-aversion. The catch for a foreign hire is that the warmth is real but conditional on participation: skip enough festival lunches and WhatsApp threads, and the door that opened fast closes just as quietly.

The same ISS data shows 30 percent of Indian employees citing shared values as the glue behind that belonging, nearly double the figure Germany and Denmark reported, which lines up with how quickly a foreign hire gets folded into the group: alignment on effort and loyalty tends to matter more, early on, than years of acquaintance. The friction sits elsewhere, in hierarchy rather than warmth. A widely echoed account on the professional forum Blind, from someone who had worked inside an Indian team, described near-familial camaraderie after hours alongside real caution about contradicting a manager in a meeting — a reminder that the social ease does not extend uniformly up the org chart.

Czechia inverts the equation. The office is not the social life; it is the thing you clock out of before the social life begins. Reporting from Expats.cz on workplace etiquette notes that Czechs typically keep work and personal life in separate boxes, and that "the only way to get to know your co-workers is after hours" — specifically over beer, not small talk at a desk. InterNations' 2026 Expat Insider survey ranked Czechia 27th on its Ease of Settling In Index, with only 31 percent of respondents calling locals friendly toward foreigners (against 61 percent globally) and 59 percent reporting difficulty making local friends; 53 percent said their entire social circle was other expats.

The upside is durability: once a Czech colleague does let you in — usually after repeated, unhurried contact rather than a single warm lunch — the relationship tends to be low-maintenance and genuinely loyal, not performative. The formal "vy" address can persist for years even between friendly colleagues, which newcomers from more informal cultures often misread as coldness rather than simple linguistic convention. Czechia also ranks last among InterNations-surveyed destinations for ease of learning the local language, and that friction compounds the social one: 77 percent of expats say Czech is hard to pick up, which closes off the small talk that might otherwise speed things along.

Expats.cz's own workplace-etiquette reporting adds a practical wrinkle: summer's unofficial "cucumber season" empties offices into long lunches and slow email replies, while beer at midday is unremarkable and nobody is tracking who orders it. None of this is unfriendliness so much as a culture that treats the workplace as a transactional space and reserves emotional investment for a separate, deliberately chosen circle — one a foreign hire has to actively seek out, usually through a hobby, a language class, or a buddy program, rather than wait for it to arrive through the office.

The Reckoning

The irony is that India's social life is loud and immediate but comes with an invoice — reciprocity is expected, and absence is noticed — while Czechia's is quiet and slow but, once granted, asks for almost nothing in return. An Indian friendship can feel like joining a family; a Czech one can feel like being issued a library card after a long silence, then never having the fine print change. Both are generous, in their own currencies.

There is also a timing mismatch that catches people off guard: Indian workplace bonds often peak in the first few months and plateau, while Czech ones are closer to flat for the first year and then, for those who stay, climb steadily. Someone evaluating "how is this going" at the standard six-month expat check-in will likely over-rate their prospects in India and under-rate them in Czechia — the exact opposite of how the arcs actually resolve.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expats.cz, EXPAT VOICES column — a reader described Czech colleagues as cordial but closed-off in groups, noting you have to befriend people one at a time rather than through an existing circle; he eventually broke through via a shared hobby, not through work at all.

Brno Expat Centre, What Expats Say series — an American professional who joined a large multinational said the job itself handed her an instant social network of hundreds, and that making friends was easy specifically because she was outgoing and treated work relationships as a starting point, not a ceiling.

Masaryk University profile (em.muni.cz) — an Indian PhD researcher in Brno described being invited to spend Christmas with a Czech colleague's family, which moved him deeply, while separately describing racist harassment encountered in the city center and a homesickness severe enough that he planned to leave after two winters.

Blind, workplace-culture thread — a contributor who had worked in India described close, almost familial colleague bonds and people staying late together by choice, but warned that voicing disagreement with a manager carried real career risk in a way it did not in less hierarchical workplaces.

Expats.cz, newcomer-advice column — multiple expats advised against taking Czech directness personally and said visibly trying to speak Czech, even badly, was read as a sign of respect that noticeably softened people's reserve over time.

Conclusion

If you need to feel embedded quickly to function — if isolation makes you miserable within weeks rather than months — India will give you that faster, at the cost of fewer personal boundaries and an unspoken expectation that you show up for the group in return. If you can tolerate a slow build and don't mind a long stretch of politeness before anything warmer, Czechia will eventually give you something steadier, provided you don't mistake the early quiet for rejection and leave before the second winter. The honest version for a friend over a drink: in India you'll have ten people who feel like family by Christmas and one of them will ask to borrow money by spring; in Czechia you'll have no one by Christmas and, if you stay, one genuine friend for life by the time most expats have already packed up and left.