Riyadh Will Get to the Point Eventually. Toronto Will Get to the Point on Time, Then Apologize for It.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia · 🇨🇦 Canada

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Riyadh, a business meeting scheduled for ten a.m. may begin closer to ten-thirty, pause entirely for the noon prayer, and not touch its stated agenda until the second cup of coffee. In Toronto, a meeting scheduled for ten a.m. will begin at ten a.m. sharp, end at ten twenty-nine, and still generate a follow-up email apologizing for running one minute over. Both cultures consider themselves scrupulously polite. Neither would recognize the other's definition of the word.

Do's & Don'ts

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia

🇨🇦 Canada

Saudi Arabia

According to Hofstede Insights' country comparison, Saudi Arabia scores 95 on power distance, one of the highest readings on the index, reflecting a workplace where hierarchy is not just tolerated but actively expected — decisions flow from the top, and meetings exist partly to display who occupies which rung. Gulf business-culture guides compiled by Talaera and others note that seniority dictates who speaks first, who is greeted first, and where people sit, and that Saudi meetings are commonly arranged up to a month in advance yet rarely stick to a fixed agenda once they start.

The rhythm of the working day compounds this. Commisceo Global and Expatica both describe a split working schedule — roughly 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., a long midday break, then 4:30 to 8 p.m. — with the Sunday-to-Thursday week bookending five daily prayers that pause commercial life for twenty to thirty minutes each time. Meetings are, per these same guides, "not very structured, with rarely a formal agenda or designated chairperson," and the first encounter with a new counterpart typically consists of prolonged small talk about family and health before any commercial subject is raised. Underneath the leisurely pace sits wasta — the web of personal connections and influence that Gulf business guides describe as the actual mechanism by which meetings turn into signed contracts. GASTAT's own labor figures for 2025 put the non-Saudi share of the private workforce above 75% in several sectors, meaning most of the people navigating this system on any given day are, like the reader of this guide, learning it from scratch.

Canada

Canada sits near the opposite end of Hofstede's power-distance scale, and the effect on meetings is immediate: agendas are followed, junior staff are expected to contribute, and a manager who dominates the conversation is more likely to be quietly criticized than admired. Erin Meyer's Culture Map research places Canada among the lowest-context communication cultures in the world, but crucially not among the bluntest — Canadian feedback tends to arrive wrapped in what Meyer's framework calls a "positive sandwich," softer and more diplomatic than the direct style common in northern Europe, even though the underlying message is meant to be unambiguous.

That combination — say what you mean, but say it gently — is precisely what trips up newcomers. A CBC News first-person account from an immigrant navigating the Canadian job market described being told she wasn't "outspoken enough" in meetings, a note that landed as bewildering for someone raised in a workplace where you simply did not address senior leaders as equals. On the more mundane end, Canadian workplace surveys on remote and hybrid work found that roughly three-quarters of employees still hold regular team meetings despite dispersed schedules, and that companies investing in structured meeting training saw measurable gains in meeting effectiveness — a very Canadian solution to a problem: if the meetings are unavoidable, at least standardize them.

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the irony sharpens: the culture with the strictest hierarchy is also the one where meetings wander, and the culture that prizes flat, democratic input is also the one that starts and ends precisely on the minute. Punctuality and structure, it turns out, are not the same axis — Saudi Arabia is highly structured in who may speak and in what order, just not in when the meeting ends; Canada is loosely structured in who may speak, but rigidly disciplined about the clock. A Saudi executive transplanted into a Toronto stand-up would likely find the lack of ceremony faintly disorienting. A Canadian manager dropped into a Riyadh majlis would likely check their watch four times in the first twenty minutes and learn nothing useful by doing so.

The other divergence is what silence means. In Saudi meetings, an indirect answer — "this will be difficult," a long pause, a change of subject — is a fully legible no, and reading it correctly is treated as basic professional competence. In Canadian meetings, silence in response to a direct question is more often read as unresolved disagreement waiting to be drawn out, and a good manager is expected to draw it out. Import either default into the wrong country and you will misread the room with total confidence.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — a respondent working in Saudi Arabia described the workplace as genuinely multicultural and colleagues as courteous and punctual once you're inside the circle, but noted that Saudis are, on the whole, not quick to welcome strangers — the friendliness has to be earned over time rather than assumed on day one.

Expat.com forum, Saudi Arabia — a longtime expat cautioned newcomers that with five prayers a day, phones simply stop being answered and shops and offices go dark for a solid half hour each time, and that the only sane approach is to build that dead time into your calendar rather than fight it.

Quora — one thread on Canadian workplace culture argued that Canadians tend to equate any form of direct confrontation with rudeness, so disagreement gets rerouted through hedges and qualifiers, which newcomers from more direct cultures can mistake for the absence of any disagreement at all.

CBC News, First Person essay — a newcomer to the Canadian labour market recalled being told in a performance conversation that she wasn't "outspoken enough" in meetings, a jarring note for someone who had spent her career in a workplace where junior staff did not casually challenge senior leadership.

Quora — a response to a question about what Canadian bosses actually reward made the point that supervisors generally prefer employees willing to voice a contrary opinion politely over those who default to quiet compliance, which surprised a number of commenters raised to treat silence as the safer professional choice.

Conclusion

Neither country's meeting culture is broken; each is optimized for a different question. Saudi Arabia's meetings optimize for trust before transaction, which is why the small talk is the point and the agenda is decoration. Canada's meetings optimize for documented, evenly distributed input, which is why the clock is sacred and the feedback comes cushioned. The practical move for anyone relocating is less about memorizing etiquette rules and more about recalibrating what silence, delay, and politeness are each doing in the room — because in one country they signal patience, and in the other they signal a problem nobody has said out loud yet. If a friend asked me over a drink, I'd say: in Riyadh, worry when the small talk stops; in Toronto, worry when nobody pushes back.