Santiago Handshakes, Belgrade Hierarchies: What Actually Happens When You Take the Corporate Job

🇨🇱 Chile · 🇷🇸 Serbia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Santiago, the org chart is a formality everyone quietly agrees to override with a phone call to the right person's cousin. In Belgrade, the org chart is the terrain map, and skipping a rung is treated less like efficiency and more like an act of minor treason. Both countries will tell you, in the interview, that the culture is "relaxed." Neither is lying, exactly. They just mean two very different things by it.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇱 Chile

🇷🇸 Serbia

Chile's working week is on a legislated glide path down: the 40-Hour Work Law, passed in 2023, is trimming the statutory maximum from 45 hours to 40 in stages — 44 hours from April 2024, 42 from April 2026, on the way to 40 by 2028, according to the OECD's 2025 Economic Survey of Chile. On paper that reads like a country easing off the throttle. In practice, expat guides and the OECD's own labor figures tell a more complicated story: only around 12% of Chilean workers reported working remotely as of a mid-2023 survey, and the office culture that remains is heavily in-person, socially dense, and slower to make decisions than the compressed legal workweek would suggest. Hierarchies are real — Chile scores 63 on Hofstede's Power Distance Index, a solidly hierarchical reading — but they are softened by an insistence on personal warmth that a newly arrived, efficiency-minded manager can mistake for informality. It isn't. It's a different mechanism for getting things done, built on "pituto," the web of personal connections that often outperforms a cold email up the chain of command.

Serbia runs on a standard 40-hour week already, eight hours a day, five days a week, with overtime compensated at a legally mandated premium of at least 26% above base pay, per Rivermate's Serbian labor-law guide. Where Chile's hierarchy is cushioned by personal warmth, Serbia's is structural: companies — especially older, more established ones — maintain what Commisceo Global's management guide calls a "reasonably vertical" corporate structure, in which subordinates are generally not expected to weigh in on a manager's decision, only to execute it well. Newer, high-growth, and tech-sector firms are visibly flatter, a split that matters enormously depending on which Belgrade you end up working in — the legacy corporate one or the startup one that produced companies like Nordeus. Across both, work is treated as inseparable from social life: colleagues are expected to become an actual social circle, not just a professional one, and a shared coffee or lunch after a meeting is less a courtesy than a second, informal negotiating table.

The Reckoning: Here's the trap: both cultures describe themselves as relationship-driven, and both are — but the relationship does different jobs in each place. In Chile, the relationship is the workaround, the thing that lets you route around a slow hierarchy. In Serbia, the relationship is the maintenance cost of staying inside the hierarchy correctly. An employee who tries to "network around" a blocked decision in Belgrade the way they might in Santiago risks reading as disrespectful of the chain of command rather than resourceful. Meanwhile, a manager who assumes Chile's warmth means the hierarchy is optional will find requests mysteriously stuck at 63-points-of-power-distance for reasons nobody says out loud. The other quiet irony: Chile's legally shrinking workweek and Serbia's legally fixed one point in opposite directions, but expat reporting from both countries agrees that the posted hours are closer to a starting point than a ceiling.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com — A remote worker who relocated to Santiago described being genuinely startled that skipping the individual round of morning greetings — a quick hello to each person at their desk — got him quietly filed as cold by colleagues who'd otherwise been warm in every other interaction. He said no one ever told him directly; he pieced it together from how much friendlier requests got once he started doing the rounds.

Expat Arrivals — One newcomer to Chile flagged that the official 8:30-to-6 workday was almost never the real workday, and that the drift toward 7 or later wasn't formally required so much as socially assumed — leaving early on time, without an explicit reason, read as a statement rather than a neutral choice.

Expat Exchange — A foreign hire in Belgrade wrote that the "honeymoon phase" of charm and hospitality in Serbia gave way, a few months in, to real friction once actual decision-making was involved — in four of six cultural-values areas, by their own account, their instincts were the direct opposite of what their Serbian colleagues expected, and nobody flagged the mismatch until it had already caused a misfire.

Nordeus (Belgrade tech-company staff blog) — A relocated engineer described the adjustment less as a hierarchy problem and more as a pacing one: decisions that would take a single Slack thread elsewhere in Europe instead moved through a visible, deliberate sequence of people, and trying to shortcut that sequence didn't speed things up — it just made colleagues wary.

Commisceo Global (Serbia guide, drawing on business-consultant fieldwork) — Advice repeated across multiple consulted engagements: never raise a disagreement with a decision in the room where it was made. Take it to the person privately afterward. Public pushback, however diplomatically phrased, was consistently reported as damaging to the relationship in a way it wouldn't be in flatter, more improvisational cultures.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between these two moves for the career upside, the honest framing is this: Chile rewards people who invest early in being liked, because being liked is how things move. Serbia rewards people who invest early in being correctly positioned, because position is how things move. Neither is more "hierarchical" than the other in the way people usually mean it — they're hierarchical along different axes, warmth versus structure, and mistaking one for the other is the single most common way newcomers stall out in their first six months. The thing I'd actually tell a friend over a drink: learn the greetings in Santiago and learn the org chart in Belgrade, and you'll be fine — just don't try to bring the wrong playbook to the wrong office.