Silence Means You're Doing Fine in Taipei; In Amsterdam, Silence Means They've Given Up On You

🇹🇼 Taiwan · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

No news is good news in a Taipei office — hear nothing, and you're doing fine. In an Amsterdam office, no news is close to the worst possible sign: the Dutch rule of thumb, repeated by nearly every expat guide, is that colleagues only bother criticizing people they still believe can improve. Silence isn't neutral in either country. It just means the exact opposite thing.

Do's & Don'ts

🇹🇼 Taiwan

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Taiwan's feedback culture is shaped directly by Confucian values around harmony and face — concepts that show up in Hofstede's numbers as a striking combination: individualism of just 17 (strongly collectivist) alongside a long-term orientation score of 93, among the highest measured anywhere. In practice, that translates into a formal review cadence — once or twice a year, built around a documented "accomplishment list" the employee prepares themselves — layered on top of an everyday communication norm where negative comments are deliberately kept out of group settings. Commisceo Global's management guide is blunt about the mechanism: written criticism is genuinely risky in Taiwanese workplaces because tone is easy to misread on paper, so anything sensitive gets handled face-to-face, in private, specifically to preserve the chance to clarify and avoid embarrassment. The flip side, widely reported by relocation guides, is that Taiwanese managers historically default to silence rather than proactive feedback — "no news is good news" — a norm imported wholesale from a culture where actively demanding feedback the way an American or Dutch employee might isn't the expected move at all.

The Netherlands sits at almost the opposite pole. Erin Meyer's cross-cultural feedback research consistently places Dutch communication at the most direct end of the negative-feedback spectrum globally, alongside Israel and Russia — criticism delivered openly, sometimes in front of the team, using intensifying language ("completely," "absolutely") rather than softened with praise on either side. Crucially, multiple Dutch workplace guides frame this not as coldness but as a specific cultural logic: directness is treated as respect, an assumption that the recipient is capable of hearing accurate information and improving from it. That logic pairs with genuinely flat organizational structures — first names with senior leadership, junior employees expected to push back on ideas in meetings — and with a work-life balance regime that's a statistical outlier even within Europe: just 0.4% of Dutch employees regularly work very long hours, against an OECD average near 11%, and the Netherlands sits at the top of the OECD's Better Life Index for work-life balance.

The Reckoning: The real trap isn't the obvious one (Taiwan indirect, Netherlands direct) — it's what each culture does with silence. A Taiwanese employee moving to an Amsterdam office and hearing nothing from their manager for weeks might reasonably relax, the way they would at home; in Dutch workplace logic, that same silence is a red flag worth raising themselves, since Dutch managers who've mentally written someone off often simply stop engaging rather than escalate. Inversely, a Dutch manager transplanted to Taipei who delivers blunt, public feedback intending to show respect for their team's ability to handle it risks producing exactly the embarrassment Taiwanese workplace norms are built to avoid — the same gesture, read as care in one office, reads as a serious misstep in the other.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Answering a thread on the biggest culture shocks people face moving to Taiwan, several respondents pointed specifically to the workplace: negative feedback essentially never surfaces in group settings, and newcomers used to actively soliciting feedback in performance conversations elsewhere found the Taiwanese default of waiting to be told disorienting until they learned to read the absence of comment as the actual signal.

Traveling Kunz (Taiwan work-life blog) — A foreign employee's account of "the good, the bad, and the ugly" of Taiwanese office life singled out expected overtime and a near-total absence of home-office flexibility as the hardest adjustments, alongside a warning that some traditional workplaces still carried real verbal-abuse problems from senior staff — not universal, but not rare enough to dismiss either.

IamExpat.nl — A feature on Dutch culture shock "nobody really explains" focused heavily on directness in professional settings, describing newcomers from indirect-communication cultures initially reading blunt Dutch feedback as aggression before realizing, often only after an uncomfortable first review cycle, that the bluntness carried no hidden judgment at all.

Charmingmarie (personal relocation blog, Netherlands) — Among a list of biggest culture shocks moving to the Netherlands, the writer described a specific early meeting where a junior colleague openly disagreed with a senior manager's proposal in front of the whole team — an interaction that, from a more hierarchical professional background, initially read as a serious breach of protocol rather than the unremarkable, expected exchange Dutch colleagues treated it as.

Dutch On Track (language and culture knowledge base, drawing on client coaching sessions) — Coaches working with newly arrived professionals repeatedly identified the same recovery pattern: clients who initially found Dutch directness distressing came to describe it, within a matter of months, as more efficient than the softened feedback style they'd left behind — the adjustment period, not the directness itself, was consistently the harder part.

Conclusion

If you're moving into a Taiwanese office, the operating rule is: silence is safety, and any correction you need to give goes into a private room, never a group chat. If you're moving into a Dutch one, the rule inverts completely: silence is the warning sign, and the blunt feedback you're bracing for is, by local standards, a form of respect. The line I'd give a friend heading into either: in Taipei, stop waiting to be told you're doing well — assume it until told otherwise. In Amsterdam, stop waiting to be told you're doing poorly — ask, because nobody's going to soften it for you either way.