The Buddy System vs. The Guru: Getting Started at Work in the Netherlands and India

🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In the Netherlands, your first week involves someone handing you a laptop, a direct manager, and an assigned "buddy" who expects you to speak up in meetings by week two. In India, your first week involves the same laptop, but the unspoken rule is that you watch, listen, and wait for a senior colleague to decide you're ready to be actively guided. Both are forms of care. They look nothing alike.

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Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇮🇳 India

Netherlands: Structured, Fast, and Allergic to Ceremony

Dutch onboarding tends to run on a defined 90-day rhythm that balances administrative setup, cultural integration, and actual role competence, according to HR guidance from Adams Multilingual Recruitment and Rippling's Netherlands hiring checklists. The centerpiece is the "onboarding buddy" — a colleague assigned in advance, separate from your manager, whose job is specifically to catch the informal knowledge a formal induction misses. Companies that use mentors this way see measurably better early retention, according to onboarding research from Chronus and Together Mentoring.

What distinguishes the Dutch version from onboarding elsewhere is how quickly new hires are expected to participate as equals. Meetings are informal in structure but not in stakes — new employees are expected to offer opinions early, and Dutch communication norms treat directness as efficient rather than confrontational. The social layer lags behind the professional one, though: several accounts describe the Dutch as reserved and slow to form new personal friendships, even as they're immediately collaborative at a work level — a split worth expecting rather than reading as coldness.

India: Relationship-First, Hierarchy-Aware

Indian onboarding at larger, more structured employers increasingly mirrors global norms on paper — a formal 30/60/90-day plan, functional training by role, and an assigned mentor, as described in Quora accounts of onboarding at firms like ITC and Oracle India, where induction can run as a dedicated multi-day process at the outset. What operates underneath that structure is different: work culture in India blends hierarchy, relationship-driven collaboration, and strong personal accountability, per Wisemonk's 2026 work culture guide, and mentorship in Indian workplaces carries a dynamic Western platforms rarely design for — junior employees are often genuinely reluctant to initiate contact with senior mentors, waiting instead to be approached.

This produces a specific risk for newcomers used to flatter systems: a highly collaborative, hands-off management style that reads as empowering in Europe or Australia can be perceived in India as vague or disengaged, according to InsourceIndia's guidance for international employers. New hires who expect to be given autonomy immediately, the way they might in a Dutch or Scandinavian firm, can instead find themselves waiting for structure that a hierarchical culture assumes should be actively supplied by a senior colleague, not requested by a junior one.

The Reckoning

Both cultures use a formal "buddy" or mentor system, but the underlying theory of new-employee competence is opposite. The Dutch model assumes competence should be demonstrated immediately through participation — speak in the meeting, disagree diplomatically, prove you belong. The Indian model assumes competence is built through observed trust over time — earn the guidance by showing patience and respect for the process first. A Dutch new hire who stays quiet in week one reads as underqualified. An Indian new hire who speaks up too assertively in week one can read as presumptuous, even if the words themselves are accurate.

Hofstede Insights data frames this well: the Netherlands scores low on Power Distance, meaning hierarchy is minimized by design, while India scores considerably higher, meaning hierarchy is treated as a legitimate organizing structure rather than an obstacle to route around. Neither framework is more rigorous than the other — they're solving the same onboarding problem, competence signaling, with opposite assumptions about where authority should sit.

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The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone who moved from India to take an IT role in the Netherlands described the biggest adjustment as speed of trust: within the first month, they were expected to challenge a technical decision made by their manager in front of the team, something that would have felt career-risky at their previous employer in India.

Quora — A separate respondent working in the Netherlands as an Indian professional noted that Dutch colleagues were immediately collaborative on work matters but genuinely difficult to befriend socially, describing Dutch reserve outside the office as one of the more surprising adjustments of the move.

teamblind.com — A new hire in their first month at a large tech employer wrote about feeling uneasy asking basic questions, worried that senior colleagues would judge the questions as too elementary — a dynamic several commenters said was less about the specific company and more about the seniority gap itself, a pattern especially visible in hierarchical offices.

teamblind.com — Someone advising a junior colleague on "surviving" their first weeks at a new company recommended contextualizing every question with what you'd already tried before asking a senior mentor for help — framed as the difference between being seen as resourceful versus simply unprepared.

Conclusion

If you're moving into a Dutch workplace, over-prepare to speak early and often — silence is read as absence of opinion, not humility. If you're moving into an Indian workplace, resist the urge to demand instant autonomy; invest visibly in the relationship with whoever is guiding you, and the structure and trust will follow faster than forcing it would. The honest version I'd tell a friend: in the Netherlands, you're handed a seat at the table on day one and expected to use it; in India, you're shown where the table is and trusted to know that pulling up a chair too early is its own kind of mistake.