The Dutch Have a Legal Right to Ask for Remote Work. Indian Companies Are Legally Free to Say No — And Increasingly Do.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

More than half of the Dutch workforce works from home some or all of the time, backed since 2016 by a Flexible Working Act that lets any employee at a company of 10-plus people formally request remote work after six months on the job. In India, 12.7 percent of full-time employees work fully remote and 28.2 percent are hybrid, according to 2023 data — respectable numbers, except the trend line is now bending backward, with major employers steadily tightening attendance mandates in the name of "culture" and "collaboration." The Dutch legislated a right to ask. Indian firms are increasingly legislating, informally, a right to say no.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇮🇳 India

Netherlands: Flexibility as Codified Default

Dutch remote work culture is unusual in having been substantially legislated rather than left to employer discretion. The Flexible Working Act, added to the Working Conditions Act in 2016, gives eligible employees a formal right to request changes to hours, location, or schedule — a request employers can still deny, notably, since a stronger 2023 bill that would have obliged employers to accept remote work requests was rejected by the Senate. What resulted is a middle path: not a guaranteed right to work from home, but a structured, normalized process for asking, embedded in law rather than dependent on individual manager goodwill.

In practice, hybrid — not fully remote — is the dominant pattern, typically two to three office days a week, and the numbers back a broadly positive read: over half the Dutch workforce works from home at least some of the time, and independent surveys cited by expat resources found 60 percent of hybrid workers reporting a productivity boost and 79 percent reporting improved work-life balance. Fully remote roles exist but remain less common than in the US or UK, reflecting the Netherlands' preference, per Hofstede's lower masculinity and power-distance scores, for negotiated, consensus-based flexibility over blanket policy in either direction.

India: A Post-Pandemic Reversal in Progress

India's remote work story runs in the opposite direction. The pandemic pushed rapid, genuine adoption, especially in the IT and ITES sector, which per multiple 2023-24 reports remains the clear leader in remote-friendly job postings. But "India Inc," as one industry report puts it, has been steadily pulling people back to offices since, with employers across sectors explicitly arguing that physical presence matters for productivity, culture, and collaboration — and attendance mandates getting measurably stricter as a result, even as roughly a third of employees remain hybrid or fully remote in current data.

The underlying dynamic is proximity bias, well documented in workplace research: employees physically present near leadership are more likely to be considered for promotions, key projects, and informal mentorship, a pattern India's more hierarchical, high-context workplace culture arguably amplifies relative to flatter cultures. The result is a genuinely fragmented landscape — IT firms and startups often retain real flexibility, while more traditional and hierarchical companies have reasserted in-office expectations more aggressively than their Western counterparts did.

The Reckoning

The irony worth sitting with: the Netherlands, culturally comfortable with negotiation and consensus, chose to legislate a formal process rather than leave remote work purely to individual company culture — a rules-based solution to what could have been left informal. India, culturally more deferential to hierarchy and more likely to formalize process in other domains, has left remote work policy almost entirely to individual employer discretion, producing wide, unpredictable variation between one company and the next.

The second divergence is trajectory. Dutch remote work adoption has been broadly stable and gradually normalized since 2016. Indian remote work adoption spiked hard during the pandemic and is now visibly receding at many large employers — meaning a job offer's remote policy today may look quite different from what a company advertised even eighteen months ago. Anyone weighing an India-based role should treat the current policy as a snapshot, not a guarantee.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A software engineer who moved from an Indian firm to a Dutch tech company wrote that the biggest adjustment wasn't the hybrid schedule itself, but the total absence of any implicit pressure to be visibly present — no one tracked who was in the office on a given day, a level of trust that took months to actually believe was real.

r/india — An IT professional described watching their previously remote-friendly company reverse course over eighteen months, tightening attendance requirements one internal memo at a time, until "hybrid" quietly came to mean five days in the office with one grudging exception per month.

Internations — A Dutch expat working in Bangalore observed that despite India's large and visible remote-work-friendly tech sector, the specific company they joined expected daily office presence for anyone hoping to be considered for promotion, a contrast to the Netherlands that no recruiter had mentioned during hiring.

DutchReview — A contributor covering hybrid work culture noted that new arrivals in the Netherlands often over-prepare for a fully remote job market that doesn't really exist there, since hybrid with two to three office days remains the practical norm even at companies that market themselves as flexible.

Quora — An Indian professional who'd worked remotely for a European company before joining a domestic Indian firm said the hardest recalibration was realizing that logging good remote output wasn't enough — informal trust and next-project consideration still ran through who showed up physically, proximity bias in action even when nobody called it that.

Conclusion

If you're moving from the Netherlands to India, don't assume the flexible-work reputation of India's tech sector applies to your specific employer — verify current policy directly, since the national trend is actively tightening. If you're moving from India to the Netherlands, expect a genuinely codified, negotiable process rather than a single company's mood on any given quarter — the law gives you a real, if not absolute, seat at that table.

My honest advice, over a drink: in the Netherlands, trust the system — it's more stable than it looks. In India, trust the specific company's current policy over anything the sector's reputation tells you, because that reputation is currently in the middle of changing.