The Long Handshake and the Longer Meeting: Saudi Arabia and Belgium on How to Run a Room

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia · 🇧🇪 Belgium

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Riyadh, a meeting can open with twenty minutes of coffee, dates, and inquiries about your family before anyone mentions the agenda, and the agenda item may still not receive a straight answer. In Brussels, the agenda will be circulated in advance, adhered to with Germanic precision, and will nonetheless take three more meetings to actually decide anything, because everyone in the room must first be seen to have had their say. Neither country is being inefficient, by its own lights. Both are simply optimizing for something other than your flight home.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia

🇧🇪 Belgium

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia scores 95 on Hofstede's power-distance index, among the highest in the world, which in practical terms means the org chart is not a suggestion (Hofstede Insights). Decisions travel up the hierarchy and back down again, and a foreign manager who tries to negotiate directly with a mid-level counterpart is not being efficient — they are being ignored, politely, until someone senior is looped in. GASTAT's Q4 2025 labor market data puts the Kingdom's overall unemployment rate at 3.5% and Saudi labor force participation at 49.5%, part of a broader Vision 2030 push to draw more nationals, especially women, into a workforce still dominated by expatriate labor (GASTAT). That demographic mix — a large expatriate workforce reporting into an increasingly assertive Saudi management layer — is precisely where meeting etiquette stops being a courtesy and starts being a job requirement.

The communication style itself is high-context: relationships are established before business is transacted, not alongside it, and forums of expats working in the Kingdom describe entire first meetings spent almost entirely on hospitality and family inquiries, with the actual commercial ask arriving, if at all, near the very end (Expat.com forum, "The work culture in Saudi Arabia"). Criticism, similarly, rarely arrives as criticism. It arrives as a long pause, a change of subject, or a message relayed through a trusted third party — the wasta system that structures so much of Saudi business life functions as both a networking mechanism and an informal feedback channel. A Gulf News op-ed on expat life in the Kingdom describes newcomers gradually learning to read tone and silence rather than words, which is a skill no orientation packet teaches and every long-serving expat eventually picks up anyway.

Belgium

Belgium's power-distance score sits around 65 — lower than Saudi Arabia's, but notably higher than its Dutch and Scandinavian neighbors, which is the country in miniature: more hierarchical than its reputation suggests, more consensus-driven than its formality suggests (Geert Hofstede 6-D Model). The country also runs two distinct meeting cultures under one flag. In Flanders, decisions tend to be worked out collectively, with input solicited from the room before anything is finalized; in Wallonia, the senior person present is more likely to simply decide, French-style, after the discussion has run its course (Global Business Culture; Commisceo Global). A manager who treats the two the same way will misread both.

What unites them is a near-religious devotion to the meeting itself. Belgian business is, by multiple accounts, extremely meeting-heavy, with a preference for face-to-face discussion over email even when email would be faster, and a structure that includes real agendas and real minutes (Global Business Culture). Forum discussion among expats consistently flags the gap between Belgium's reputation for orderliness and the actual experience of decision-making, which can loop through several rounds of "further discussion needed" before landing anywhere (Quora, "What do you most dislike about Belgium work culture?"). The professional-personal boundary is also firmly guarded: overtime is unusual, lunch is not a working hour, and the after-work camaraderie common in Anglo-American offices is, by design, mostly absent (Expatica). One expat blog summed up the adjustment simply as learning that being invited to a meeting is not the same as being invited to a friendship (BCF Career).

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the irony sharpens: Saudi Arabia's meetings look informal — coffee, dates, unhurried starts — but the authority structure underneath is rigid and unambiguous, with one person's word carrying the room. Belgium's meetings look formal — agendas, punctuality, minutes — but the authority underneath is genuinely diffuse, at least in Flanders, requiring buy-in from people whose job titles suggest they shouldn't need to be consulted at all. The newcomer who reads Saudi warmth as informality, or Belgian structure as swift decision-making, will misjudge both rooms in the first fifteen minutes.

The other divergence is what each culture asks you to protect. In Saudi Arabia, you protect the relationship and the hierarchy; a well-placed no said too bluntly can cost you the deal even if your logic was sound. In Belgium, you protect the process and the argument; a well-reasoned position said too forcefully can cost you the room even if your conclusion was right. Neither is more "difficult" than the other — they are simply optimized for different failure modes, and the expat who succeeds in one does not automatically succeed in the other.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com forum — a new arrival in Riyadh described sitting through an entire first meeting without once hearing the client's actual requirements, only realizing weeks later that the request had been embedded, gently, in a story about a previous project.

Gulf News — a longtime expat wrote about being genuinely startled by how much colleagues remembered about their family and personal circumstances months after a single mention, calling it a level of attentiveness no Western office had ever matched.

Expat.com forum — a newcomer to Brussels assumed a Flemish colleague's repeated "that's an interesting point" during a proposal meant agreement, and was blindsided when the plan was quietly reworked from scratch the following week.

Quora — a respondent working in Belgium advised that the fastest way to lose credibility in a meeting is to push for an immediate decision, since Belgian teams treat visible haste as a sign the idea hasn't been thought through.

BCF Career blog — a professional who relocated to Belgium suggested treating the first few months as an observation period, sitting in on meetings purely to learn who actually holds influence versus who simply holds the title.

Conclusion

The practical takeaway is not that one culture is warmer and the other colder, or one slower and the other faster — both are slow, by different mechanisms, for people used to snap decisions. It's that Saudi Arabia asks you to invest in people before you invest in outcomes, while Belgium asks you to invest in process before you invest in relationships, and mistaking one requirement for the other is the single most common way expats stall their own careers in either country.

If a friend asked me which was the harder adjustment, I'd say Belgium, if only because nobody warns you that "very organized" and "takes forever to decide anything" are, infuriatingly, the same sentence.