There Is No Such Thing as "Just Colleagues" in Hanoi or Nairobi

🇻🇳 Vietnam · 🇰🇪 Kenya

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Vietnamese has a specific verb for this: "nhậu" — to come together over generous food and beer, often for hours, sometimes ending in spontaneous sidewalk karaoke, with the invitation "đi ăn nhậu tối nay không?" ("shall we go eat and drink tonight?") functioning as one of the more important sentences a foreign colleague can learn to say yes to. Kenya doesn't have a single word for it, but the underlying instinct is nearly identical: colleagues who share food, know each other's family names, and show up for one another outside work aren't going above and beyond — they're doing the actual, expected work of being a colleague. In both countries, declining the invitation isn't a neutral choice. It's a message.

Do's & Don'ts

🇻🇳 Vietnam

🇰🇪 Kenya

Vietnam: Trust Is Earned Over Beer, Not in the Boardroom

Vietnamese business culture treats relationship-building as a prerequisite for real professional trust, not a pleasant supplement to it. Rivermate's cultural guide is direct about this: investing time getting to know colleagues and business partners outside formal meetings — socializing, sharing meals, showing genuine personal interest — contributes significantly, and specifically, to trust that translates into professional outcomes. Vietnam operates as a collectivist society that values group harmony and consensus, and multiple guides note this trust requires time and frequent interaction to build; it isn't a box you check once and move past.

The specific ritual that makes this concrete is nhậu — the extended, often boisterous sessions of shared food and beer, frequently stretching for hours and sometimes drifting into spontaneous sidewalk karaoke, that punctuate Vietnamese social and professional life. After-work gathering spots fill reliably between 5 and 7 pm, and companies themselves often organize social activities explicitly to build team spirit. The concept sits alongside a lighter version of what other Asian business cultures call guanxi — a network of personal connections and obligations that, while less formalized in Vietnam, still meaningfully shapes how professional opportunities move through informal relationships built outside the office.

Kenya: No Real Line Between Colleague and Friend

Kenyan workplace culture, per Commisceo Global and multiple cultural guides, operates without the clean separation between business and personal relationships that many Western newcomers expect to find. Kenyans, as one guide puts it plainly, "do business with those they know and become friends with business associates" — the sequencing runs in both directions simultaneously rather than friendship following professional trust at a careful distance. Sharing meals is the primary mechanism: many Kenyan colleagues socialize specifically over lunch or dinner, and accepting those invitations is treated as a meaningful signal of investment in the relationship, not just a scheduling convenience.

What makes Kenyan workplace social culture distinct is its described genuineness under real pressure — colleagues who share food, know each other's family names, and celebrate wins together create what's characterized as a real form of professional capital, one that specifically "cushions you during hard seasons," per reporting on Nairobi's hustle-culture-adjacent office norms. This isn't purely spontaneous warmth; The Skyline Collection's guide to building a Nairobi social circle explicitly recommends joining community groups, sports clubs, or social networks as a deliberate strategy for newcomers, suggesting Kenyans themselves treat relationship-building as an active practice worth structuring, not something to leave entirely to chance.

The Reckoning

Vietnam and Kenya converge on a shared premise — that professional trust is inseparable from personal relationship — but diverge on ritual. Vietnamese relationship-building centers on a specific, almost ceremonial activity (nhậu) that concentrates bonding into intense, extended sessions. Kenyan relationship-building is more diffuse and continuous, woven into daily lunches, casual conversation, and ongoing small gestures rather than one signature ritual.

Hofstede Insights context helps explain the underlying logic: Vietnam's collectivist, group-harmony-oriented culture rewards the kind of sustained, repeated-interaction trust-building that nhậu sessions provide, since harmony within the group is the primary social currency. Kenya's culture, shaped by extended-family and community-network norms that long predate the modern office, treats the office itself as simply another kinship-adjacent structure — which is why the absence of a business/personal boundary feels less like an exception and more like the default state of any relationship.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone asking how to make friends in Vietnam was advised, above all, to say yes to invitations rather than waiting for a "real" friendship to form first — Vietnamese social bonds were described as forming through repeated shared activity rather than through the deeper one-on-one conversations that build friendship in some Western cultures.

InterNations — A description of the platform's Nairobi-adjacent expat network noted that newcomers who actively joined local events and community groups reported building genuine local friendships far faster than those who relied only on workplace interactions, reinforcing that relationship-building in Kenya rewards visible initiative.

Quora — A respondent describing Vietnamese people as generally very friendly but also traditional and conservative cautioned that friendliness on first meeting shouldn't be mistaken for immediate closeness — genuine trust, they said, builds gradually through repeated interaction, not a single warm exchange.

Quora — Someone new to Ho Chi Minh City looking to connect with other foreigners was pointed toward a well-known expat gathering area locals call the "Street of Foreigners," suggesting that even within a highly relationship-driven culture, newcomers often start by building an initial social circle in parallel with local integration rather than instead of it.

Rivermate — A cultural guide to Vietnamese business practices noted that showing personal interest in a colleague's family and life circumstances isn't read as intrusive the way it might be elsewhere — it's treated as a genuine, expected relationship-building move, and skipping it can come across as coldness rather than professionalism.

Conclusion

If you're moving to Vietnam, learn to say yes to nhậu, and treat those long shared meals as the actual work of building professional trust, not a distraction from it. If you're moving to Kenya, drop the instinct to keep your work relationships at arm's length — accepting a lunch invitation and asking about someone's family isn't overstepping, it's simply how the relationship is supposed to start.

My honest read, over a drink — appropriately: in both places, the people who thrive aren't the ones who work the hardest during office hours. They're the ones who show up afterward, too.