Toronto Will Let You Eat Alone. Singapore Will Not.

🇨🇦 Canada · 🇸🇬 Singapore

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Gallup's latest read on Singapore finds only 14% of employees engaged at work, among the lowest rates it measures anywhere. Statistics Canada's ongoing social-connection tracking finds that more than half of working-age Canadians report feeling lonely at least once a week. Put those two facts next to each other and a certain symmetry emerges: one country has built an office culture almost nobody is obligated to show up for socially, and the other has built one almost nobody can opt out of, and both, by their own numbers, have produced a workforce that would rather be somewhere else. This is the part of the relocation packet that stays unwritten.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇦 Canada

🇸🇬 Singapore

Canada

Canadian office sociability runs on an opt-in model, and the data on what people opt into is unflattering. Almost 40% of Canadians eat lunch at their desks, according to Dalhousie University research reported by CBC News, and the office potluck — while a genuine fixture, complete with BYOB team drinks and a running tab everyone splits — is treated as a nice-to-have rather than an institution. Hofstede Insights scores Canada 72 on individualism, describing a "loosely-knit society" where employees are expected to be self-reliant; nobody is assigning you a lunch buddy, and nobody particularly notices if you never make one.

The consequence shows up in the loneliness numbers. Statistics Canada's Canadian Social Survey and GenWell's parallel Canadian Social Connection tracking both point to a majority of Canadians reporting weekly loneliness, and the OECD's Better Life Index notes a broader, decade-long decline in time spent socializing generally. Meanwhile a 2023 ezCater survey, reported by HRD Canada, found that 64% of employees feel obligated to attend after-work events anyway, 51% have lied or snuck out to avoid one, and 81% would rather employers moved bonding into the workday — ideally, per 87% of respondents, in the form of a free team lunch. Canadians, in other words, have engineered a system where socializing is optional in principle and mildly resented in practice, whichever way you slice it.

Singapore

Singapore inverts the arrangement. Hofstede Insights scores it low on individualism relative to Canada, describing a culture where work occupies a more central place in identity and where group cohesion is prioritized structurally, not just socially. "Guanxi" — trust-based relationship-building — is treated as career infrastructure rather than a personality trait, lunch and kopi runs are where reputations are quietly made, and the annual Dinner & Dance, company-funded and seniority-seated, is closer to a mandatory fixture than an RSVP. Introductions follow hierarchy, and "face" — reputation, dignity, standing — is something colleagues are expected to actively protect for each other, including in how criticism gets delivered: privately, and with tact.

The strain of running an office culture this densely social is now showing up in the engagement data. Gallup's most recent State of the Global Workplace put Singapore engagement at 14%, and a companion Gallup–SID study found workers under 35 disengaging at nearly three times the global generational gap, with only 10% describing themselves as engaged versus 16% of older colleagues. And yet 40% of Singaporean employees rate their lives as "thriving" — above the global average — suggesting people are doing fine personally while quietly checking out of the collective rituals meant to bind them to the office.

The Reckoning

Here is the joke the two countries are playing on each other without realizing it. Canada removes the obligation to socialize and gets an isolation problem; Singapore imposes the obligation and gets a resentment problem. Neither the freedom nor the mandate produces colleagues who particularly want to be at the retirement party. The individualist model assumes people will build connection on their own initiative and mostly finds out, a decade later and by survey, that most people didn't. The collectivist model assumes shared obligation will manufacture belonging and instead manufactures a TikTok genre — Singaporean workers filming their objections to after-hours "mandatory fun" and racking up tens of thousands of views doing it.

The practical difference, for someone relocating, is where the effort has to come from. In Toronto, you will have to generate your own social calendar or simply not have one, and no one will flag it. In Singapore, you will be handed a social calendar you did not write, and skipping it carries a cost measured in reputation rather than loneliness. Both are real costs. They are just billed differently.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — One respondent describing Singaporean work culture called the office a "second home," noting long hours and high stress alongside a caution that colleagues can seem reserved and hard to read at first, warming up only once trust is established over time.

TikTok, via The Independent Singapore — A Singaporean office worker's viral rant against after-hours team bonding argued companies should hold events during paid time or not at all, joking that being asked to spend four hours in an escape room with colleagues felt absurd after spending eight hours a day trying to escape them; another commenter recounted voting "no" to a repeat team-building session on a supposedly anonymous survey, only to see their full name attached to it afterward.

r/singapore, via The Independent Singapore — Responding to a viral comment that local workers were "less hungry" than newer arrivals to the workforce, one Redditor argued that declining to sacrifice family time and health for loyalty rituals isn't a lack of ambition — it's watching a parent do exactly that and get retrenched anyway.

CBC News, First Person — A newcomer to a Canadian workplace described initial anxiety about the informality — first names for managers, constant small talk — before realizing it functioned as an entry point rather than a wall, eventually calling herself "a student of Canada" rather than a permanent outsider to it.

Remitbee, Immigrant Confessions — One contributor recalled mistaking Canadian friendliness for actual closeness, only to discover a real formality underneath the politeness; the advice offered to future arrivals was to enjoy the warmth without assuming it converts to friendship on any particular schedule.

Conclusion

If you are choosing between these two postings on the strength of their social calendars, the honest framing is this: Canada will not make you show up, and Singapore will not let you skip out, and each country's own data suggests that neither approach is making its employees especially content. What should actually drive the decision is which failure mode you can tolerate better — a quiet, self-inflicted isolation you can always blame on yourself for not trying harder, or a fuller, more scripted social calendar that occasionally makes you feel like company property between six and nine p.m.

Pick the one whose bad days you can live with, because both come with bad days. And if anyone tells you the team-building retreat is optional, ask them what happened to the last person who opted out.