Two Ways to Be Told You're Underperforming, Neither of Which Involves Being Told

🇲🇽 Mexico · 🇨🇴 Colombia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Mexico, the average employee logs 2,207 hours a year, more than anyone in the OECD, and still has no clean read on whether the boss is happy. In Colombia, the legal workweek just shrank to 42 hours after a five-year phase-out, and the meeting where you learn how you're doing will likely happen over lunch, somewhere between the small talk and the bill. Neither country runs on the American ritual of a terse, bulleted review with a PDF attached. What they've built instead is subtler and slower — and can leave a newly arrived employee wondering, for months, whether they still have a job.

Do's & Don'ts

🇲🇽 Mexico

🇨🇴 Colombia

Mexico: The Feedback Is in the Subtext

Mexico's power-distance score, in Hofstede's widely cited framework, sits at 81, among the highest worldwide, and nowhere is that clearer than in how criticism travels down an org chart. Feedback functions less as a task audit than a negotiation of status and dignity — delivered too bluntly, it can erode a manager's authority rather than correct an employee. Staff typically learn where they stand by inference: a shifted deadline, a warmer or cooler "buenos días," a lunch invitation that either happens or doesn't.

That indirectness coexists, oddly, with staggering hours: the OECD puts Mexico's average annual working time at 2,207 hours, the longest in the bloc, with 29 percent of workers logging more than 50 hours a week. Long hours plus soft feedback rewards people who can read a room. Formal annual reviews exist at multinationals, but at many domestic employers the review is a conversation that happens when the boss decides, not when HR's calendar says so.

This doesn't mean Mexican managers avoid the subject of poor performance — they avoid the American register for it. The subjunctive mood, an offhand remark, a joke that isn't quite a joke: these are the actual delivery mechanisms, and missing them is how expats discover, six months in, that a minor-seeming problem was serious.

Colombia: Hierarchy With a Human Face

Colombia scores lower than Mexico on power distance (67 versus 81) but higher on indulgence, where Hofstede puts it at a notably high 83. The workplace expression is a style researchers call hierarchical yet paternalistic: bosses who expect deference but also take a personal interest in employees' lives outside the office. Decisions concentrate at the top, and managers rarely seek consensus, treating it as weakness rather than collaboration — but that same manager is often the one asking after your family before the meeting starts.

Colombian labor law just gave this culture a formal nudge. Under Law 2101 of 2021, the statutory workweek stepped down gradually from 48 hours to 44 and finally to 42 as of July 2026, with no cut in pay. It's a modest reform landing in a workplace already ranked among the more engaged in the world by Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report: Latin America and the Caribbean posted 31 percent engagement, matching the US and Canada, with 56 percent of workers reporting they are "thriving."

Where Mexico buries feedback in subtext, Colombia wraps it in ceremony: relationship first, praise rationed because overpraising reads as insincere, criticism cushioned enough that a newcomer can leave unsure whether they were just told to fix something. The upside: a manager who has decided to invest in you will usually say so plainly.

The Reckoning

Side by side, the country working the longest hours in the OECD is not the one with the newly shortened legal workweek — Mexico logs 2,207 hours a year while Colombia has spent five years legislating down to 42 — yet both workforces report comparable engagement and unusually high regional wellbeing, per Gallup. Hours worked predicts almost nothing about how people feel at work; how feedback is delivered, and whether it preserves dignity, seems to matter more.

The sharper contrast is procedural. Mexico's feedback is personal and undocumented — you learn from tone and proximity to your boss. Colombia's is personal but more ceremonial — you learn from a lunch invitation and the cushioning around a critique. An employee from a direct-feedback culture will misread both as evasiveness. It isn't. It's a different theory of feedback: not efficient information transfer, but maintenance of a relationship built to last.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com forum, Mexico — a longtime foreign resident who ran a small business described the local pace as fundamentally about patience: deadlines and payments arrive when they arrive, and pushing against that rhythm causes more friction than accepting it.

InterExchange blog, Mexico City — a nonprofit volunteer assumed the office would resemble a US workplace and was wrong within months; used to straightforward feedback, they found the indirectness frustrating, and reading between the lines became a survival skill.

Quora, Colombia — a respondent noted colleagues routinely stayed past the workday's end to finish what they'd started, and meetings happened over breakfast or lunch as often as at a desk, with personal rapport treated as a prerequisite for being taken seriously.

mejiaj Substack, Colombia — the author described office hours as nominally longer than the American 9-to-5, but paradoxically loose in practice: a full calendar of holidays, tolerance for arriving or leaving fifteen minutes off schedule, and long stretches spent on non-work conversation.

Expat.com forum, Mexico — a second poster who had employed staff directly flagged the Christmas bonus (aguinaldo) and severance protections as non-negotiable legal obligations that caught him off guard — facts he argued every new employee should confirm in writing before their first payday.

Conclusion

If there's one thing worth knowing before signing a contract in either country, it's this: neither culture will hand you a scored rubric, and both find it slightly rude if you ask for one too soon. The difference is where the signal lives. In Mexico, it lives in the relationship with your direct manager — invest there, and the subtext becomes legible. In Colombia, it lives partly in the relationship and partly in the room: who's at the lunch, who's asking about your weekend, who bothered to soften the criticism. Get fluent in either language, and the long hours and absent review deck stop feeling like chaos and start feeling like a system optimized for something other than paperwork.

If a friend asked which one to pick, I'd say: choose Mexico if you can sit with ambiguity for six months before you're sure where you stand, and choose Colombia if you'd rather have that ambiguity delivered warmly, over a second cup of coffee, by someone who already knows your kids' names.