Two Ways to Never Get a Straight Answer: India vs. Turkey

🇮🇳 India · 🇹🇷 Turkey

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In India, a meeting can end with everyone nodding and nothing decided. In Turkey, a meeting can end with everyone agreeing and nothing decided. The two failure modes look similar from the doorway and feel entirely different from the inside — one runs on hierarchy theater, the other on relationship banking — and if you are weighing a move to Bengaluru versus Istanbul, the gap between those two flavors of "yes" is worth more than any salary spreadsheet. Hofstede Insights puts India's Power Distance score at 77 against Turkey's 66, but flips the uncertainty-avoidance numbers almost exactly — India at 40, Turkey at 85 — which is the data's polite way of saying: both places defer to the boss, but only one of them also wants it in writing, notarized, twice.

--- ### Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇳 India

🇹🇷 Turkey

India

India's meeting culture is best understood as a hierarchy display mechanism that occasionally also transmits information. Hofstede's Power Distance score of 77 (world average: 56.5) explains why the senior-most person in the room speaks last, speaks least, and is somehow still the only one whose sentence ends the discussion — subordinates are expected to demonstrate respect through compliance rather than debate, and openly challenging a superior in a group setting reads as destabilizing rather than constructive (Global Business Culture; Cultural Atlas). What trips up newcomers is that this coexists with a genuinely low Uncertainty Avoidance score of 40, meaning Indian colleagues are often far more comfortable than their Turkish counterparts with ambiguous scope, shifting deadlines, and decisions made on the fly — right up until those decisions involve contradicting someone above them.

The volume of meetings is its own phenomenon. On the professional network Blind, one contributor working on a majority-Indian team described colleagues identifying a minor, non-urgent issue and immediately wanting to "hop on a call" rather than resolve it asynchronously, producing a schedule of ten-person meetings with no fixed agenda for questions that needed two people and three minutes. Deloitte's 2025 India GCC Culture Sensing Report found a Culture Index of 82 out of 100, with nearly 95% of organizations reporting strong marks on empowerment and inclusion — so the intent is not dysfunction, exactly; it is a workplace where presence itself functions as a form of currency, and where "let's discuss" is doing the job that "let's decide" would do elsewhere.

Turkey

Turkey inverts the risk profile. Power Distance is lower (66) but Uncertainty Avoidance is dramatically higher (85), and the practical effect is a workplace that wants firm structure and clear rules layered underneath a communication style that almost never delivers a flat refusal. Meetings routinely open with tea and unhurried conversation about family or food — rushing past it reads as impatience, not efficiency (World Business Culture; Commisceo Global) — and the country's business hours run long by OECD standards: Turkey logs roughly 1,855 hours of work per year against an OECD average closer to 1,736-1,765, with an estimated 43% of Turkish employees clocking more than 50 hours a week (OECD Hours Worked database).

The communication itself is high-context. Disagreement is expressed through hesitation, delayed responses, and diplomatic hedging rather than a direct "no" — reading the room, and the pauses, matters more than reading the transcript. This is where the uncertainty-avoidance score earns its keep: because ambiguity makes people uneasy, a lot of energy goes into softening potential conflict before it becomes visible, which paradoxically makes the workplace feel both warmer and harder to get a firm commitment out of.

The Reckoning

Put the two head-to-head and the counterintuitive finding is that India, the higher-hierarchy country on paper, is the one more comfortable improvising once a decision needs to move — while Turkey, the lower-hierarchy country on paper, is the one that wants the structure nailed down before anyone will commit to it out loud. An Indian meeting can produce a decision in the room, reversed twice by lunchtime, with nobody particularly bothered. A Turkish meeting can produce warm consensus in the room and a decision that actually gets made two days later, over tea, in a much smaller group.

The other head-to-head worth flagging: workload. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2024 found global employee engagement slipping from 23% to 21%, with South Asia — India included — still running ahead of that global average even as its own three-year rolling engagement figure dropped three points. Turkey's story is less about engagement scores and more about sheer hours logged, per the OECD data above. Neither country will hand you a shorter week; they'll just make you sit through a different kind of meeting to get there. India does not legally guarantee a minimum amount of annual leave at all, a gap the International Labour Organization has flagged as part of a broader pattern of longer working hours across lower- and middle-income Asian economies.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind — An engineer on a mostly Indian team described the reflex to call an immediate meeting over any spec question, even minor ones, turning what should have been a two-line message into a ten-person calendar block with no agenda; teammates elsewhere on async-first teams, they noted, simply resolved the same issues over chat.

Quora — Someone who'd braced for stiff formality working with Turkish colleagues found the opposite once the relationship was established: tea breaks and genuine check-ins on family and life outside work made the office feel less transactional, and deadlines flexed around real personal circumstances without the resentment that would accompany the same request elsewhere.

Quora — A contributor warned that a Turkish colleague's "I'd be happy to help with that" is not necessarily a commitment; it can just as easily be a polite deflection, and the actual answer arrives, or doesn't, over the following weeks — better to watch for hesitation up front than to bank on the verbal yes.

Blind — A worker described the habit of never saying no to a manager's request, regardless of the hour or day, becoming an unspoken expectation rather than a personal virtue — weekend work went unacknowledged with comp time, and the pattern kept expanding because nobody was willing to be the one who broke it first.

Blind — Someone newly assigned to a team that was roughly 90% Indian colleagues found it considerably more hierarchy-driven than expected, with decisions consistently deferring upward to the most senior person in the room regardless of who actually held the relevant expertise — their advice to future arrivals was to identify that person early and route requests accordingly, rather than wait for the meeting itself to produce an answer.

Conclusion

The practical takeaway is not "which country has worse meetings" — it's which failure mode you can live with. India will test your patience for redundancy: more people in the room than the topic requires, more calls than the decision needs, and a "yes" that means "I heard you" rather than "I agree." Turkey will test your patience for ambiguity of a different sort: a warmer room, a slower path to commitment, and a "no" you have to learn to hear inside a "let's see." Both systems work, by the way — they're just optimized for different things, hierarchy display in one case, relationship insurance in the other, and Hofstede's numbers back up what the forums already knew anecdotally.

If you're choosing between them, choose based on which kind of uncertainty you'd rather manage: India's ambiguity about scope, or Turkey's ambiguity about sincerity. Either way, budget extra time for tea, and do not, under any circumstances, mistake a nod for a decision.