🇧🇷 Brazil · 🇸🇪 Sweden
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
Sweden has a law — not a written one, but a social one — called Jantelagen, which can be roughly translated as: "Do not think you are better than anyone else." Brazil has a concept called jeitinho brasileiro, which roughly translates as: "There's always a way, if you know the right people." These two cultural operating systems — one built around enforced equality and collective modesty, the other around flexible hierarchy and personal relationship capital — produce corporate environments that are, structurally, almost mirror images of each other, and almost equally confusing to people who arrive from the other.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Invest in personal relationships before pushing for business outcomes — in Brazil, people negotiate with people, not with companies | Rush to the agenda in a meeting; small talk about family, food, weekend plans is not wasted time but the necessary pre-work for any productive professional interaction |
| Respect the formal hierarchy while also reading the informal one — knowing who has the real decision-making authority often means knowing who has the relationship with the decision-maker | Send a cold email to a senior executive expecting a prompt reply; without an introduction from a mutual contact, you are effectively invisible |
| Be flexible about deadlines while maintaining professional standards — the Brazilian attitude toward time is relational rather than contractual | Interpret schedule flexibility as carelessness; Brazilians take their commitments seriously, but the human relationship takes priority over the calendar |
| Show warmth and personal interest in colleagues — complimenting someone's family, asking about a recently mentioned trip, remembering birthdays — these are not HR exercises but genuine social currency | Maintain a purely professional register; the colleague who is friendly but never personal is read as cold and possibly untrustworthy |
| Understand that showing dedication through visible effort and presence is valued — staying late, being responsive, being seen — matters in the Brazilian corporate context | Disappear at 5pm with the efficiency of a Scandinavian; Brazilian managers interpret availability as commitment |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Attend fika — the mid-morning and afternoon coffee-and-cake break is a genuine workplace ritual that functions as an informal meeting and social adhesive; missing it consistently registers as antisocial | Brag about achievements or self-promote aggressively; Jantelagen operates as a genuine social sanction and visible individualism is treated with coolness |
| Expect consensus — Swedish meetings are long and inclusive because everyone's input is genuinely expected, and decisions taken without consultation are viewed with suspicion | Push for fast top-down decisions in a meeting; this is read as either impatience or power-grabbing, both of which sit poorly in Swedish corporate culture |
| Be direct and precise in written communication — Swedes value clarity and brevity in professional exchange | Interpret flat hierarchy as the absence of authority; Swedish managers have real power, they simply exercise it without ceremony |
| Respect the sanctity of personal time — leaving at 5pm, taking parental leave, being unreachable on weekends are professional norms, not signs of disengagement | Email people on weekends expecting a reply; this is considered a boundary violation in most Swedish workplaces |
| Be punctual — arriving late to a meeting is genuinely disrespectful in Swedish professional culture and unlike in Brazil, this is not mediated by warmth | Assume that because Sweden is relaxed about hierarchy it is also relaxed about time; punctuality and structure are core professional values |
Brazilian corporate culture is built on a foundational premise that business is conducted between people, and that people need to know and trust each other before they can conduct business effectively. This premise, which in Northern European cultures might read as inefficiency, is in Brazil simply a recognition of how organisational trust actually functions.
Hofstede scores are instructive: Brazil scores 69 on Power Distance, compared to Sweden's 31. This hierarchy is real and observed — titles matter, seniority is respected, decisions move through formal authority structures — but it is equally mediated by personal connection. The most effective Brazilian corporate operator is not necessarily the person with the highest rank but the person with the most useful network: a phenomenon captured in the concept of jeitinho brasileiro, the creative, relationship-enabled navigation of systems that might otherwise impede progress.
Brazilian meetings reflect this. A meeting in São Paulo will begin with 10 to 15 minutes of genuine social exchange — family updates, weather commentary, anecdotes — before settling into the agenda. Foreign professionals who arrive ready to begin the agenda at the scheduled time will either wait, puzzled, or begin early and miss the actual decision-making, which happens in the warm-up. Brazilian corporate speed is not slow; it is calibrated to a different variable, one in which the relationship between people is the primary driver of outcomes.
Swedish corporate culture operates under Jantelagen — the informal social law discouraging self-aggrandisement, hierarchical display, or the conspicuous assertion of individual superiority. In practice, this produces organisations that are genuinely flat: Swedish managers frequently sit in open-plan offices alongside their teams, introduce themselves by first name, and participate in fika on equal terms with interns. Titles are functionally present but socially minimised.
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The decision-making process reflects this. Swedish meetings are built around the concept of full consultation: every relevant party is expected to contribute, every voice is formally invited, and decisions are not considered legitimate until consensus has been reached. This takes longer than Brazilian top-down decision-making, and the pace can frustrate people from more hierarchical cultures. The payoff is that Swedish decisions, once made, tend to stick — implementation is rapid and unified because everyone was part of the decision.
Fika is not a trivial ritual. Research on Swedish work culture consistently notes that fika functions as the informal meeting space where interpersonal alignment happens — where colleagues update each other, where disagreements are softened before they become formal positions, and where the texture of working relationships is maintained. A foreign professional who skips fika consistently is not simply missing coffee; they are opting out of the primary social infrastructure of the Swedish office.
The deepest difference is about what "getting things done" looks like. In Brazil, things get done through relationships, which means the apparent inefficiency of extended personal small talk is actually the mechanism. In Sweden, things get done through consensus, which means the apparent slowness of inclusive meetings is also the mechanism. In both cases, the person who bypasses the process — who skips the relationship-building in Brazil, who makes unilateral decisions in Sweden — does not move faster. They lose the system's cooperation entirely.
A Brazilian professional in Sweden will be repeatedly surprised by how efficiently a flat consensus process actually runs once it has built its decision. A Swedish professional in Brazil will be repeatedly surprised by how quickly an apparently slow relational culture can move once the relationship has been established.
r/sweden — A Brazilian software developer who relocated to Stockholm described her first Swedish performance review as the most confusing professional experience of her career: "My manager told me I was doing very well and should maybe consider speaking up a bit less in meetings. I had thought speaking up was expected. It took me three months to understand that there is a volume norm, and I had been exceeding it."
Quora — A Swedish consultant who took an assignment in São Paulo described her first month as a sustained exercise in recalibrating her professional clock. "Every meeting started 20 minutes late and ended 30 minutes over. I thought this was disorganisation. It was not. The meeting was the relationship-building. The agenda was the framework. The actual work happened after, between people who now trusted each other."
Internations Brazil — A German executive in a joint venture described discovering that his direct reports in São Paulo had informally reorganised their team in a way that bypassed his instructions — not from insubordination, but because they had established a relationship with a lateral team that made things work better. "In Germany, I would have been furious. In Brazil, I learned to ask: did it work? Yes? Then fine."
The Local Sweden (thelocal.se) — Several international workers reported the same adjustment: the discovery that skipping fika, even occasionally, had a measurable effect on how colleagues related to them. One described it as "the most expensive cup of coffee I was not drinking." The social signal of absence at fika, it turned out, was larger than anticipated.
teamblind.com — A Brazilian product manager at a Swedish multinational described the first time a junior colleague pushed back on a decision in a team meeting — directly, calmly, with data — and no one in the room reacted with discomfort. "In Brazil, that would have been read as insubordination, at minimum. Here it was just... Tuesday."
If you are moving from Brazil to Sweden, prepare for a workplace that looks flat and operates on consensus — which is genuine, not performative, and requires genuine participation. Bring your patience to meetings and your restraint to self-promotion. If you are moving from Sweden to Brazil, invest in relationships before you invest in outcomes. The person you have lunch with three times is worth more than the process document you circulate once.
The honest summary: both cultures produce functional, even excellent, organisations. They simply define "functional" differently, and the definition is not negotiable from the outside.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.