🇦🇺 Australia · 🇳🇱 Netherlands
By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
The Scanlon Foundation's 2025 Mapping Social Cohesion report found that 80 percent of Australians believe their neighbours help each other and get along well. Across the North Sea, Statistics Netherlands calculated that 30 percent of the Dutch feel at least somewhat lonely — yet the Netherlands has a national anti-loneliness strategy, while Australia does not. This is not a paradox so much as a window into two countries that have made the same general decision — to bond over drinks on a Friday afternoon — and arrived at profoundly different cultural philosophies about what, exactly, one is supposed to say once the glass is in hand.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Show up to the Friday arvo drinks, even briefly — presence is the message | Skip team barbecues repeatedly without explanation; absence is noticed and remembered |
| Call your manager by their first name and match their casual register | Open with your job title or LinkedIn credentials as a conversation starter |
| Praise others when you succeed; keep your own wins understated | Dominate the conversation with your accomplishments — tall poppy syndrome is real and enforced |
| Join in the banter; self-deprecating humour reads as confidence, not weakness | Take offence at directness — "no worries, mate" is a compliment, not a brush-off |
| Accept the invite to the barbie even if you only stay an hour | Treat the social event as optional networking — it is a loyalty test in casual clothing |
| Bring a plate or a six-pack if invited to a home gathering | Arrive empty-handed; contributing to the communal spread is a social baseline |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Attend the vrijdagmiddagborrel — it signals you are part of the team | Leave without saying goodbye; a proper round of farewells is obligatory |
| Decline an invitation directly and give a real reason — "I have dinner at 7" is entirely acceptable | Vague out with "maybe" or "let's see" — the Dutch treat ambiguity as rudeness |
| Make eye contact, keep plans concrete, and confirm times explicitly | Try to pop in unannounced; the Dutch calendar is maintained with surgical precision |
| Accept that deep friendships take longer to form and treat colleagues as colleagues first | Interpret friendliness at the borrel as an invitation into someone's personal life |
| Order a small beer (pils) or jenever at the borrel; eat the bitterballen | Refuse to participate in the communal snack ritual — gezelligheid requires physical presence in the moment |
| Be direct about disagreements; Dutch directness is a sign of respect, not aggression | Read bluntness as hostility — it is the highest form of Dutch social trust |
Australians are, on paper, among the most individualistic people on earth. Hofstede gives Australia a score of 90 on the individualism index — higher than the United States, higher than the United Kingdom, comfortably in the top tier of countries that consider self-reliance a civic virtue. One would expect this to produce a nation of atomised professionals who eat lunch at their desks and regard team-building as a form of psychological aggression. One would be wrong.
The mechanism that reconciles Australian individualism with Australian sociability is called mateship, and it is essentially an unwritten social contract that says: yes, you are your own person, and yes, you will also come to the barbecue. Rooted in the mythology of the colonial frontier and reinforced through two world wars, mateship functions as the cultural software that runs on top of the individualist hardware. It places enormous weight on loyalty, equality — no one is better than anyone else, hence the "tall poppy syndrome" that punishes conspicuous success — and on the ritual of showing up. The Friday arvo drink, the team barbie, the knock-off beers: these are not optional leisure activities so much as loyalty tests conducted in a low-key register. Declining too often is noticed. Showing up, even briefly, is logged.
The 2025 Scanlon data bears this out in the aggregate. Fifty-four percent of Australians are actively involved in social, community, or civic groups. Seventy-nine percent describe themselves as happy or very happy. These are respectable numbers, though the picture has some texture: the proportion of millennials reporting a "great" sense of belonging has fallen from 64 percent in the 2010s to 34 percent today, a decline the researchers attribute in part to rising housing costs and social isolation among younger renters. The barbie is, apparently, less persuasive when you cannot afford the suburb in which it is being held.
In the workplace specifically, Australian bonding culture is characterised by studied informality. Hierarchy exists — Australia scores 61 on Hofstede's masculinity index, reflecting a competitive, achievement-oriented undercurrent — but it is expected to dissolve at the drinks table. The boss gets a nickname. The title stays in the meeting room. Direct communication is a value, not a preference: Australians are trained from childhood to say what they mean, or at least to say it with enough understatement that the meaning can be inferred. Newcomers from more hierarchical cultures sometimes mistake Australian directness for rudeness. It is, in fact, a compliment — an invitation to be treated as an equal rather than a subordinate.
The Netherlands scores 14 on Hofstede's masculinity index. Fourteen. For context, this places the Dutch at the feminine extreme of the spectrum, in a cluster of Nordic countries that systematically prioritise quality of life, work-life balance, and cooperative relationships over competitive achievement. The Dutch are not, in short, trying to win the team bonding game. They are trying to survive it with their schedule intact.
The signature social institution is the borrel: a gathering of colleagues or friends in a bar or office common room, typically mid-to-late Friday afternoon, featuring small glasses of beer or jenever, a rotating tray of bitterballen, and conversation that researchers have described as the "transition from agenda mode to human mode." The vrijdagmiddagborrel — the Friday afternoon borrel — is embedded in Dutch working culture with the same weight that the Friday arvo drink carries in Australia. The key difference is conceptual. Where the Australian version is about maintaining the fiction that everyone is equally casual and that the office hierarchy does not really exist, the Dutch version is about gezelligheid — a word that resists translation but broadly signifies warmth, cosiness, togetherness, and the satisfaction of being in a pleasant place with agreeable people. For 93 percent of survey respondents cited in research on borrelen culture, the social atmosphere matters more than the alcohol. This is the Dutch approach to bonding: therapeutic, scheduled, and remarkably sober in its intentions even when it is not sober in its execution.
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What the Dutch do not do, by and large, is blur the line between work and personal life in the way Australians tend to regard as natural. A Dutch colleague who declines the borrel is not staging a quiet revolt; they have a dinner reservation at 7 PM and have said so plainly. Dutch directness — "doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg," meaning roughly "just act normal, that's eccentric enough" — makes the refusal itself a social act rather than an absence. You do not have to show up; you have to say, directly, that you are not showing up. The social obligation is discharged through communication rather than presence.
Place an Australian expat in Amsterdam and a Dutch expat in Sydney, and you get the same complaint from opposite directions. The Australian finds the Dutch friendly but contained: warm at the borrel, politely unavailable at weekends, harder to read than the banter suggests. "Making friends hasn't been easy," reported one Australian living in the Netherlands in a widely-cited expat forum exchange. "My social circle is mostly colleagues spread across Europe rather than local connections." The Dutch expat in Sydney, meanwhile, finds the friendliness impossible to calibrate — everyone says "how are ya" and seems to mean it, but the follow-through, the actual commitment to plans, can be elusive. Australian warmth, they note, is ambient rather than targeted.
What both observations are describing, without quite naming it, is the difference between a high-context bonding culture (Australia, where showing up to the barbie is itself the message, and the conversation is secondary) and a structured bonding culture (Netherlands, where gezelligheid is the goal and the borrel is the vehicle, but the event has a start time, an end time, and does not metastasize into your personal calendar without permission). Australia bonds through ritual presence. The Netherlands bonds through ritual honesty. Both systems work. Both systems produce, at statistical scale, fairly happy people who feel reasonably well connected to their communities. They simply disagree, fundamentally, about whether social warmth should feel like a standing invitation or a confirmed appointment.
r/expats — Moved to Melbourne from Germany three years ago. The first month I turned down every after-work drinks invite because I didn't think it was mandatory. By month two, my manager sat me down for a "culture chat." Nobody ever said the barbecue was compulsory. Everybody knew it was compulsory.
Quora — Dutch colleagues are warm to you at work and perfectly friendly in the corridors. What I wasn't prepared for was that this warmth does not automatically translate into a social invitation. After eight months in Amsterdam I realised I had confused professional friendliness with the beginning of a friendship. They are not the same thing here. They are separated by about two years and a specific act of deliberate invitation.
r/Netherlands — The borrel is genuinely pleasant once you understand the rules. The confusion for me as an American was that it ends. At 7 PM everyone just leaves. There is no gravitational pull toward a second venue. At first I thought I had offended someone. I had not. They had dinner reservations.
Internations Amsterdam — In Sydney, I was invited to three different barbecues in my first week. By week four, the plans had rescheduled twice and the third host had forgotten I was coming. I eventually worked out that the invitation is the gesture; the event is optional. Once I understood that, I stopped feeling rejected and started showing up whenever something did actually happen. That's when people started treating me like I belonged.
DutchReview — The key to the Netherlands is the sports club or the hobby group, not the office. My Dutch friends didn't come from work. They came from a cycling club I joined after six months. The Dutch have their school friends from age eight. They're not unwelcoming — they just already have a full roster. You need a side door.
If you are moving to Australia, the core requirement is simple: show up. The barbecue, the Friday drinks, the team lunch — these are not social accessories but load-bearing structures of belonging. You do not need to perform enthusiasm. You need to be present, accept a drink, and demonstrate that you consider yourself a participant rather than a guest. The rest — the banter, the nicknames, the easy informality — will follow, faster than you expect, provided you keep showing up.
If you are moving to the Netherlands, the core requirement is different: be legible. Confirm plans. State your availability plainly. Attend the borrel on Fridays, eat a bitterballen, and don't expect your colleagues to become your closest friends within the first year. They are not being cold. They are being Dutch, which is to say they are operating a social system that runs on directness, punctuality, and the calm understanding that gezelligheid is a quality to be cultivated over time, not performed on demand.
Both countries will, eventually, make you feel like you belong. Australia will do it in three months and you'll wonder why it felt so effortless. The Netherlands will do it in three years and you'll feel you genuinely earned it. Which you did, in fact — you just had to wait for a confirmed appointment.
Sources: Scanlon Foundation Mapping Social Cohesion 2025; CBS Netherlands Loneliness Statistics 2024; Hofstede Insights; OECD Social Connections and Loneliness in OECD Countries 2025; DutchReview; ExpatsBlog; Quora expat community discussions; StuffDutchPeopleLike; FinGlobal; Pararius Expat Guide; Matador Network.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.