CULTURE SHOCKS working in the Netherlands as an American!

hi everyone my name is Ava and I'm an American living in the Netherlands and today I wanted to talk to you about what it is like working here in the Netherlands as an American of course because let me tell you all of those cultural differences that I like to talk about on this channel well they come out at work so if you are an international and you're looking to move to the Netherlands or you're International working the Netherlands there's some stuff we should talk about and if you are Dutch I hope you enjoy what the work culture is like from the perspective of someone who is not Dutch or wasn't born in the Netherlands with that said first a little bit of a background on to what my job experience has been since I moved here so I've had two full-time jobs since I've moved uh from the US to the Netherlands the first job that I've had was at an American company essentially an international company but mostly with Americans and it was based in Netherlands but again I would call it an American company so that was my first job and then afterwards my current job that I've been at for 3 years is at a Dutch University and while universities tend to be International let me promise you that this is very much a Dutch working environment that I am in we speak Dutch at work we follow a lot of the Dutch cultural norms Etc so with that said let us get into those cultural differences starting with the Dutch work week so I'm American in America The Stereotype and also what I've seen is that it's a little less 9 to5 and a little more nine to burning the midnight oil or however long you can work working on the weekends Etc the Dutch work week is a little different than that so I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about things you might already know but did you know that the Netherlands has the shortest working hours in all of the EU Dutch people I tell this to don't believe me but there are the numbers to prove it according to the recent numbers available the average work week in the Netherlands is only 33.2 hours long 33.2 is shockingly little I was surprised to see those numbers myself okay but if you are Dutch you are probably going to guess what is coming next and that is that if you zoom into the data and look at it by males and females you will see a different picture emerge so let us look at the males if you look at the males here in the Netherlands you will see that they work an average of 37.4 hours per week now that is still the lowest in the EU but that is not quite the 33.2 that I was talking about earlier now if you go and look at the female work week then that's when you see that the numbers are quite low the average woman or the average work week for Dutch woman woman in Netherlands is 28.5 hours per week that is 3 and 1/2 days that sounds kind of nice but if you look at the discrepancies between males and females even though both of these groups work the least number of hours here in the EU that is a big difference so I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about this problem because it is quite complicated and Dutch Society is trying to combat it or try to figure out what it is that causes the discrepancy between the male and female working hours so I'm not going to go into it but the reason I wanted to bring this up is because I think in general the Netherlands is moving towards a 4-day work week they may not know it yet but this has just been my experience also in terms of the new jobs that are put out I have seen time and time again now I think more than when I started looking even four years ago that they're just an increasing number of jobs that are available for a maximum of four days a week so 80% I didn't even know what this meant when I moved here I would see jobs like actual you know jobs that you needed a PhD for or a lot of training and I would see that they were available for um 32 hours per week and I just did not understand what that meant or the0 comma 8 FTE I was like I don't I don't know what that means like I'm am one person so one person one job that's kind of the mindset that I had but I've seen so many vacancies where 4 days is sort of the maximum number of days that you can work during the week so your salary also reflects that so I will say on the one hand it is great to be able to work 4 days and you do I think get paid enough to sustain yourself but it is something that I grapple with because what if I just wanted to work more like I said I work full-time so I work one FTE but maybe it's just my field but I've been seeing more and more jobs that are 4 days a week but that said you can totally just have a perfectly great career working four days a week you could be the director working 4 days a week you could be a doctor working four days a week so that in itself is not an issue but I think it's it's not quite the norm yet it's just more and more of what I've been seeing so that's my personal experience the other phenomenon that is really interesting that has to do with the Dutch work week is the fact that Dutch people seem to only go into work especially after covid on just Tuesdays and Thursdays like the whole country came together and just decided oh we're going to go to work only on these two very specific days and the reasoning goes something like this I think people have told me that on Wednesdays like kids are let out of school early or something like that so people tend to stay at home on Wednesdays work from home on Wednesdays or just take Wednesdays off Fridays well that's the day I think people who typically work four days take off as well and for people who work full-time it's sort of well it's almost weekend so I'm not going to go into work that day so people don't really go into work on Fridays and then Mondays I don't know people just don't like Mondays here in the Netherlands or anywhere so people decide to not go into work on Mondays anyway so then you end up with people crowding the trains crowding the roads just really packing up the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays and it is a pretty funny phenomenon to absorb now the next thing I want to talk about is work life separation note that I didn't say work life balance that exists as well but I'm talking about work life separation now D people will go into work and they are very much in work mode they it's almost as if they've just agreed that nothing fun is going to happen during their workday they're going to sit down at their desk and they're going to work they will take breaks from meetings and you know Dutch people drink a lot lot of coffee so they will make an exception for coffee like really they just drink coffee all day long I thought Americans drank a lot of coffee and then I came here and was like wa they drink a lot of coffee here so they'll take coffee breaks but a lunch break absolutely not they will sit at their desk eat their boater H hum their sandwich in front of their computer and just keep working from the moment they came in so that they could leave work on time and actually start their life part of their day I mean coming from the US I kind of assume that people in Europe took lunch breaks so I fully expected when I started my job at this University that people would you know take some time for lunch and sit down and eat together but that was just not the case so there's a little bit of expectation versus reality here but oh my God let me tell you Dutch people will leave work at 5:00 at work 4:30 p.m. the office is full and then 5:30 p.m. it is totally deserted like almost nobody is in the office after 5:00 p.m. and this is also a really funny thing to observe that people are just working as if they're sprinting towards the end of the day not a marathon just a Sprint and then when the clock hits 5 everyone just packs up and like oh time to go and they stop abruptly like they will drop everything and just leave the other thing related to this is Dutch people have colleagues not friends at work if you came to the Netherlands and expected to make Dutch friends through work I have bad news for you that ain't going to happen Dutch people just treat work as as work and then they have their private life D people will do the work at work will'll have their colleagues at work they'll be collegial and you will have nice conversations with them but then they'll end their workday and then just go home to their real friends I mean of course there's some exceptions to this but for instance I in the beginning wanted to hang out and do fun things after work but I noticed pretty quickly that other than planned work events it was basically impossible to you know get to know people a bit more and go hang out with them outside of work because everyone just wanted to end their work day at 5:00 so that they could go home and cook potatoes or like go to one of their after workor Hobbies I don't know what dut people do after work because I have a limited amount of Dutch friends I will say I have made a friend or two through work and they're Dutch but again this is the exception not the norm I mean even the work drinks in the Netherlands they often start at 400 p.m. so that by the time dinner time rolls around you can go home and be with your family friends and just move on with your lives but as you can probably reason there is a huge positive side to this work life separation and one of those is the emails between the hours of I don't know 6:30 p.m. to the next day 7:30 a.m. you will see hardly any emails in your inbox like I just don't think anyone in the Netherlands is sending out work emails at those times now maybe if you work in finance or consulting or a high pressure lots of hours job like that it might be a bit different but I think the norm here is pretty pretty much that after work hours people just go do other stuff so they're really not checking their email they're really not responding and that was a bit different when I uh started this job which was during covid because people were at home all the time there wasn't a lot of social stuff going on but I noticed pretty quickly that as we came out of it between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. I will say like categorically there are no emails so then I don't have to be worried about missing something while I'm asleep you know which believe you me does happen outside of the Netherlands and then there are the weekends my weekends are actually weekends on Monday morning after having done my workday on Friday on Monday morning when I open my inbox it's not flooded with emails from the weekend which again happened to me in the US all the time this was standard people would fully expect you to do work over the weekend but here that is just not the case I open my email Monday morning and guess what they are no emails yet because nobody was working over the weekend okay now the third thing I want to talk about is office culture I did kind of go into it a little bit but there's some aspects that I want to highlight and the first aspect I want to highlight is hierarchy American Society at work is very hierarchical um in the Netherlands that is less so I'm not saying that work hierarchy doesn't exist it does but I would say in general people treat each other like people it seems like this should be something they do everywhere but I feel like that's always the case so I'm going to mention that here but what I mean by less hierarchical is that for instance you can give input to people regardless of what their role is within the organization that you work in so if you as a I don't know individual contributor want to give uh input feedback to the director you may now it may not be as easy because there is some kind of hierarchy but not so much that this would be inconceivable now I a couple of years ago when I was looking for the next step of my career here in the Netherland went through career coaching because I just was coming out of Academia and I didn't I needed help with a lot of things so I did career coaching and it was this Dutch woman who was leading it and she told me Ava listen I don't know what things are like in America but here in the Netherlands you need to give input and feedback to your manager if you feel that that's important no one is above anyone here we are all working together towards the same goal and then she says for instance there was this video of Mark rut when he was prime minister that went viral where he spilled coffee and he was just cleaning it up and she said the world took notice but to us that is normal now I think now that I've been in the Netherlands for a few years okay people definitely like think oh that was nice that he did that but I have to say that I definitely see what she means that it's not something that would necessarily go viral here in the Netherlands because he just you know he spilled coffee like of course he should clean it up that's the Dutch mindset whereas the world was shocked okay now let's talk about meetings for a second Dutch people love meetings I feel like why haven't I heard of a societ in this world where people go hey let's tackle this via email that does not happen in the Netherlands either but what is interesting about Dutch meetings is that apparently the Dutch at some point came up with this poer model where everyone could then contribute their opinion and you sort of like come up with a consensus in these meetings and and then that's how you get a decision on something now that hasn't necessarily been my personal experience I do think everyone's opinion is valued but I think what I really noticed in meetings was that oh my God Dutch people do not hold back their opinion they will tell you exactly what they think not just of the topic but of you in the meeting I mean and of course like you want to try and be tactful in things and like when people actually start expressing their opinion it gets ugly but I remember the first couple of months that I sat in these meetings I would just after these meetings go to my wife and be like this just happened is that is that normal like should I be worried should I like HR know cuz I was horrified and I think maybe those particular months were a bit extreme but after that I've also noticed that people are very comfortable just you know expressing their opinion very directly and I think maybe because of that directness to me it sounds rude and now I'm used to it so maybe that was also the change in the months that you know followed but I think because of how direct things were I thought people were being rude or fighting even but I think I've gotten used to the Dutch directness at work and I try to be more direct myself myself because people just Express their opinion and then you can be done with the meeting sooner and then you can just get through the rest of the day so that you can end your work day at 5: and then you can go and cook potatoes at home okay final thing about office culture here in the Netherlands is that if it's your birthday you have to bring cake people will be very upset if you don't bring cake to work okay and finally I wanted to end this video talking about benefits the benefits of working in the Netherlands now I don't want to spend too much time on things like vacation days we get a lot of vacation days here like a ridiculous amount and on top of that you get things like development days that you can also take you just get a lot of time off and you have flexible working hours people don't work full-time I think comparatively there is a lot of free time and there is a work life balance here in the Netherlands but that aside I wanted to spend a moment on getting sick because when I first moved to the Netherlands I did not understand how the system worked at the first company I worked at here in the Netherlands because it was International with also very many Americans we sort of retained half of the American culture there and one of the things I didn't know how to tackle or deal with was getting sick because if I was sick I would still continue working and that was fine but when I started working at this Dutch University with Dutch people I noticed pretty quickly that people were comfortable taking time off when they were sick I'm saying this now and it just seems so matter of fact like if you're sick you should take time off to recover and then come back to work when you're totally fresh and actually useful but that was just not my mindset when I joined so I had no idea how to go about doing this because in America you have something called sick days now here I think I mentioned this to my manager once and she was like what's a sick day she was like if you're sick you're sick just take the day off recover let me know when you're better and like I'll just put it in the system like that's all she wanted from me but I felt so guilty for being sick and I didn't get over this guilt until maybe I would say a year and a half almost 2 years into the job so only recently I've been comfortable taking time off for being sick but that's because in America when you have those sick days you can just trade a day your time to be sick whereas here you can just be sick and I love that because you know I feel like days should be reserved for vacation and something you can plan whereas being sick you can't plan that you can't plan when you're going to get sick and for how long that's the other thing if you have a long-term illness I think up to 2 years you are just protected by law and of course at some point uh you only get partially paid but still it is a good chunk of your income so those were some of my experiences working in the Netherlands as an American I'm curious to hear about your experiences as well and if something stood out to you if you think I left something out feel free to let me know in the comments down below I love reading them and until next time

Channel: Dutch Americano

Views: 93,307

Keywords: Netherlands lifestyle, working in the netherlands, moving to Amsterdam, working in Amsterdam, work culture Netherlands, life in the Netherlands, lifestyle in the Netherlands, Dutch lifestyle, European work culture, Dutch work culture, expat in the Netherlands, moving to the netherlands

Id: JhPBkM3igDg

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024