Is Being Late Rude? Cultures Disagree on What Time Is and How to Use It

Do you ever feel like people are too blunt – or not direct enough? Do you live by the clock, or are you free with your schedule? Do you like to cut to the chase and get to work, or do you need to warm up first? These are not just individual preferences – they are cultural norms. In this episode, I explore why we are the way we are, and what happens when different cultures collide.

Read the article. 

The Culture Map 

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I’m your host, Sarah Mikutel, a communication and mindset coach. My work is about helping people like you share your voice, strengthen your relationships, and have more fun.

As an American expat living in the U.K., I value curiosity, courage, and joy. A few things I love: wandering European streets in search of the best vegetarian meal, practicing Italian, and helping my clients design lives that feel rich and meaningful.

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Transcript

Your culture impacts how you think about time

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I would love to go to Mexico with you, my German friend said, but spending two weeks there is not enough time. What I'm thinking, not enough time. While I haven't lived in the US in many years, spending two weeks anywhere still feels like a luxury. To many Americans, nearly 50% of whom don't use all their vacation days. And I think I read some crazy stat once that a quarter don't use any vacation days. I'm not 100% sure on that, but one thing that is true is that Americans take way less vacation than Europeans do. So to many Americans, the idea of spending two weeks anywhere might still sound ludicrous. For me though, a 12-hour flight to Mexico City from the UK feels worth it. So I am headed there in a few days to eat all the tacos and to see my friend, of course. And last year my aunt and uncle flew from the US to Australia for a wedding and they only stayed for a week. But for a lot of Europeans I know, that would be unthinkable. I am fascinated by how our perceptions of time are shaped by our culture and our families and our own personal wiring. And I love talking about this with clients because understanding these nuances, these cultural nuances, helps us reduce miscommunication and our irritation with one another so we can enjoy better relationships. And this is especially important at work when you might be dealing with teams all over the world. How we think about time shapes how we speak, how we build trust, and how we show respect to another person. A Mexican friend living in Switzerland was rolling his eyes in a friendly way as he was telling me about his weekend plans. So he lives in Switzerland and he said, My Swiss neighbors are coming over for lunch. They will ring our bell at 11.59 and 30 seconds, and then they will leave promptly at 2.59. In Mexico, it is normal, if not expected, to show up an hour late for a party. There is a collective agreement that the invite says one time and you show up later. Whereas in the US, and definitely in Switzerland it sounds like, if an invite says 7 p.m., you show up at 7 p.m. Anthropologist Edward Hall described the US and countries like Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the UK as monochronic cultures. This means that in our minds, punctuality signals respect and professionalism. And showing up late signals incompetence. So for us, time is a commodity. You spend it, you save it, you invest it, you waste it. And we're constantly saying, I don't have time. In Mexico, where my friend is from, much of Latin America, the Middle East, parts of Africa, South Asia, these are polychronic places. These cultures treat time more fluidly. It's not that polychronic people are always choosing to be late. It's that relationships take priority over schedules. And being late is just not as big of a deal. You might run into your neighbor and chat for a few minutes, and then your mom calls and you don't want to cut her off. And then somebody walks into your shop and wants to talk. And the cultural norm is not to ruthlessly protect your schedule and your time against these moments. Whereas in the US, Germany, Switzerland, we perform a kind of constant triage, like, sorry, I've got to run, I'm in, I've got to go meet somebody. And for us, that's normal. We have scheduled obligations that we want to respect. And when I say scheduled obligations, that sounds kind of rigid and formal. But those scheduled obligations involve people and we don't want to leave them waiting. Whereas in a place like Mexico, that kind of cutoff can feel rude. So one culture prioritizes people by honoring the schedule, and the other prioritizes people by honoring what is happening right now. A lot of this is context-dependent, of course. If someone from Latin America has a flight to Germany, chances are they're going to show up for their scheduled departure. A birthday party? No. My Mexican friend told me about the concept of aurita. That's A-H-O-R-I-T-A. And aurita technically means right now, but in reality it means anywhere from right now to a year from now, and maybe never. And this is really confusing for a foreign manager who might be asking when a project is going to happen. So my friend said, the Mexican not wanting to say, Hey, I can't work on this right now because I'm finishing other things. Instead, he'll say, I started working on it, ahorita. Meaning, I will get to this when I'm done with my other work. But then a few days later, my friend said, When the manager checks in, the Mexican worker might say, Oh yeah, no worries, I will start working on it. Aurita. And the manager might start to think, okay, this guy is just bullshitting me. And I'm quoting my friend here. So aurita is intentionally flexible and relational. It's not time-bound. And it can be used to avoid a direct refusal or conflict. But for someone from a culture that speaks more directly, it creates a completely distorted sense of when things are actually going to happen. And so to quote my friend again, it's not that Mexicans aren't hardworking. The problem is the avoidance of precision. For Mexicans, it is not normal to say to your boss, I can't do it now, I'll do it tomorrow. End quote of my friend speaking. So in his book, Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward Hall would say this is an example of a high context culture somewhat in Mexico, meaning you have to read between the lines a bit. And Japan, India, China, these are all high context cultures as well. And in her excellent book, I love this book so much, The Culture Map, Erin Meyer says that when a society has existed for thousands of years, like those countries I just mentioned, Japan, China, most people there share the same cultural background and have for so long that there are a lot of unspoken rules, things that don't need to be said, people just get it. But in a country like the US, which has been built from generations of people arriving from different countries, you can't rely on that shared meaning. So Americans learn to be explicit. We say what we mean. And these cultures are called low context cultures. And we consider this to be effective communication. If you don't understand us, it's our job to make things clear for you. But in high context cultures, it's up to the listener to figure out what is not being said. And in her book, Meyer emphasizes that when we are assessing what a culture is like, we have to consider what it we are comparing it to. So compared to the US, the UK can be seen as higher context, meaning less direct. And I remember when I first moved to the UK, I found the way that managers asked you to do things to be quite charming because they would say, Would you be happy to do XYZ? And I thought that was so cute. Oh, they're asking if I'm happy. To me, it kind of sounded like there was a choice in the matter, but what they were really saying was, do XYZ. But compared to Japan, the British might as well be screaming directives through a megaphone. So it's all relative. An Italian friend of mine works at an international aerospace company in the UK. And every day at lunch, she and her other Southern Italian colleagues used to go and eat lunch for an hour or more. And as somebody who spent her early working years eating at her desk in Manhattan, this thought just gave me anxiety. A whole hour for lunch. How do you get anything done? And I thought I had made progress after moving to London about lunch and giving yourself some time and space because I had one gig and I was offered more money somewhere else, and I actually turned it down because I liked the leisurely lunchtime where I was. It was the first time I ever felt free enough to walk around for a bit during my lunch. But clearly I still had room to grow because this whole group dynamic lunch situation, I was just like, whoa, how do you do it? The US is a task-oriented culture. We might chat for a bit at the start of a meeting, but then we get down to business. From our point of view, we are respecting each other's time, which we view as valuable. We're here together to work toward a common goal. Let's crack on. On the flip side, are relationship-oriented cultures, like my friends who are all from southern Italy. We can also include Latin America, India, China. Before someone can trust you in these regions, in these cultures, they need to get to know you as a person. So long meals and personal conversations, these aren't just perks of the job or a random detour. They are how business actually gets done. In the culture map, Meyer shares an example that perfectly captures what happens when these two different cultures collide. An American company and a Brazilian company were in negotiations, and the Brazilian team visited the US, and the Americans jumped straight into work mode. For them, this was respectful. The Brazilians were only there for a few days, and the US team didn't want to waste any of their time. And the Americans thought this went really well, and the Brazilians disagreed because no bonding happened. They didn't know if they could trust these people. Then the Americans visited Brazil and they were invited to a meal that went on for hours, and this completely stressed out the Americans because they were thinking things like, okay, when are we gonna have time to do all the work? We're gonna be up all night. And so the meal didn't feel relational or fun for them. It felt like an obstacle that they had to endure before they could actually do their jobs. And both teams were asking the same question, is this a good use of our time? And they were arriving at opposite answers. The Americans saw their shared meal as time taken away from work, and the Brazilians saw skipping the relationship building as time wasted on a deal that had no foundation. And Meyer describes this as the difference between cognitive trust and effective trust. So head trust versus heart trust. Cognitive trust is built through demonstrated competence. This is how you deliver, how you follow through, you're showing that you're reliable, you're doing great work, and effective trust is built through your personal closeness. You're sharing meals, you're getting to know each other, and you know about each other's families, you start to feel like you can be yourself and open up. You're getting to know each other as human beings. In task-oriented cultures, the work builds the trust, and in relationship-oriented cultures, the trust has to come first, and trust takes time. That's what makes the Brazilian lunch story a time story, not just a trust story. It reveals a fundamental disagreement about how we're supposed to be using our time. And if you don't understand that the person across the table has a completely different answer to that question, you might walk away thinking they're either wasting your time or they don't care about you. Neither of which is probably true. Of course, I'm speaking in cultural generalities. There are Mexicans who speak directly and evasive Americans, Italians who show up on time and Swiss people who are late, British people who want a meaningful conversation before a meeting, and Brazilians who want to get straight to work. There's more than just culture at play here. We've got individual wiring, family upbringing, personal history, these things all play a role. But the broader cultural patterns are real and they matter, especially when they collide. What's perceived as incredibly rude in one culture may be a sign of respect in another. The American who jumps straight to business thinks he's valuing your time. The Brazilian who extends lunch by another hour thinks she's valuing you and getting to know you. The Mexican who says Aurita isn't being evasive. He's navigating a social norm where directness feels aggressive. And the German who rings the doorbell at 11.59, maybe she's not trying to be rigid, she's trying to show that she respects your time and takes the invitation seriously. Instead of taking offense, we can step back and ask ourselves why someone might be behaving the way they are. We can learn how other cultures relate to time and drop the struggle that things should be any different. And this is something especially worth remembering when you are on holiday. In a few days, I will be in Mexico City, and I'm consciously thinking about what time well spent will mean for me there. Because I work for myself and often take what I consider to be longer holidays. Sometimes I do work when I'm traveling, so my goal is not to switch off 100% while I'm away, though maybe I should experiment with that. My goal is to be fully present in whatever I'm doing. So I've decided ahead of time which days I'll do a little work, which days I will devote to fun and connecting with my friend. And I know that a thought might come up at some point, like, should I be working now or I have so much work to do? And I can sit in the discomfort of that thought until it floats away. Because it is just a thought, and I don't have to give in to the impulse to check email or binge another business podcast. I can put my task mode, uh, my task-oriented culture on hold and lean into the more relationship-oriented culture that I will be immersing myself in. So I can choose to live according to what I say matters to me. And in Mexico City, that means exploring pyramids and flying around in a hot air balloon with my friend and tacos. Lots and lots of tacos. That's all for now. I'm your host, Sarah Michatel, a writer, podcaster, and coach over here in England. Thank you so much for listening and have a beautiful week wherever you are.