Differences and similarities in perception of time are maybe the easiest ones to spot in people’s behaviours and likely attributed to culture. Let’s take a closer look at the Scheduling scale of Meyer’s Culture Map.

Within the Leading scale for example, it’s more likely for people to make a comment along the lines of ‘This Japanese guy never contributes to anything, he never speaks up during the meetings!’. But rarely people will reflect and actually give him the chance to speak up, relating to their intercultural knowledge. Instead they will blame him and look at him as unreliable team member. With the Scheduling scale, it is likely that people perhaps at the beginning could be a bit more understanding and humorous about it, for example “Oh, he’s Spanish, let’s just give him 5 more minutes to join”. Is it a stereotype? Yes. Is it used as a generalisation? Yes. But in this scenario humour can make it easier for people to deal with the lateness in a non-confrontational way.

Linear vs Flexible

Scheduling scale has two dimensions: Linear-time and Flexible-time. On the linear-time side you will find countries such as for example Germany, Japan, US, UK, closer to the other spectrum there will be most of African countries, India, Brazil, Spain… Just to remind you, all of the comparisons between the countries should be considered relatively to each other. The terms you might find in other sources as well for this scale are monochronic vs polychronic cultures.

So what are the practical implications of this scale? Well it might for example make it easier for you to establish how late is actually late, when you should actually inform people that you’re late, what does I’ll see you after two days vs I’ll see you in two days mean. Usually that’s the thing you can easily grasp once you learn how it works.

Stick to the schedule!

I think that it’s slightly harder for people from linear-time cultures to adjust and understand flexible-time cultures when it comes to wider functioning, apart from just scheduling meeting times. Let me know your thoughts on this though!

It can get very frustrating when you have prepared your agenda thoroughly, set the goals for the meeting and then suddenly half of the group is late, in the middle of the meetings someone leaves the room to pick up an important call, some additional off-topics start to appear. It’s hard to tell when the perceived chaos is normal and when is it starting to be out of control. Whilst if you enter a Linear culture, the rules of the game are more explicit and clear.

Unpredictability is the key to success!

It seems like adjusting might be slightly easier for flexible-time cultures – it’s enough to stick to the agenda and you will survive. As hard as it might be. Problem is, this way of solving problems or making decisions is just not perceived as efficient enough and will get very frustrating and demotivating very quickly in the case of a linear-time cultures.

Having a mixture of cultures in one team will require meeting somewhere in the middle of the Scheduling scale to keep the team productive.

Luckily, although this scale might cause some problems and miscommunication between people, they are very easy to explain and adjust to. If you’re very late to a meeting in Germany once and everyone will look at you with a disappointment, I bet next time you will be there right on time! 🙂

As if it’s not enough already, that’s another thing to have in mind when working and living in an international environment. If you’d like to read some more about scales that are less often attributed to cultures, but having an enormous influence on how people work together cross-culturally go to articles about Communicating, Evaluating, Leading, Deciding and Trusting and learn some more!