Why "I am fine" means different things on an international team
Cross-cultural communication is where many international teams quietly lose people, and it rarely arrives looking like a problem. On a team in the Netherlands, a Dutch manager asks "How is it going," and treats the answer as data. An employee from a higher-context culture can answer "I am fine" for months and mean something closer to "ask me again, differently." The gap stays invisible until it is too large to close. This piece looks at why direct and indirect communication styles collide at work, what that looks like in a Dutch office, and what a manager can do about it well before it becomes a resignation.
What the research found
A peer reviewed study by researchers at the University of Michigan, published in 2003 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, compared how American, Korean, and Chinese employees communicate in work and non-work settings. The finding was specific. Korean professionals became significantly more indirect at work than they were outside it. Americans became significantly more direct. The same Korean person who would speak plainly with a friend will, with a colleague, tend to soften, hedge, and rely on implication.
This is not shyness, and it is not a language problem. It is a learned professional vocabulary, shaped inside a higher-context culture that treats blunt disagreement at work as a kind of relational injury. The indirectness is the skill, not the deficit. It signals respect, protects the working relationship, and leaves room for the other person to save face. In the setting it was built for, it works.
What this looks like in a Dutch office
Dutch workplaces run on one of the most direct professional cultures in Europe. Feedback is given plainly, disagreement is voiced in the meeting rather than after it, and a question is usually meant as a literal request for information. When a Dutch manager asks an employee how things are going, the answer is treated as the answer.
So two reasonable systems meet and misread each other. The manager asks in good faith and hears "I am fine" as a closed, reliable statement. The employee answers in good faith, in the way they have learned to answer at work, giving the version that protects harmony and waits for a second, more specific prompt that, in a Dutch context, often never comes. Neither person is doing anything wrong. They are simply using different rules for the same sentence.
The month-nine pattern
The cost of this gap tends to show up on a delay, and it follows a recognisable shape.
There is a weekly one to one where the manager comes away believing everything is fine, because that is what was said. There is a performance conversation that lands as a genuine surprise to the manager and as no surprise at all to the employee, who had been signalling for some time in a register the manager was not reading. And then, often somewhere around month nine, there is a resignation that the team experiences as sudden and that the employee experienced as the only option left.
From the outside it looks like someone left without warning. From the inside, the warnings had been there for months, just not in a form the team was set up to notice. The same employee who looked low-maintenance and self-sufficient was managing a growing problem alone, in part because every check-in confirmed there was nothing to discuss.
What helps
The fix is not for these employees to become more Dutch, and it is not for Dutch managers to abandon the directness that makes their teams work. What helps is narrower and more practical: recognising that "I am fine" does not carry the same weight for everyone, and that for some people it is the opening of a conversation rather than the close of one.
A few changes make most of the difference.
Ask twice, and ask differently
A single open question often collects a polite answer. A second, more specific question gives a higher-context employee the invitation they are waiting for. "How is the project going" tends to return "fine." "Which part of this project would you change if you could" tends to return something real.
Replace the broad check-in with a specific one
Open prompts like "Everything okay?" are easy to close down. Concrete questions about workload, a particular deadline, or a specific working relationship are harder to deflect and easier to answer honestly, because they do not require the employee to be the one who raises the problem.
Watch the gap between the words and the signals
When someone says they are fine but has gone quiet in meetings they used to drive, cancels one to ones, or has stopped joining the things meant to be a break, the words are not the most reliable data. The change in behaviour usually is.
Make it ordinary to say the hard thing
Higher-context employees often hold back not because they cannot speak directly, but because they are reading the environment for whether it is safe to. Managers who name that openly, who say plainly that raising a problem early is welcome and will not be read as complaint or weakness, change what their employees feel able to say.
Know when it is bigger than a manager can carry
Some of this is ordinary management, done with more awareness. Some of it is not. When the pattern has gone on long enough that an employee is genuinely struggling, manager attentiveness is not a substitute for proper support. This is where specialist support for cross-cultural teams in the Netherlands earns its place, alongside the manager rather than instead of them.
The quiet ones are the ones to watch
The instinct on most teams is to look hardest at the people who seem to be struggling. On an international team, the harder and more useful discipline is to look again at the people who keep saying they are fine, especially the ones who have always said it. The same care applies to your strongest performers, who tend to be the most fluent of all at sounding fine right up until they are not; that pattern is worth its own attention, and I have written separately about how strong performers burn out without obvious signals.
On a team that spans cultures, "I am fine" is rarely the end of the conversation. Often it is the place the real one starts.
Kelly Kim is an NIP-registered psychologist and workplace mental health specialist supporting international and Korean organisations in the Netherlands. About Kelly.
Source: Sanchez-Burks et al. (2003), Conversing across cultures: East-West communication styles in work and nonwork contexts, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
