M-time or P-time?

I still remember my first business meetings in France. How surprised I was to see some of my colleagues arriving late at all times. I had been lucky to find a job as a buying assistant for a Canadian Buying Office in Paris. Being educated in The Netherlands I found it normal to be on time, as it was for our German boss and the international staff from London and Toronto. But since we were all people from very different horizons, we didn’t have the same perception of time. That’s at least what I discovered, years later, when doing research on time perception for my lectures at Sorbonne University, it all became clear. I didn’t tell you yet, but the latecomers then were mainly the French and Italian staff.

People in one culture are more or less obsessed by being on time, where in other more Latin cultures, people are much more flexible about meetings, scheduled or not. Difficult to leave some nice colleagues we are chatting with, for another meeting! Latins are relationship-oriented, meaning that they will always give priority to people, privately but also in business. They work to live. In the north of Europe and in the USA people are, on the contrary, task-oriented and give the absolute priority to their work. They live to work.

Everything becomes more complicated when both northern and southern Europeans, are supposed to work together. Why should a Dutchman have any understanding for a Frenchman being late?
That’s why it can be very helpful to know in advance whether our meeting will be with Monochronic (M-time) or Polychronic (P-time) people, terms introduced by the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall in the sixties, to identify our perception of time. M-time people consider time as tangible and concrete – you can save, spend, lose and even waste time. P-time cultures have a totally different view of time, that they consider flexible. Time is not important whereas the environment around, like colleagues for instance, is.

A good observer will often hear the M’s criticize the P’s. Aren’t they actually the victims always waiting for the others to arrive?

Arriving on time for an invitation can be very embarrassing too. I remember very well the faces of my French friends when, invited for dinner at their place at 8 pm, I ‘dared’ to arrive on time. Nobody was ready, the table wasn’t set and the kids supposed to be in bed, were still running around the room.
What were they going to do with that always punctual Dutch girl?

Nowadays I’m used to those flexible French – not that all the French are late, that would be a stereotype I will talk about more in detail, later on this blog. In France you will always appreciate that newspaper you have hastily shoved into your bag when leaving home in the morning.

In addition to all the foregoing, I have never forgotten this wisdom told one day by Aminata, one of my Senegalese students from Dakar: ‘in Africa we say that Europeans have a watch whereas Africans have the time’.