Working in Southeast Asia for a European company comes with plenty of cross-border bumps and quirks. Time zones and public holidays are the most obvious mismatch. But it’s email that causes the real headache. Each story that we write at Monocle is thoroughly fact-checked, so that means asking Thais or Indonesian interviewees for email addresses that they rarely use and nudging them to check their inboxes for an email from a colleague in a European timezone. Instant-messenger apps are the default communication tool for offices in these parts and Line is the dominant one in Thailand.

Living in Bangkok, I jump between Line and Gmail and sometimes get tangled up in the middle, missing emails deemed urgent in one timezone and sending emails deemed unnecessary in the other. I arrived at a meeting in the Thai capital recently to find that the email I had sent from the taxi to excuse my traffic-related tardiness had become a point of discussion around the water cooler. “He sent an email to explain that he was going to be five minutes late? How sweet.” Embarrassment aside, it was a useful reminder of Southeast Asian norms and expectations. Pretty much everyone is late for meetings in Bangkok, so only serious delays warrant a message – and email is reserved for emergency cancellations. 

Translating these communication preferences was part of my country briefing for several of my London colleagues when they arrived in August to report our next travel book. “Do we need malaria shots? What about Hep A?” they asked. “No but you do need to download Line to set up appointments; use Grab to get around; and keep plenty of baht in your pocket because you won’t be able to scan any QR codes with your Apple wallet,” I said. Ahead of their arrival, I started receiving Line messages from Thais attaching screenshots of emails from my colleagues and asking how they should reply. “Please reply to their email,” might have been the obvious answer but I knew what they meant. 

Over here, email feels clunky and corporate and more for formal, letter-type correspondence: the modern equivalent of a dusty PO box that gets checked and cleared into the dustbin every now and again. Line suits this part of the world, where communication is personal, relationship-based and consensus-driven. Think cute stickers and kind words rather than icy, transactional exchanges that could be written by a bot. The requirement to know who you are communicating with on Line means that the system is more trust-based and less prone to hackers. 

There are drawbacks, of course. Line IDs are often nicknames or a random assortment of emojis so finding old contacts can demand either a sharp memory or a lot of scrolling (an esteemed academic who I talk to about Thai politics goes by a squiggly tilde grapheme and a glasses-face emoji). There is no archive to speak of either – cue the horrified groans of HR and legal departments in London and Paris. But sidelining emails does not have to bring about an end to the rules-based order. Changing status “On holiday” works just like a regular out-of-office email and formal things are done in person with a paper record.

The world might feel smaller and more uniform thanks to automation but cultural quirks in communication persist. It’s part of what makes travelling and working abroad so rewarding and these preferences vary even between English-speaking countries. My favourite puzzle that remains unsolved? Why Aussies don’t use WhatsApp. I only found that out when we ran a Monocle event in Sydney last year. Message me if you know the answer.