“I think hospitality is extremely important. It comes from my Arab culture, where if someone is in your home, you make them feel like the most important person, you offer them everything and make them comfortable. That feeling carries over — when a customer comes into the coffee shop, I genuinely feel they are my personal guest.”

That is Elias, thirty-five, Lebanese, standing behind a counter in a Canadian city, describing the mental model he actually uses at work. He was not speaking in metaphor. For Elias, the moment someone becomes a customer they are no longer a stranger buying a service. They are a houseguest. They deserve the same treatment as a visitor at home. And that expectation carries weight: it means the worker holds himself responsible for making the space feel comfortable and welcoming, the way a home is supposed to feel.

Every one of the fourteen described something like this. They did not view customers as transactional clients but rather as guests or extended family members, who deserved personalized treatment and special care. They provided home-like care, had friendly conversations, and went beyond the formal requirements of their jobs to offer emotional support. Several said that true service means creating a bond with customers rather than just completing a transaction.

Acts of personal sacrifice followed naturally from that. Participants described staying late after their shifts or paying customer bills out of their own pocket. Participants did not describe these as going above and beyond. For them, this was just what the job required.

The puzzle

Consider what has to be true for Bassam to buy those children a meal. He must believe that the distress of a stranger’s child is, in some sense, his responsibility. He must believe that the boundary of the transaction — one main course, paid for, delivered — is not the boundary of his obligation. And he must believe this strongly enough to act on it before anyone can stop him.

This is the shape of collectivism as it actually appears in a working life. Not an abstraction about group harmony, but a coffee shop worker deciding that a family’s evening matters more than his own wages.

Rachid, the Moroccan hotel receptionist, put the disposition into words: “We are also emotional people, which has both advantages and disadvantages. At times, this means we might be less rigid about punctuality or take things personally. But the strength of our culture is its warmth and people-oriented nature. We connect emotionally with others and genuinely care about their experience.”

Note that he named the cost as well as the benefit. Nobody in this study argued that their culture was without trade-offs.

The idea

Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions give us a vocabulary for this. Collectivism — the degree to which people emphasize group harmony and relationships over individual objectives — is the dimension in play here, and it sits at the low-individualism end of his scale for Arab societies. But a dimension is only useful once you have seen the behaviour it is trying to describe. What Hofstede offers is not an explanation of Bassam. It is a way of noticing that Bassam is not an eccentric.

The second framework worth knowing is SERVQUAL, the service quality model developed by Parasuraman and colleagues in 1988, which breaks service into five measurable dimensions: reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy and responsiveness. Two of those five — empathy and responsiveness — describe precisely what these workers do instinctively. When Bassam pays for the meals, a service quality researcher would score that as empathy and responsiveness at the top of the scale. His shift supervisor scores it as lost margin.

That gap between the two scorecards is what this book is about.

What the research found

Nour, a Syrian childcare worker, linked her approach directly to where she came from: “My goal is always to treat people like family. In Syria, there’s a strong sense of connection with neighbors, children, even strangers, we often feel connected. So, when I interact with the children or their parents here, I instinctively see them as cousins or aunties. You know, that family feeling makes me much more caring, and perhaps even more protective.”

What she described was a familial orientation to service work. She did not separate what constitutes professional care from the kind of care you’d give family. It was the same for her.

Participants generally saw this familial approach as basic — it was simply how service should be done. But it became most visible when customers were in distress or needed something urgently. Tarek, a thirty-five-year-old restaurant worker from Egypt, described an evening when customers arrived after the kitchen had closed:

“One evening, a young couple arrived very late, just as the kitchen was closing. They looked exhausted and cold. I immediately thought of my mother in Egypt, who would never allow anyone to leave her house hungry, and that made my decision easy. I served them anyway, and even gave them tea in the house. They were incredibly surprised and thankful.”

They were incredibly surprised. That surprise is data.

This abundant hospitality narrows down to a single Arabic expression: “El dayf ʿala raasna” — literally, “the guest is on our head,” meaning that the guest’s comfort and satisfaction hold the highest priority. Participants used this phrase to describe their logic of service. This was not a metaphor. It was the real model by which they understood service delivery. Customers were people who bring blessings rather than deals that had to be closed. And the concept of the guest carries an implication: you give without expecting anything in return.

Where expectations collide

The focus on relationship-building clashed, often, with Canadian service norms, where speed, efficiency, formality and uniformity are the standard. Participants reported that their tendency to hold long conversations and engage emotionally with customers was every so often perceived on the Canadian side as unprofessional, or as conflicting with the established code of conduct.

Tarek again: “During my first weeks, I kept trying to chat with customers excessively and ask them all sorts of questions. My manager eventually pulled me aside and told me to keep it short, that people here just want fast service. It did feel very weird, because what I learned from Egypt is that service is all about making a connection.”

The collision has a price on both sides of the counter. A Syrian server who gave free food to children in good faith was teased by Canadian peers for squandering the restaurant’s resources. Rachid found Canada’s rigid punctuality baffling next to the more lenient timekeeping he had grown up with.

Here is the honest version of the conflict, without a villain in it. In collectivistic settings, quality means the whole experience is infused with care and hospitality. Individualistic settings measure quality as efficient delivery with limited waste of resources and therefore lower cost. Both definitions are coherent. Both are defensible. They simply cannot both be the standard in the same shop at the same moment, and the person standing between them is the worker.

What it means

Emotional language and human connection are central to how these workers work. They do not view service as a purely transactional relationship. All fourteen participants, from eight Arab countries, across different service sectors, described their service as human connection first and business transaction second. This was consistent across the study, not isolated cases.

The interviews also revealed something I had not gone looking for: that the warmth causes tension with Canadian norms of efficiency and speed. What is deemed good service by the Arab worker is not always perceived as such by their Canadian customers or even their non-Arab co-workers, because each regards the quality of service differently.

Why it matters

The main lesson is that collectivist warmth and hospitality cannot be considered drawbacks in the Canadian service environment. They are service quality assets that should be identified and directed rather than suppressed. These workers intuitively perform on the empathy and responsiveness dimensions of service quality — the two dimensions that organizations spend fortunes trying to train into people — and yet their generosity may be misread or punished in workplaces that value cost management and transactional productivity above all.

For an operator, the implication is concrete: identify which collectivist behaviours actually improve the customer experience and build them into the standard of service delivery, instead of treating them as exceptions. Adjust the policy so that relational gestures — a personalized greeting, a small act of generosity — are permitted and even encouraged within a defined limit. Stop assessing performance on speed and cost alone; count relational contribution too.

This is not about letting cultural cordiality override business rules. It is about finding the ground where the two can coexist.

What the participants called giving extra — extra food, extra time, extra warmth — is not a deviation from good service. It is an expression of it.