An expatriate (“expat”) is an individual living and working in a country other than their country of citizenship, often temporarily and for work reasons. They are usually sent abroad by a multinational employer (profit or non-profit). Managers often criticize expats who take up expensive international assignments for “underperforming” in their host locations. But nobody knows why that is. We don’t have data to prove this. A study by Learnlight shows that four in ten international assignments are judged to be a failure. And yet the number of overseas assignments continues to rise. Global companies are under considerable pressure to determine what makes a successful overseas assignment and to understand why they so often fail. However, what has been so often […]

Some of us feel a bit low in December. There are several reasons for that. One might be that you look back on the year and feel you have not made great strides: You worked hard, but you did not necessarily achieve the financial success you had envisioned. Or your health took a toll from everything you are trying to juggle at once. You dread Mondays. Instead of starting your laptop to go through another day of meetings (that could have been an email), you look at the globe you got from your grandmother as a kid. You have been sitting at this desk for too long and wish to smell the spices in a market in Amritsar, walk through […]

Despite what is happening in the world I have been keeping myself really busy. Honestly, getting stuff done gives me deep satisfaction and having a lot of great client conversations raises my energy level to the max. So, I personally feel that I work on my mission to bring the Human Touch back into Global Mobility and my team is helping me along.

As I mentioned in this post during the early days of the pandemic my mother could not find yeast. Her village in Southern Germany had a yeast shortage. We don’t have a shortage of anything here in Zurich, neither toilet paper, nor yeast, even though demand for both was higher than in “normal” times. My mother likes to bake in normal times but I felt she needed to bake even more in these times.

How often do you open your inbox and find over a hundred unread emails? And how frequently do you “clean your inbox” just to see it overflowing with emails again the day after? One of the reasons I used to get stressed around emails was that I would spend a whole day in a workshop, and I couldn’t check my emails because it would distract my mind too much. Then I checked my emails after the workshop, when I was already exhausted, and I knew that I had a lot of tasks and queries to handle. I had this urge to respond to people because it was a habit from the corporate world, and I pride myself on being “responsive” […]