I am working on several different projects at the moment. Let me know if you are interested to hear more!
How can you make friends with host country nationals?
This is the focus of my forthcoming book Breaking out of the expat bubble with Routledge, hopefully to come out in 2023. This book is meant for expats and HR managers, and contains many practical recommendations on how to go about to create more connections between expats and host country nationals, both at work and in private life. As well as my own past research, it is based on 72 new interviews with expats around the world, about how they made friends abroad, which has led to a new model that shows how this process actually works.
The Host Country Liaison model
Working as an expat has always been full of challenges. An important aspect is dealing with the host culture because cultural differences and local ways of working can have a significant impact on the success of the expat assignment. We have constructed a questionnaire to help us more clearly understand how expats work together with local employees.