Why you need a repat (or two… or ten) in your organization.

[Joywtseo421]

It’s not hard to find blog articles proselytizing the benefits of travel, and that twenty two-year old that just finished backpacking around Europe to find herself may truly be a creative genius, but from an HR standpoint there are an awful lot of unknown variables.

How is she going to handle working out of a cubicle instead of blogging from a rooftop cafe in Prague?

Is she going to be loyal to the organization when she’s been enjoying the freedom to bounce around to different countries whenever she feels like it?

The repats I’m talking about have already seen the world and come full circle to understand what’s really important to them. The exotic has become routine. Being dazzled by cities that never sleep has been replaced by looking forward to australia phone number resource getting home by 7 p.m. to have dinner with the family. At the end of the day they are mature, self-actualized adults. What’s more, even though they clearly have an explorer’s mindset, after settling into a country and career, they have simultaneously developed the kind of loyalty and sticktoitiveness that’s hard to find in the current market.

You don’t have to take the word of random internet guy for it though, because behavioral scientists have started to weigh in.

My own wake-up call about this population came when I read an article in Aeon titled How Loneliness Generates Empathy and Shapes Identity. As an expat myself, I realized that although I long ago stopped feeling regular pangs of homesickness that I might consider ‘loneliness,’ as integrated into the local community, language, and culture as I am, I will always be, at some small level, culturally isolated.

The article went on to overview several scientific studies that pointed to creativity and empathy in particular, but also to the related traits of grit and persistence, as I discussed in my own interpretation of the research.