Best workplace advice I ever got #2: Little stuff matters

"Little things" photo from Marcella on Flickr, via Creative Commons license

In 2000 I was working for a multinational company and had an opportunity to move abroad, from Canada to the UK. As part of preparing for that expat move my company gave me cross-cultural training. That training opened my eyes and prepared me for a very successful overseas career.

A lot of the training was factual: about the UK government, demographics, membership in the EU, driving on the other side of the road. It was useful context about the country where I was planning to spend the next 2 years.

But the thing they said that really struck me was that rates of early return for expat Canadians in the UK are quite high. This surprised me. People speak English in the UK, I thought, like most Canadians do. People look, broadly speaking, the same when you walk down the street in either country (there are a lot of people of British descent in Canada - we were a colony, after all). They're both temperate northern hemisphere countries. They have similar power distance ratings. There are so many similarities I figured that it would be an easy fit.

Not so, my trainer told me. In fact it's because of these similarities that expat assignments like this frequently fail. People like me make the move expecting life to be the same because of the larger similarities, unless they've been warned otherwise. They expect to follow the same rituals and patterns as they did back home.

But they'll be wrong. There are many little things that are different between Canada and the UK: types of groceries, the hours that coffee shops are open, driving etiquette, licensing your TV. If you go in expecting your daily routine to be the same then these little things will grate on your nerves and you'll become unhappy.

Conversely if you move from a place like Canada to a place like Japan or Turkey then you know your life is going to be very different. You're expecting it and so those things may not bug you.

Armed with this info I went to the UK determined to set aside all my daily routines and habits, in the workplace and outside it. I established new patterns. I met friends at the pub in the evening instead of at the coffee shop (in hindsight, possibly a bad idea). I developed a taste for Marmite (not an easy task for an adult). I made note of the slightly different office expectations.

As a result my 2-year expat assignment saw me go local and stay in the UK for 9 years. And then move to Australia nearly 5 years ago. I've successfully changed jobs a couple of times as well. I'm convinced my flexibility in being able to do so has been aided by those workplace-funded words of warning: little stuff matters, don't make assumptions about them, and be prepared to change them.