Listening to Expats

Technology has reinvented the way we work, communicate and build relationships. While working on expatfinder.com applications aimed at improving an expat’s experience abroad,  we have identified several tools or “hacks” that can help your company listen to expats, adapt your human resources support or products to this consumer group and follow trends.

You might be sitting at the home office, wondering how your expats are doing out there while on assignment, or how your third country nationals are adapting to the office life around the world, well, here are a few tools to let you dip a toe in the life of expats around the world, or at least listen to some trends.

Cigna’s Expat Twitter Map

Cigna Global just launched a twitter map to listen to expats anywhere in the world. Cigna allows easy searches for real-time feeds from foreigners living in various host countries worldwide. This not only helps expats seek help and provide advice to fellow expats but also assists employers to understand their employees’ needs while on foreign assignment.

Slack RSS Reader

Use Slack as an RSS reader for a better reading experience. Slack, an app designed for teams, enables employees to communicate effectively wherever in the world they may be. Just set up some Google alerts with RSS outputs and plug them into your slack, for example, build a news alert for “Expat Dubai” and you will get a push notification on your RSS feed instantly.

Word Map

If you don’t know how to get your word across, you can always try and use this slick tool and find the perfect word. Word Map partnered up with Google Translate and Wikipedia to help you find the context of languages and its relationship with geographical space. Try out how to say insurance or benefits around your new target country 

Flickr Map

Find recent images geotagged in certain locations all over the world through Flickr’s map tool. Find millions of images scattered all over the globe and see all kinds of events, scenery, highlights, and all things related to lifestyle in a certain area. Flickr Map allows you to keep an eye on different parts of the world and keeps you informed of the latest lifestyle trends of residents in that city or country.

Shazam Map

Shazam, a mobile music app, allows users to discover explore and share music and TV shows. Users only need to start the app and tap the Shazam button while in an online shop. With that, Shazam creates a digital fingerprint of the audio, within seconds, it is matched with Shazam’s database of music tracks, TV shows, etc. The user is then provided information about the song or TV show such as lyrics, artist biography and show synopsis.

Staying Safe

While it is a difficult exercise to listen to expats on a regular basis, there are certain tools or “hacks” that can come in handy and will definitely improve the way you communicate with your employees overseas. It would also help keeping track of their health and security while on assignment.

International SOS, a top medical and travel security services company, has introduced the first travel risk map that provides information on each international destination’s medical and travel security risk rating. This map greatly helps employers in their travel risk mitigation efforts.