Bermuda is full of news concerning expatriate workers here — their treatment, their lifestyle as well as their recent exodus.But one Bermudian executive knows just what it’s like to live abroad in one of the toughest cities in the world and says now he can relate to the trials and concerns that guest workers face.Neville Grant, a top executive with HSBC Bermuda, has just returned from a two-year secondment in New York City. His wife and two small children joined him.Mr Grant had a quintessential New York experience — including a 40-minute commute in and out of the city every day to work and back to his temporary home in the New York suburb of Westchester County.During his stay, he rotated through HSBC Group’s North American Commercial Banking (CMB) Business Management Team and, in September, returned to Bermuda as the head of Payments and Cash Management, Bermuda. In this role, Mr Grant oversees the management of department that assists commercial clients with their payments and the management of their money.Mr Grant said his time in the Big Apple was an eye-opening experience both professionally and personally.“It was a fantastic experience, I keep saying to people if I got the call to go back first thing tomorrow morning, I would be on the plane and gone,” he said. “It was a great stretch experience. It was mind altering, career changing — all the positive that you look for in a move.”But Mr Grant also said his time in New York also gave him first-hand knowledge of what it is like to live as an expat in another country. Not all of it good.“That experience, from a personal perspective, brings in focus very clearly what it is like for a lot of our guest workers here,” he said.An experience that weighed heavily on him was that some of his New York colleagues commented on the corporate housing he was given during his stay, which happened to be in one of the wealthiest counties in the US. Bill and Hillary Clinton are counted among its residents.“It’s like wearing brand new shoes in a place where no one else has shoes,” he said.“A small comment like that would have been no big deal if I heard it or said it when I was previously here in Bermuda because you don’t have that frame of reference how impactful that could potentially be,” Mr Grant added. “It made me very cautious that you don’t use the status of the benefits you receive from your organisation as a whip to hit others.“You’d hear these small comments that brought to my attention pretty clearly to be much more mindful of how we treat our guest workers. It made me much more cognisant and sympathetic to some of the feedback that you hear in Bermuda about how we treat our guest workers having been through a similar experience.”The transition from a small community like Bermuda to being a stranger in a large city was an understandably trying one.“You take a lot for granted when you are living in Bermuda — we had never in our entire lives with children have paid for a babysitter because you have a small community that surrounds you and extended family that is in very close proximity,” said the HSBC ten-year veteran.But that all changed when they moved.“You go to a brand new place, you don’t know anyone and you have to build another network and one of the individuals in that network is a babysitter. To find someone you are comfortable enough to leave your small children with while you have a night out is tough. For the first four months we did not go anywhere without our kids.”At work, Mr Grant enjoyed New York’s fast-paced culture and found being surrounded by people who had a wide breadth of international background “exhilarating”.“These are leading experts, these are people that have a very diverse skill set; these are people that have a broad country exposure, which means that their advice and guidance is much more in depth,” he said.He added that the culture in New York is very results and execution driven; when a deadline is set, the work is expected on that date. Period.“Here in Bermuda, we’re much more comfortable as a society to discuss, but in terms of passion for implementation, it’s not as much as it was in New York.”Mr Grant gave an example of two of his young support staff in New York who he had briefed on a project for only 30 minutes and said they would meet in a week to discuss next steps.By 2am that night, Mr Grant’s BlackBerry was buzzing. His support staff had sent him a full presentation.“It had appendices, research, documentation, suggested plan and approach all laid out,” he said. “Imagine the thought, the time that had been put into place from the time that discussion ended which just a theoretical, macro discussion to the full executed plan missing just one or two items. That’s the level and the expectation that’s in a culture like New York.”That is not to say, he explained that, that Bermuda doesn’t execute — it was just a different level that he experienced abroad.“It’s an opportunity to take that best in class and apply it to Bermuda,” he said. “It certainly requires a change in mindset.”Mr Grant, however, brought a bit of Bermuda’s outgoing personality to the city that never sleeps.His colleague used to joke that Mr Grant would walk down the street like he was running for public office.“Bermudians are very good at building relationships. I bet you that in a city like New York there are people that want to be engaged, want to say hello and talk,” he said. “That’s something that Bermuda does well — that small level of interpersonal engagement. Bermudians are comfortable in that space.”“All in all, in terms of our relatability to clients, colleagues, those Bermuda interpersonal skills go a long way.”Overall, he found that living abroad gave him a broader world view that he feels would benefit the larger community on how to tackle challenges facing the Island.“Some of the challenges that we see in Bermuda could benefit from a different perspective, so you can get some relativity,” he said. “What may be a tough challenge here in Bermuda may not be as difficult somewhere else because there is a new and different approach. A broad perspective helps to put the challenges in context.”His advice to other Bermudians who are contemplating a secondment abroad?“You will find that there’s a lot of people that have an interest in you, especially if you put yourself in a position where you are interested in learning. Without exception, if you approach people and say ‘I have a lot to learn and there’s a lot I can bring to the table once I’m up to speed, if you could expose me to this, that would be great’, I haven’t had any issues in terms of knowledge sharing.”