Globe Trotters

International job assignments have changed significantly in the last decade. Today's expatriate is often going overseas to perform a short-term, mission-critical assignment that must promise and deliver a return on investment, with little time to prepare and even less spent on evaluation and training.

As the worldwide workforce becomes more globally mobile and outsourcing continues to distribute parts of corporations all over the planet, it's clear that the stakes are getting higher for overseas job rotation. Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based technology research company, says it expects that the worldwide IT outsourcing market will grow to $241 billion in 2008, and a total of 3.3 million jobs will move offshore by 2015. That means a lot more to do in a lot more places by expatriates who are facing new challenges in getting ready.

How have international job assignments changed in the evolving global economy? The biggest difference is that aggressive cost-cutting has dramatically changed the way organizations do business overseas. A telltale sign of that cost-cutting is the fact that organizations have shifted from long-term assignments to short-term assignments. According to the 2003-2004 Global Relocation Trends Survey (GRTS), a survey of hundreds of senior-level human resource management professionals conducted by GMAC Global Relocation Services, a Warren, N.J.-based global corporate relocation services company, there were more than five times more short-term assignments (of a duration of one year or less) in the 2003-2004 survey than in the past decade of surveys.

Persistent demands that companies do more with fewer resources have required trainers to modify their learning approach. "We have been asked to adapt our training to accommodate the tighter deadlines and greater expectations to achieve more in less time," says David Eaton, president and founder of Eaton Consulting Group, a Boston, Mass-based cross-cultural management consulting firm.

What are today's trainers doing to ensure the success of expatriates, whether they are launching a new call center in India or a leading a start-up in Africa? According to the five internationally focused training and academic professionals we interviewed, success in preparing employees to handle overseas challenges comes down to managing both knowledge and expectations.



Learning on the Web

Creating Web-based cultural learning tools that function 24-7 has become essential for Eaton, who has spent more than 15 years guiding clients through the nuances of global relocation. Eaton says that many expatriates today are officer-level executives who are going out on a global assignment as a CFO or COO, or directing a department until the organization can hire and train someone local. "These people are there to accomplish a mission—to get in and get out," he says.

To adapt, trainers like Eaton have had to make adjustments in their training methods and style. "The learning has to help them develop strategies to navigate cultural differences in ways that will help [the organization] hit their bottom line. And I have to do that in hours, not days," says Eaton. "The biggest adjustment is that these individuals are busier, less patient and less classroom-oriented, so we've had to move much of our knowledge acquisition and early-stage skill development to the Web."

This approach benefits expatriates, their colleagues, and the parent company, Eaton says, because "it means a Web-accessed posting of answers to such recurring cultural business questions as: 'How do I conduct a meeting in this country? What is the historical root that might have influenced today's negotiation behavior? What is the religious philosophy or spirituality that might influence the why behind the behavior? What are the protocol tips again for running a meeting? What am I supposed to do in a cross-cultural negotiation in this country?'"

Eaton says his typical client is smarter and more self-directed than ever before, and wants to learn early-stage skill development before spending valuable time in a face-to-face learning situation. What this really means, he says, is that "the expatriate can log onto the Web and read a case study and learn why certain answers are the most appropriate. Basically, they are already starting to apply this cultural learning to a real-life business scenario."

One might think that what amounts to outsourcing training to the Web could sabotage Eaton's business model—in which he owns a company that trains people in a brick-and-mortar classroom. "It doesn't," says Eaton. "Instead, that knowledge acquisition hosted on the Web provides the wraparound to what the executives still need, which is one-on-one sparring dialogue. Now we're spending their precious time [in the classroom] doing only the things we can't do on the Web." This includes task-specific cross-cultural coaching and explaining the whys and wherefores behind the cultural behaviors the executives have already learned.

Because assignments are getting shorter but the world is no less complicated, Eaton believes that expatriate Web training programs should include a way to pass on valuable cultural, experience-driven learning—such as strategic account planning, meeting notes and updates from local managers—to colleagues back home. He suggests incorporating an online learning program that includes a tool like PeerNotes from Meridian Resources, a San Francisco-based provider of global Web tools and services. PeerNotes is a knowledge management software that allows users to contribute, organize, retain and access knowledge specific to their global operations. Expatriates use the software to upload their cultural experiences by dialing a phone number and dictating what they've learned into a telephone. The monologue is recorded, edited, transcribed and made available online within a few hours.

Eaton offers an example of how a pay-it-forward learning tool can increase cross-cultural organizational learning: Jim, a typical U.S. expatriate, goes to India to build a captive facility that will become the outsourcing solution for the company's internal needs back in Europe and the U.S. "Jim's task," says Eaton, "is to build a business process group (BPO) and an IT development group in India. Jim will have been trained to empower [them] with that roll-up-your-sleeves, 'Just call me Jim' method to try to keep things informal and friendly.

"So Jim calls a first gathering of employees. He says, 'Okay, guys, let's get some of your ideas. What are some things you think would make a BPO or IT group really powerful?'

"There's dead silence. Jim is doing exactly what he's been trained to do by U.S. standards, and he still thinks he's doing the right thing, so he calls out, 'Rajid, what do you think,' because he thinks he is doing the right thing to engage the crowd. Now these Indians are looking at Jim like he's nuts, thinking, 'If he's asking us, then he must not know.' Now the group has just lost confidence in Jim."

The diamond in the rough of this experience is that it makes a great peer note to leave to Jim's successors, says Eaton. "What Jim later learns is that when you go to India and you want to engage the group in collective thinking, brainstorming and decision-making, you first present them with your initial thoughts about how to approach a certain challenge, task or activity. Then put them into small groups, have them brainstorm and type up their reports. When they do eventually report out, they do so as a collective group."

The next expatriate that Eaton trains will have already read about this cultural experience as pre-work on the Web. "Now we've just zoomed ahead 30 light years," says Eaton. "We can focus on this expatriate's unique tasks or responsibilities they need to accomplish, and we can talk about the reasons behind the cultural behaviors."



Making everyone happy

Organizations that have to send someone overseas to get a job done focus much of their energy on finding candidates who can succeed in those assignments. According to the GRTS results, 73 percent of the organizations surveyed said that finding a suitable candidate was their most critical relocation challenge. Other challenges included developing intercultural understanding (55 percent) and career management (45 percent).

Linda Jacobsen says that even—perhaps especially—in cost-cutting times like these, the threat of failed assignments is very real. Jacobsen, founder and president of Global Vision Strategies, a Saint Charles, Mo.-based company that specializes in global relocation and cross-cultural training, says it's not hard to show the value of training employees properly for overseas assignments. "If you compare the $4,000 to $5,000 cost of training to the cost of a failed assignment—$150,000 or up to $500,000 if it's a high-level executive—anybody in the company, especially the CFO, can see that's small change compared to what could be lost," she says.

Because today's budget-conscious organizations realize the potential cost of a failed assignment, they are willing to put more effort into evaluating whether an employee will make a perfect fit for that two-year assignment managing a group in Africa. For the training and learning industry, this means that the first task is to analyze the assignment in question and decide what a successful candidate will need to know going in—starting with their expectations.

"The bottom line is that the employer wants a productive transition for their expatriate," says Jacobsen. "We need to assure the employer that the employee is fit to accept the assignment. This often involves identifying and managing the [potential] expatriate's expectations of salary, family integration and career path."

Jacobsen performs her assessment by spending two days in the candidate's home, evaluating the candidate and the entire family. "We see how the employee and spouse treat each other. We see things like an adolescent child who's not talking to the parent because of the move. We try to be an advocate for that family: We want them to be happy, and so does the employer."

In order to manage all of a potential expatriate's expectations, Jacobsen says she has to investigate areas, such as compensation, that are traditionally the province of an organization's internal HR function. For example, an assignment could be disastrous for an employee if he or she doesn't have realistic financial expectations. A few months ago, Jacobsen was working with an executive who really wanted to take an assignment in Ireland, but he was worried that his income might not survive the conversion to the euro. "We were running all the numbers and found that he hadn't allotted a budget for travel," says Jacobsen. "We went through a simple discussion: 'Are you planning to simply live in Ireland and localize? Did you have dreams of taking your family over to the UK?'"

Some expatriates are still selected for international assignments to give them more experience and opportunities to develop their leadership skills, says Eaton. "We still follow the same training techniques, but these companies often have more money and a willingness to do more psychometric work to identify the [expatriate's] current state of cultural leadership skill."

In these cases, Eaton works with the organization's leadership and mentors to define the desired outcome for the expatriate at the end of two or three years. "We evaluate a person's current capabilities—their knowledge, skills and attitude toward cross-cultural global competency," he says. "Then we write up a development plan to bridge the gap between that person's current state and their desired state."

Eaton's expatriate evaluation uses a multi-source feedback instrument to develop a scorecard for global competency. "We ask them to rate themselves by responding to a series of 49 cultural and business statements, then we ask six others who have seen them work in a multinational environment to rate them as well. Then we do our own hour-and-a-half face-to-face interview with them to figure out our scorecard for them."

Ensuring the success of a global assignment includes exploring the candidate's goals, not just for the assignment, but also for the aftermath. Sometimes expatriates' career expectations for when they return to the U.S. are unrealistic, and the disappointment can lead to turnover. Michael Campion says that turnover rates for employees reentering the U.S. after an overseas assignment are alarmingly high. "If you read the literature on international assignments, there is some concern about reintegrating [expatriates]," says Michael Campion, professor of human resources management at Purdue University in Purdue, Mich. "If you look at it from an employee development point of view, it suggests that something is not right. We're using [global assignments] to develop our employees, and then we're surprised that we have a disproportionate turnover rate when they return. The presumed explanation is that they have not been watched after—out of sight, out of mind—and that they feel a bit rejected and out of place when they come back, and then they leave."

When expatriates come home, they may find that their company has downsized or just that the really great job they expected isn't there when they get back, says Carol Sommerfield, vice president of IT and infrastructure for Ciba Specialty Chemicals, a Basel, Switzerland-based provider of chemicals for automotive, textile, packaging and construction products. Sommerfield is also a doctoral student at the Fielding Graduate Institute in the School of Human and Organizational Development in Santa Barbara, Calif., and is currently writing her thesis on the underemployment of corporate repatriates. "Sometimes [returning expatriates] get one of these "holding" jobs where their new skills and level of maturity are not really being used," says Sommerfield. "They are put into jobs that don't really utilize the skills they developed when they went overseas, which means they are essentially underemployed."

Sommerfield argues that the best way for managers to handle situations like these is to be open about the employee's underemployment situation and acknowledge that the current position does not make the best use of their skills. But the manager better reassure the employee that together they'll find a more fitting job in the future, because a skilled and cosmopolitan employee who doesn't see a future with the company is likely to hit the road.

Finding expatriates who have realistic career expectations and are risk-tolerant is key, says Sommerfield. "We used to say to expatriates, 'This [global assignment] is good for your career.' Now we're saying, 'This is a really good life experience, but we can't promise that it's going to be a great career move.' There used to be an expectation that you can't get ahead unless you do these [global assignments], but now, with economic uncertainty, especially in some industries, you never know what [job] you'll come back to."

>(See also: Challenges-R-US) and The Face of Global Relocation)

Jodie Carter is the former associate editor of Training. edit@trainingmag.com