REPATRIATION CAN SOCIAL MEDIA MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
Expatriates returning home at the end of their assignments face a number of repatriation challenges, including unanticipated negative career implications, loss of contacts and deterioration in relationships with family and friends. Yet in today’s highly social-media-connected world, are these traditional repatriation difficulties a thing of the past? Dr Sue Shortland explains why repatriation is problematic and explores the role of technology in improving repatriation outcomes.
T
he cost of transferring individuals and their families abroad is widely quoted as being between three and five times the home country salary. Loss of expertise gained on assignment is, therefore, expensive if
individuals choose not to remain with their sending organisation at the end of their assignment term. Given the trend towards using international assignments for knowledge transfer and management development purposes, supporting the re-entry and retention of repatriates is crucial for multi-national corporations to benefit from international staff transfers in the long term. At the end of the assignment, the transferee may repatriate to the
home country, be redeployed to another country or become localised in the host country. Ideally, repatriates will share the knowledge that they acquired during their assignments and also continue to access relevant knowledge from the host unit, facilitating ongoing cross-unit knowledge flows in the multi-national corporation. It is important that repatriates not only stay with the organisation long enough to share their experiences, but also build links between the sending unit staff and those employees in the repatriate’s previous host unit.
CHALLENGES ON RE-ENTRY The move ‘back home’ can, however, be more difficult than the original move abroad. This is due to a number of factors. First, the repatriate is likely to have developed a number of expectations of their future career path as a result of being on assignment. Having gained in-depth professional and personal experience, as well as new cultural and wider job content understandings, often set within a remit of greater autonomy, there is an expectation of career advancement on return. Yet the following issues are more likely to represent the repatriate career reality:
• Firms often fail to use the experience or knowledge gained internationally and most likely do not consider the career implications of this experience
• The repatriate is reassigned to a position similar to the one he or she left two or three years before, while their colleagues may have been promoted
• Repatriates often find it difficult to relate the value of their global experience to managers with a domestic focus.
10 | RELOCATE | SPRING 2019
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