HOT TOPIC
David Sapsted looks at the challenges facing employers when dealing with staff returning from foreign deployments. He suggests ways that this transition can be best managed to successfully reintegrate the employee and their family back home, while also managing their expectations about their changing role.
C
oming home is a “funny thing”, F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed. “Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realise
what’s changed is you.” According to extensive academic research, such
sentiments resonate not only with employees returning from deployments abroad, but also with students coming home after studying in foreign lands. It has been branded ‘reverse culture shock’ and its effects are not only felt by the individuals involved, but also by the institutions they work for or at which they are studying. The research shows that ‘repats’ can experience
more intense culture shock on returning home than the trepidation they initially felt when being dispatched abroad. In one poll, 80 per cent of returning Japanese expats, 71 per cent of Finnish, 64 per cent of Dutch and 60 per cent of Americans said they found it harder readjusting to their home country than to their host country abroad.
REVERSE CULTURE SHOCK FIDI, a Brussels-based global alliance of international moving and relocation companies, describes repatriation as a troubling time, not just for the returning expat, but also for his or her employers. “While the expat is likely to find it harder than expected to get back into the swing of things, the employer faces a more business-like problem: a high proportion of returning expats leave their jobs. “The need to start the global assignment was
almost certainly driven by a strategic imperative... (but) there is little strategic need for the returning expat. They come home because their task is complete, not because they are necessarily needed.
“It is understandable that people see the outgoing
journey as more complex, and, therefore, more worthy of the HR or global mobility department’s time and attention. The return journey involves no house search, no schooling problems, no language barrier – surely just a glorious homecoming?” FIDI goes on to say, “The truth is that the reverse
culture shock can be every bit as difficult, since many expats expect life to be as it was, but the world has often moved on without them – leaving them feeling out of place. The disillusionment that follows is often the catalyst for changing jobs.”
NOT ALWAYS A PASSPORT TO PROMOTION According to a survey by global talent company Brookfield Global Relocation Services (BGRS), just 23 per cent of companies talk to returning overseas assignees from day one about the roles that might be open to them in the future. And recent research from the Canadian Employee Relocation Council found that only 30 per cent of organisations currently provide repatriation support. In the absence of discussion with repats,
misunderstandings abound, says Benjamin Bader, a professor at Leuphana University of Lunebürg. Bader is also a co-author with the University of Hamburg of a study on repatriation conducted with the RES Forum, an independent community for international HR and mobility professionals. While the employee sees an overseas assignment
as a passport to promotion, the employer simply wants someone to get the job done and is not making any promises – or plans – for the employee’s future prospects back at home. David Enser, head of international mobility at Adidas and co-founder of the RES Forum, says this ➲
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