With increasing globalization and workforce mobility, there is a chance that you will be sent to another country to conduct business. It may be a brief visit, or it can be an international assignment as an expatriate. An expatriate is an employee who leaves their home country to go work in another country.
Global competencies are becoming necessary for expatriates in the workplace, and as demand for these competencies increases, companies have to create and apply a set of tools to help prepare their employees for international assignments. Preparing employees for expatriate assignments will primarily be a training process, and the biggest training issue will usually be cross-cultural training.
Culture shock can occur when we move from one culture to another. This culture shock can cause significant problems for the expatriate employee, and in fact there is evidence that up to 50% of employees fail to complete their international assignment, with the major reason being an inability (on the part of the employee or family members) to adapt to cultural differences.
A second type of training that is frequently required is communication training. Both language training and other communication training (verbal, nonverbal, and symbolic) may be needed before sending an employee on assignment. Communication is sometimes difficult even when everyone is speaking the same language.
Would you care to guess what is likely to happen after a lengthy international assignment when an individual (and possibly their family, too) returns to their home country? The same adjustment will be necessary as they return home, because they have adapted to another culture and other ways of doing everyday things. So reacculturation training will most likely be necessary. Repatriation generally should include a series of steps that need to occur in order to get the employee back into the home-country work routine.
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