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Bringing them home again.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Companies that send personnel abroad are well aware of the work and personal adjustments required on the part of employees and their families. But most don't give a thought to addressing problems those employees will experience when they return home after an international assignment. With foresight and good sense, companies can develop repatriation procedures to ensure more satisfied staff and fewer problems.

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Repatriation or cross-cultural reentry is the transition from the foreign country back into one's home country and organization. Since this transition merely involves a return home, neither returnees nor their home country organization expect this to be a difficult process. To their great surprise, however, many returnees and their families soon discover that they are returning neither to the home that they remembered nor to the homecoming they had anticipated.

Repatriates often experience problems similar to those encountered in initial cross-cultural entry into a foreign environment. These involve readjusting to their home country work and nonwork environments as well as interacting again with home country nationals. Until recently, international firms had considered reentry to be a relatively easy process, and it is clear that very few firms have developed definitive transition strategies for their repatriates. But mounting empirical and anecdotal evidence has demonstrated that reentry is a major problem, presenting expatriates and their families with new and unanticipated challenges, to the extent that repatriation for some is even more traumatic than adjustment to the foreign assignment.

There are several negative consequences of failing to develop definitive transition strategies. The first is high reported levels of repatriate dissatisfaction with the repatriation process in general and with the level of support in this process by their home country organization in particular. Second, there is a reluctance on the part of repatriating managers and their spouses to accept a second overseas assignment--not because of the difficulty in having to adjust to the overseas assignment in the first place but because of the difficulty in returning. Third, as a direct consequence, research documents a high attrition rate in the first year after return. Average reported attrition rates range between 15 percent and 25 percent for the first year, with subsequently nearly 40 percent leaving within three years. Fourth, these high attrition rates in turn result in a significant loss of both investment funds and international expertise for the international firm. Fifth, these repatriation failures may decrease a firm's ability to attract future expatriates.

A major obstacle to the readjustment process is the fact that the need for such readjustment is so unexpected. Many adjustment problems are anticipated when people are sent on overseas assignments, and international firms have begun to set up predeparture selection and training programs as well as in-country support mechanisms to help expatriates and their family members adjust to work, interacting with the foreign nationals, and the general environment and culture overseas.

However, since repatriation readjustment problems are so unexpected, such programs are lacking upon return and repatriates often feel abandoned, left to fend for themselves. Home organizations, for their part, seem to believe that the transition back home is such an easy process that there is no need to make any special efforts for repatriates or their families. Home organizations also express concern regarding the cost of such programs and their...

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