January 2000

Editorial

The Power of Dreams

Alain Verstandig, Managing Director, Net Expat   Finally! We've talked about it so much and here we are at last in the Year 2000! Even if for purists the 3rd millennium does not actually begin for another year, we are nevertheless a bit further into our future… Of course we cannot see Martians at every street corner, of course we still get stuck in traffic jams without our own flying cars… But even if all our childhood dreams haven't come true, we have made fantastic progress. At the beginning of this Year 2000, I wish that you may pursue your dreams and get closer to making them come true. What about my dream? Companies without frontiers, employing more mobile men and women who will be happy to move around the globe, allowing the whole family to get the best out of their expatriation! It is neither science, nor our actions which really make the world progress, it is our dreams!….

Best Practices

An Expat life at IBM

Manfred Schnabel, General Manager, Learning Services EMEA,IBM Global Services Mr. Schnabel, could you tell us where your expat experiences began? My first expatriation goes back 10 years when we moved from Germany to Paris. It was a wonderful experience for both my wife and myself. When we arrived my wife had a number of worries, and was reticent about coming to Paris. And when we had to leave Paris she was the one who did not want to go back to Germany! We both had the chance to learn French and to meet so many new faces amongst both the French and the foreign population as we chose not to live in an expat ghetto. In fact we are still in touch with some of the people we met over there. Of course we also visited France a lot too, and apart from the overseas departments we think we must have been just about everywhere. I would probably not have tried expatriation for a second time if the first experience had not been so rewarding for both my wife and myself! IBM has realised what is at stake in this area, and does a great deal to help not just the expats but their whole family during expatriation. So, after Paris, the city of light, you must have had high expectations for your next expatriation! In fact, after Paris we did go back to Germany, East Germany! To Karl-Marx-Stadt, now again called Chemnitz. IBM had rather an unusual assignment for me: IBM had just launched a joint venture with a state-owned company located in post-reunification East Germany, and I was responsible for getting this company up and running. After the Parisian atmosphere, the socialist universe of Karl-Marx-Stadt with its markedly backward development was a much bigger culture change for me, even if we did all speak the same language! I had to explain totally new concepts to everyone, such as profit, the responsibility of individuals, the responsibility of a company … but it was also a very good experience. And how did your wife take to this new departure? This time she stayed in Stuttgart: my assignment was supposed to be for a brief period of 18 months, although I ended up staying for …. 5 years! The apartment I lived in there was smaller than the one I had had when I was a student at university. I did what is known as commuting: I stayed there during the week and at weekends I rejoined my wife. It was during this time that we decided we would not be expatriated again if my wife and I could not be together. How did you cope with this commuting? How do you find it as an alternative solution to full expatriation? I would not have agreed if I had known it was for 5 years! I think that commuting as an alternative solution to expatriation can have both its good and bad sides: I saw a lot of successful cases, and a lot of failures! I think that if you have young children it can be very difficult. Generally speaking, no one should agree to this kind of arrangement without the full, enlightened agreement of his or her spouse! One great survival tip: never leave on Sunday evening, and never return home on Saturday morning. Make sure you benefit from a whole weekend! We disciplined ourselves to do this. The really negative side was that there was no longer any room for improvisation in our lives. We could no longer decide at 5 p.m. what we were going to do. Everything had to be planned. I find that made for a serious reduction in my quality of life ! Another big difference from traditional expatriation is that you do not become assimilated into the new culture in the same way: being alone, you work very long days and in the evening you stay in your hotel. Although it is feasible on the business side, on the personal side you miss out on a lot of things … You can't really call it an expatriation! You could never really claim to have been expatriated if all you ever do is commute ! Would you do it again? No! This is my position. I am not answering for others. Everyone has to decide on his/her work-life-balance. Would you suggest commuting to a member of your team? I would force myself to be honest about my experience and help them make up their own mind. If it was for less than a year and they were fully aware of what it entails, then why not. So after East Germany, came Brussels. What is your life like here? It's rather easy because the people and the city are very open. No one attaches much importance to the language you speak. Apart from having to have a fire extinguisher in your car, it is not much different to Germany, you can tell you're in Europe. And then IBM has arranged everything to suit us. IBM really tries to help its employees and looks after the whole family. And the main thing is you can't ever make a mistake when going to a restaurant in Belgium: the food is always good ! In a more general way, what is IBM's overall vision of expatriation and mobility? Today, IBM expatriates its employees in a planned and promoting way, because IBM needs to be a global company and because the employees have to develop and gain experience. However, this increased need for mobility is balanced out to a certain extent by the possibilities offered by new technologies, like videoconferences, e-mail and the usage of collaborative software like Lotus. So, on top of physical assignments and expatriation, at IBM we talk of a " virtual assignment ": the manager and his/her teams may be in different countries. For example, in my case, I am responsible for Europe, Middle East and Africa and my team is scattered all over the place. This does change the way we work internally: but there still have to be " physical " meetings from time to time and I visit each region about twice a year. What is more, I spend all my time on the telephone in teleconferences. But if this is to succeed, I first have to meet the people, speak to them face to face so that I can " recognise " them later on the telephone. Otherwise it is very difficult and not as productive as an organisation based on working physically together. On the one hand companies need more and more mobile people whom they can expatriate, but on the other hand technology is reducing this need. In any case, today IBM encourages and supports a considerable number of employees in order to make their expatriation easy and a natural career development.

HR Experience

Partners appear earlier than expected!

Jim Platt-Higgins, Programme Director U.K., Net Expat At the beginning of the 1990's Esso noticed that the best graduate applicants placed opportunities to work abroad very high on their list of priorities when seeking an employer. We knew that our competitors appeared to offer more expatriate assignments for their graduates than us and so, as Head of Recruitment, I initiated what we called the Euroswap Programme but which was later given a smarter name of the European Graduate Interchange Programme, or EGIP. Our aim was to meet the graduates' aspirations, and we did this by establishing a more cost-effective method of sending young managers on overseas assignments. This also enriched the pool of international talent and experience within Esso. At the time, this was a major innovation and the programme is still running successfully today. The challenges we faced were: · young managers had limited experience or skills to justify the high cost of conventional expatriate assignments; · the operating companies were reluctant to incur the extra costs associated with receiving an expatriate with no obvious extra skills than a local graduate possessed; · a lack of appropriate language skills - most European candidates could speak English, a few could speak French but only a tiny minority were fluent in Norwegian, German, Italian, Dutch, etc. There was inevitably greater demand for places in certain countries and as co-ordinator I had to manage the very tough horse-trading necessary to keep the ins and outs equal in each operating company! We saw the potential benefits to be threefold: · the programme would develop a cadre of young internationally minded managers with experience of other operating companies and cultures; · it would be a recruitment attraction for the best young graduates; · our assumptions was that young managers would be less likely to have family ties and so they would be cheaper and easier to assign. How did we set up the programme? We got six of Esso's European companies to agree to swap one or two young managers for a fixed eighteen month assignment to each of the other five companies. The young managers were about three years out of university and were typically going into their third company assignment on this programme. The terms were very basic - almost no extras apart from the provision of rented accommodation and the reimbursement of travel costs. In theory you simply drove yourself to your new country with whatever personal belongings you wanted in the car with you. Language training costs were met. The receiving company paid the sending company whatever the local company would pay a local manager at that level and the sending company picked up the extra cost of rent etc. Mentoring managers were assigned to each assignee to ensure that their progress was monitored and their re-entry planned. Volunteers had to be of recognised high potential and the programme was closely monitored by Esso's European management development executives. In particular, no extensions of the eighteen months were permitted - no matter how much the host company had grown to love the assignees! Conclusions Those who went were almost universally successful, fitting in well, acquiring useful experience in a different setting and often in a second language. Esso had (inexpensively) developed a pool of young international talent ready for the more global approach to recruitment and management development which is now becoming widespread in major companies. However, we also made a most interesting and disturbing discovery: a) despite the clear enthusiasm for expatriate opportunities amongst graduates at the time of recruitment, and b) despite management's assumption that after only three years the graduates would still be very mobile; c) it was nevertheless surprising how many of them had acquired partners and other responsibilities within their first three years which in fact made them reluctant to take up these assignments. This suggests that no matter how early in a career an assigned abroad is offered, the need to address the issues affecting the expatriate partner is often of vital importance. In the case of EGIP it was frequently the reason for not applying for the programme. Perhaps if Net Expat had existed when I was running the programme we might have persuaded even more of our best young managers to take up the assignments they had said they craved at the time they were recruited?

Communication

The expatriate's lifeline

Richard Hill Intercultural consultant, trainer and author of "We Europeans", "EuroManagers & Martians" and other books on intercultural understanding.   One of the comforting things about expatriation is the thought that, in the virtual world we now live in, we can contact our fellow-workers, family and friends back home at the touch of a computer button. Moreover information technology not only abolishes distance, it also helps to create a level playing field. There a lot of people - not just Nordics! - who prefer the relative anonymity of e-mail messages to the stress of face-to-face confrontation. We even know cases of cowardly bosses who conduct performance reviews over the Internet! Yet there is a limit to what the Internet and e-mail can do. As human beings we are attuned to much more than a computer keyboard. Our voice, eyes and ears are essential to the act of really effective two-way communication. According to neuro-linguistic researchers, even when we are talking to a group of people, over 90% of the impact is due to our tone of voice and our body language: posture, gestures, eye contact. The actual content of our presentation - what we actually say - accounts for less than 10%. If that applies in face-to-face communication, how impoverished we are when we rely exclusively on an Internet link! IT's lack of impact is particularly a problem when it comes to establishing new relationships. "You have to meet people first," says Ellen Knapp of PricewaterhouseCoopers, "it is important to gesticulate". "E-mail can be disastrous for relationships," Andy Owen-Jones, IT Manager of Virgin Atlantic, concurs. " It displaces face-to-face contact and even people picking up the phone and talking." The limitations of e-mail are very evident in a business environment. "We have operations all over Europe and we couldn't survive without e-mail," says Mark Smale, VP of European Marketing with the IMI software group. "But when I find myself together with my other managers, we do in a week what would take a month over the net." Andrea Tevlin, a consultant with no less than Microsoft, echoes these feelings: "When you pull yourself off-line, you have more time to converse with people, think conceptually and think about how to make the human system you're operating in operate differently." So the Internet has its limitations even if, for the expatriate manager, it is a lifeline. The key is to use it intelligently, knowing when an electronic message will do the job and when it's more important to get out there and 'press the flesh'. For the roaming expatriate it's important to realise that people use telecommunication tools in different ways, depending on their culture. As one simple example, when a Brit calls the Continent, he or she tends to launch straight into "I would like to speak to So-and-So." No attempt at identification, whereas a Continental will normally start by saying 'Here is (name). May I speak to So-and-So?" Ultimately, wouldn't an exclusively virtual world be just a bit boring? As Luca Lindner, the CEO of Alfa Romeo, said recently, "International management is not a matter of e-mail and video conferencing, but about looking people in the eyes. It's still a matter of blood, sweat and tears!"

Training

The Importance of Foreign Languages

René Bastin, General Manager, Ceran Lingua International   The economy, as it is presented to us today, proceeds on a global scale. Consequently, the language barrier should no longer be considered an insurmountable problem. Let us consider two aspects: 1. The need for foreign languages within a company Here it is a question of relations between colleagues, subordinates or superiors, given that presently a growing number of companies employ people from abroad amongst their staff, either on apprenticeships or with the aim of " circulating " their middle and top executives if they have subsidiaries in other countries. We therefore speak of executive mobility. In order to integrate these people as well as possible, it is important to make a gesture by showing a willingness to speak their language. This can occur at any moment: meetings, requests for information, during teamwork. The role of the manager is to integrate any person into his group, and for that reason he must be willing to listen to his team, to understand its needs, to encourage everyone to participate, even those whose command of the language is not so good. This implies a minimum knowledge of the mother tongue of the other person, or at least of a language which permits the worker to feel at ease, to express himself with a certain degree of accuracy, in order to avoid misunderstandings. Let us also emphasise the problems encountered by managers living abroad, wishing to deal with officialdom or lead a normal social life. If, in addition, the linguistic knowledge is lacking, it becomes a real "Mission Impossible". 2. The necessity for foreign languages on a world-wide basis Today we are experiencing the globalisation of the economy. Companies export abroad where their clientele is based. They import from abroad where they have contacts with suppliers. We hear talk everywhere about the opening up of borders, and of a single economic Europe. Consequently competition is growing. To remain competitive it is necessary to move forward, to conquer new markets, to reach other countries, and as a result to speak foreign languages. The current market no longer depends simply on meeting supply and demand but above all the emergence of customer service. When we speak in terms of total quality, Human Resources appear so important to us that nothing is possible without them -this cannot be overlooked. It is the worker who is responsible for the product and its quality! Managers must therefore convince, argue, negotiate in a language which is not their own but which permits them to increase their turnover, their market share, by means of a more cultural approach, a better understanding and respecting others. Let us underline the fact that open-mindedness, the acceptance of different cultures comes through travelling and learning languages, -our most important means of communication. Uni-linguism is considered these days as a handicap, which prevents communication, attracts prejudice. Those language communities which have only relied on their own languages to date are finding it extremely difficult to open up to other cultures and to get to grips with foreign languages and thus keep up with the competition. For a manager, knowing other languages means moving forward, progressing, … and he who does not progress, regresses!