Economic globalization and large-scale operation of enterprises promote the increasing number of multinational enterprises, and the organizational structure of enterprises has undergone great changes, resulting in new organizational structures such as boundaryless organization, multinational companies and multinational companies. Expatriate employees are new employees with the emergence of these organizational types. However, enterprises often face this phenomenon: overseas projects have been negotiated, only to find that no one can send them, which leads to the postponement of the project. Therefore, how to break through the difficulties and speed up the training of overseas talents has become the focus of talent strategy for many enterprises to expand overseas. It is difficult to train expatriates. Where is the difficulty?
Expatriates need to integrate into various cultural characteristics, which determines that training is like practice.
Different cultural atmosphere and cultural patterns determine different personality traits, social values and ways of thinking, so the core competence of expatriate talents is cross-cultural management competence. Expatriates need to overcome the conflicts between different cultures under cross-cultural conditions and create a unique culture of the enterprise. This process inevitably requires expatriates to understand how the culture of the host country affects the shaping of the character and behavior of local employees, and at the same time combine the enterprise with its own traditional culture to form effective management to complete the mission entrusted by the headquarters. It is easy to change the natural environment, but it is difficult to change a person's cultural memory, just like when we go abroad, we will unconsciously look for Chinese restaurants.
The cross-cultural management ability of expatriates requires that you can accept and integrate into the culture of the host country, implement management according to that traditional habit, and organize the management activities of enterprises with another way of thinking, values and ways of doing things. You will find that there are two different cultural ideas that cross you and give you instructions, some of which are often unacceptable to you, and sometimes you will feel very tired and even at a loss. Therefore, the training of expatriates, like monks or missionaries, requires personal cognitive and practical efforts to better solve the contradiction that overseas projects need to play different roles according to different cultures.
Paper-based training conditions restrict the rapid improvement of expatriates' ability.
Due to the late internationalization and small scale of enterprises in China, the training methods of expatriates are mostly superficial training in foreign culture, history, customs, etiquette and other theoretical aspects, and there is often no condition for expatriates to contact and understand deep-seated cultural concepts such as values and personality prejudice through enterprises or communities in the host country. However, practice is far more complicated than theory, which leads many expatriates to understand the culture of the host country only at the theoretical level, and once they go abroad, they are at a loss. When the author visited abroad, a leader complained to me that no matter how many times foreign government officials were invited to dinner, they all ate and ate, did things without mercy, or strictly followed the rules. In fact, he still doesn't understand the differences between Chinese and foreign cultures. The order of doing things in China is "the law of reason", while foreign culture is just the opposite of "the law of affection". If you invite him to dinner, you will confuse them.
On the other hand, expatriates do not have mentors, training units, hands-on opportunities and so on like domestic project personnel. It is precisely because of the lack of practical carriers for overseas competence training that expatriates often need to be retrained in the host country to master the operational essentials, which has caused many expatriates to train in China for several years, but their actual abilities are difficult to be greatly improved.
There is a risk that the investment loss is greater than the training income of expatriates.
As far as enterprises are concerned, expatriates are mostly employees with outstanding ability and good performance, and because of the particularity of expatriates, they need long-term training and invest a lot of manpower and material resources. However, because such talents are scarce resources in the market, after two or three years of training, other enterprises will spend a lot of money to dig people, and enterprises often act as wedding dresses for others, thus reducing the enthusiasm of enterprises to invest in training such talents.
Personally, if you want to be an expatriate, you must put down your current major and work, accept the arrangement of the enterprise, learn all kinds of knowledge related to expatriate work, participate in various activities, and sometimes give up your current position. The purpose of paying this opportunity cost is in exchange for the position and generous salary of the future expatriate unit. However, the training of personnel sent abroad by enterprises is often just to reserve talents. For individuals, it is inevitable that if the project does not go smoothly or there is no overseas assignment opportunity at that time, they will weigh the risks and losses they have to bear.
Therefore, enterprises and employees' psychological worries about the possible risks in the training process or results have reduced the investment in training to a certain extent, thus slowing down the growth of expatriate talents.
Four countermeasures to solve the difficulty of expatriate training
Faced with the above problems, how should we solve them? The author summarizes the following four measures in practice.
Develop a training plan for foreign employees
Everything is established in advance, and it is abolished if it is not foreseen. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Guan Yu was about 48 years old when he was sent abroad to guard Jingzhou, but by the time he failed in Maicheng and lost Jingzhou, he was already a 60-year-old white-haired old man. This is a typical case of expatriates lacking training and succession planning. Expatriates are strategic talents for overseas development of enterprises. Because training is difficult and it takes a long time to become a talent, it is even more necessary to make a long-term training plan, including the overall needs of expatriates, selection conditions, selection procedures, welfare benefits, regular intermodulation, callback arrangements, career planning, etc., so that enterprises and expatriates have clear expectations and goals. There are quite a few expatriates in the enterprise where the author works, some of whom have been expatriated for many years. However, because it is difficult for enterprises to have successors and there are no suitable vacancies in the headquarters, expatriates can't go back, which leads to expatriates becoming "exiles". In addition, as the saying goes, "when a tree is moved, it will die, but when a person is moved, it will give birth". If the expatriates are not rotated in a planned way, because most expatriates hold major positions in the enterprise and control the important external social resources of the enterprise, it may eventually lead to the mentality of expatriates, such as the self-respect of the soldiers of the government, which will cause unfavorable situations for expatriates and the headquarters. Therefore, it is necessary to solve the difficulty in training expatriates from the perspective of planning expatriates.
Do a good job in selection and cultivate expatriate passes.
After solving the systematic planning of expatriate talents, enterprises should effectively prevent the phenomenon of "oranges in Huainan and oranges in Huaibei" and improve the success rate of expatriate talents training through strict entrance management.
In the selection of expatriates, there are usually such phenomena: on the one hand, the special requirements of expatriate posts for foreign language ability keep some talents with outstanding professional ability out of the door; On the other hand, the generous treatment and decent work of expatriate posts have made some people try their best to find relationships and squeeze into the special train of expatriate talents. The main leaders of enterprises also tend to arrange their own relatives and friends, which often leads enterprises to relax their conditions and include some people who do not meet the training conditions into the ranks of expatriate talents. These two phenomena are obviously not conducive to the selection of truly suitable expatriates. So how to choose? The author believes that the following three points are particularly critical.
First of all, according to the actual situation of the project in the target country, it is set that the expatriates must have some special qualities, and the special qualities required by the project in the host country should be reflected in the selection criteria, such as a good understanding of the host country's culture and strong adaptability to uncertain environment. Instead of making a one-sided choice just by looking at whether your foreign language, experience and major are good enough.