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The Expatriate

An Expat Story 
An expatriate (expat) is an employee who is sent to live aboard for a defined period of time with or without his/her family. To avoid sending an employee abroad and having a bad experience, the HR managers would need to give the expat the pre work training, in work training, and after work training. By doing so, it would enable an expert to better become accustomed to the language, customs, and culture abroad. Also, it would enable an expat to better adapt to the oversea communities. To Avoid the expat from becoming homesick, the HR manager may want to arrange to have the expat return back to his home country more frequently if there is a need. Piercy’s “Global Human Resource Management”, a YouTube film, shows an assignee who agrees to move himself and his family from New York to Paris, France. Yet, it was not a successful experience due to both personal issues and his company’s neglects in managing and arranging the trip. The Assignee eventually requested to terminate his contract to be able to return to New York (Piercy, 2014).
Companies might be experiencing international crises when they have the premature return of expats that have failed their assignments. To avoid this kind of crisis from occurring, managers are striving to make progress in improving expats’ training in order to help them become more capable in their performance and more adapting to the culture differences. Intending to encourage and retain more gifted expats, international companies are encouraging the welcoming and suitable HR policies and procedures (Chew, 2004). In this video that we have viewed ,Samuel, the assignee, has experienced a failed expat experience. He had difficulty in dealing with the French environment. Although he had leaned some French in high school and in college, neither his wife nor their young children speak French. The family seemed to have difficulty in merging into the French community. Also, the school’s neighborhood seemed not to be a satisfactory one for their children. The company should have managed a welcoming community for them, or  assigned a manager in France that they could have consulted with. On the other hand, the assignee and his family should have been ready to make a change, and that they would have known that they would be doing things differently while in a different cultural environment. 
There are challenges for multinational companies in ways that a HR manager performs the management of the company. It includes the premature return of expats, the failures  of competing assignments, and the poor retention of those expats who return (Janet Chew, 2004). To avoid having those events to continue occurring, managers can use the right ways to manage expats; for instance, while making international assignments, expats should be trained to be able to work with a global leadership development (Black & Gregersen,1999). Also, HR managers should be able to gain a return on their investments in overseas assignments. For instance, managers should have the right people who have the right skills for the right job position abroad. HR Managers need to build in a monthly check-in system to be able to have close communications with the expats so they are able to give some time for assistance and support. With this, the assignments could more effectively be performed. Also, HR managers would want to plan a goal for their assignees in which they would share their working experiences they have gained in their global assignments within their company. By doing this, they would transfer the valuable knowledge they have learned/acquired back to their company which would assist the future expats to be able to grow and assist the company in the company’s further developments (Molinsky, 2016).

References 
Black, J. & Gregersen, H. (1999). The Right Way to Manage Expats. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/1999/03/the-right-way-to-manage-expats
Chew, J. (2004). Managing MNC Expatriates through Crises: A Challenge for International Human Resource Management, Research and Practice in Human Resource management 12(2), 1-30
Molinsky, A. & Hahn, M. (2016). 5 Tips for Managing Successful Overseas Assignments. Retrieved from: hbr.org/2016/03/5-tips-for-manageing-successful-overseas-assignemnts
Piercy, D. (2014). Global Human Resource Management. [Video File]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COQgJyCpU4A

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