By not communicating with HR staff in other countries, including those countries where you send your employees, you’re missing out on valuable knowledge and jeopardising the success of expatriate assignments.

Imagine this hypothetical scenario. A European multinational sends hundreds of workers abroad each year, many from its home office in the UK and some from its offices across the continent. “Mary” co-ordinates all HR issues for employees sent from London while “Pierre” has the same responsibility for employees who leave the Paris office for assignments in Europe and Asia.

Mary has worked in international HR for 10 years and understands many of the issues and problems that come with expatriate assignments. Despite his extensive knowledge of the French system, Pierre, however, has done IHR for only a year and is still struggling to make sure paperwork gets completed in time and that the employee and his family are properly settled. He hasn’t even considered what will happen when it’s time for these employees to return to Paris.

Mary knows Pierre works for the company in Paris and has essentially the same job, but she has never met him and has exchanged only occasional emails with him. Pierre finds Mary cool and distant, concerned more with home office employees than with helping him.

Unfortunately, this type of situation — where HR managers across a multinational company do not communicate and share knowledge with each other — arises all too often.

Many Europe-based HR sector workers are alarmed at what they see as a serious lack of communication between the various personnel staff working in multinational offices across the world.

Lydia Herremans heads Eindhoven-based Hestia Expatriate Consultants, which advises multinationals on expatriate policy. She says a degree of difference between a multinational’s HR departments is inevitable, but that at the moment, cross-country communication for HR professionals is so poor that it can damage a companies’ chance of success.

“This is a real problem for multinationals and their HR departments. A company is supposedly one unit, but really every office in each country just wants to protect its own shop. This means despite working under one name, all offices have their own hidden agenda.”

But while regional branches may run slightly differently, Herremans says this does not mean they are also obliged to continue to misunderstand or know nothing about each other.

Moreover, if all HR managers make efforts to learn about each others' practices, they could stand to gain valuable tips that they can then implement back home.

“The differences between HR practices and business cultures are many and varied. For example, workers in Asia have on the whole not yet learnt to be assertive, whereas this is a respected and sometimes encouraged element of Western business culture,” she explains.

“HR staff should make sure they go on intercultural training to firstly learn why these differences exist. Secondly, this training will allow them to meet their fellow HR colleagues in person, which makes it easier to maintain communication after the event.”

While intercultural training is invaluable to a multinational’s internal communications, Herremans says the fact that it is highly important does not mean it must take place within a formal setting.

If anything, a week or at least weekend away from the office, in a new, relaxed or invigorating environment can provide HR staff the chance to view the training as what it should be – an exciting and inspirational learning exercise and a chance to build bridges.

Canadian expatriate Mary van der Boon is the managing director of Global TMC, the Netherlands-based international management training and consultancy firm.

She agrees that the secret to better communication lies in intercultural training, but says HR professionals in the West have the most work to do in this field, particularly when it comes to correcting their inaccurate perception of Asian HR practices.

“Human Resources has just so many different meanings depending on who you are talking to and where they are from,” van der Boon says. “Unfortunately, here in the West, around 50 percent of CEOs don’t really understand the idea of HR and even see as a form of ‘internal enemy’ because of the cost incurred in managing expatriate workers amongst other issues.”

Technical departments in a company, where workers generally find it hard to think in “people terms”, have the hardest time.

“They associate HR only with compensation and benefits,” explains van der Boon. “In Asia, however, there is a completely different attitude towards HR, and the HR manager is actually the most powerful person in the whole company.”

She believes Western HR managers desperately need intercultural training because without it, they will continue to make damaging assumptions about Eastern business practices.

“When Eastern HR managers sense they are not really being valued, they in turn will feel snubbed. All this just makes for no mutual understanding or common company goal – which is ironic if all this conflict and misconceptions occurs within just one firm.”

Additionally, when HR managers from different offices don’t talk to each other, the chance that the employee will be successfully repatriated decreases dramatically.

Roxanne de Beaumont, senior global information consultant at the Amstelveen office of global HR consulting firm William M. Mercer, says poor communication between HR professionals in multinationals’ various offices is making a shambles of repatriation.

“The expat’s return is not paid anything like enough attention by HR professionals at home and in the host country. Also nowhere near enough thought is given to the expat’s overall career and to take into account the fact that he has been away from home for some time,” de Beaumont says.

 “All this stems from poor communication between the HR managers who send the worker abroad and receive him in the host country. The home country HR manager often wrongly assumes everything is just the same for the expat. In reality, however, his whole life and outlook has been altered, and what was home is not really home anymore, and the role he previously held may now be unsuitable.”

As a result of this failed communication, most HR managers in the home country have no idea of the expat workers’ feelings and expectations and in turn many expatriates end up leaving a company.

De Beaumont believes HR and the expats can both work on their relationship, with the HR manager in the home office keeping regular contact by email or phone, and the expat doing the same — along with a trip to the home office at least once a year to see the HR manager there.

“Communication is everything,” says de Beaumont, “and at the end of the day it is the responsibility of a company do all it can to get this sorted between its HR staff scattered across the globe.”

March 2002

UK-based freelance journalist Rob Hyde is a regular contributor to Expatica HR. A British national, Rob has lived and worked in England, France, Germany and Austria. His work has appeared in The Times, The Sunday Express and the Wall Street Journal Europe.