Schumpeter
Not-so-happy returns
Big businesses fail to make the most of employees with foreign experience
Nov 7th 2015 | From the print edition
·熊彼得
·回报不尽人意
·大公司尚未对“海归”人尽其用
COMPANIES devote a lot of thought to sending people abroad. They offer foreign postings to their most promising employees. They sweeten the deal with higher salaries and big allowances, and sometimes help to find work for spouses. But when it comes to bringing the employees home, it is a different story. One study suggests that a quarter of firms provide no help for repatriates at all. Many others offer at best a few links to websites.
许多公司都想方设法把员工送出国门，为它们最有前途的员工提供海外职位。公司还锦上添花，提供加薪、高额补贴，有时还帮他们的配偶找工作。然而，到这些员工调回国时，就是另一番景象了。一项研究表明，四分之一的公司不会为海归员工提供任何帮助。其它许多公司最多也只是给他们提供几个网址链接而已。
Big companies are more globalised than ever. So you might think that they would treat staff with foreign experience as particularly important for maintaining their competitive advantage. Yet in practice they neglect such employees, blithely assuming they will soon be back in the swing of head-office life. The cost of this neglect is high. Sebastian Reiche of IESE business school in Spain estimates that anything between 10% and 60% of “repats” quit the company within a couple of years of returning home. Their attrition rate is notably higher than for those not sent abroad.
大公司的全球化程度如今比以往任何时候都要高。因此，你可能会认为它们觉得有海外经验的员工对于保持竞争优势特别重要。然而，实际上，大公司往往乐观地认为这些员工不久会重新适应总部生活，因而忽视了他们。而这种忽视的代价高昂。西班牙IESE商学院的 Sebastian Reiche 估计，10%~60%的海归员工会在回国后的几年内辞职。他们的离职率远远高于那些未被派遣海外的员工。
This represents a squandering of investment, given that expats often cost several times as much as locals to employ. It damages the leadership pipeline. Worst of all, it can be a subsidy to rival firms: they end up with the people best placed to bury your company, trained at your expense.
外派员工的消费成本远大于本地员工，所以这种做法无益于巨大的浪费。这也对领导梯队建设造成了破坏，还可能会让有为人才不愿意接受海外任职。最糟糕的是，这对于竞争对手来说却是一项资助：他们为你们耗资培养的这些人才安排了最佳岗位，令其成为你们公司的掘墓人。
Repats often complain of culture shock: things that once seemed familiar about home can seem strange and parochial. No one in the office wants to hear their war stories about the struggles of working in foreign climes. They find they have lost their niche at headquarters—partly because the balance of power has changed (allies have left and newcomers have greased their way into favour) and partly because they have got used to running their own fief rather than slotting into a hierarchy. Add to this the fact that they have to adjust to a lower standard of living—particularly if they have the misfortune to be moving back to an expensive city like London—and it is a recipe for discontent. One review of the academic literature, by Jan Sebastian Knocke of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, notes that “there are signs of repatriation being more difficult than integration into a culturally distant country.”
海归员工常常抱怨文化冲击：曾经熟悉的本土事物似乎变得陌生、偏狭。而办公室里又无人想听他们在异国他乡奋斗的血汗史。他们觉得自己失去了在总部的位置，部分归因于权力平衡已经改变（盟友已离开，而新同事已然得宠），也有一部分的原因是他们已经习惯了经营自己的领地，而不再愿意跻身于层级限制。另外一个事实是他们不得不适应较低的生活水平（特别是如果他们不幸调回像伦敦这样物价昂贵的城市），这终究会滋生不满。埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学的Jan Sebastian Knocke在所著的一部学术文献评论中，指出“有迹象表明归国比融入一个文化距离遥远的国度更困难”。
Most repats would be happy to put up with a bit of culture shock if they came back to a plum job. But most do not. Clare Hughes of PwC, a consulting firm, says that a striking number of them are given no properly defined job. “They wander the corridors or get given ‘projects’,” she says. A 2013 study by Christina Bailey and Lisa Dragoni of Cornell University shows that, far from moving up the hierarchy, the majority of repats return to a job on the same level as the one they had left when going abroad.
大多数海归如果回来有一份肥差，还是会乐意忍受一些文化冲击的。然而，大多数人并没有肥缺。会计事务所普华永道的克莱尔休斯（Clare Hughes）表示，有显著数量的海归人士回国后没有明确具体的工作。“他们在走廊上闲逛，亦或等着给点 “项目”，她说。康奈尔大学的克里斯蒂娜贝利（Christina Bailey） 和莉莎德拉格尼（Lisa Dragoni）2013年所做的一份研究表明，绝大多数的海归人员非但没有在管理阶层上晋级，反而是调回到与他们出国时所在的级别相同的工作岗位。
A 2011 study by Monika Hamori and Burak Koyuncu of IE, another Spanish business school, casts doubt on the entire idea that a foreign posting is the road to the top. Ms Hamori and Mr Koyuncu studied the CEOs of the 500 biggest European companies and the 500 biggest American ones (the total came to 1,001 because one company had two CEOs), to see what effect being sent abroad had on their careers. They found that the more foreign experience the employees had accumulated—that is, the more foreign postings they had been sent on and the more time they had spent abroad—the longer it had taken to reach the top.
另一家西班牙商学院IE的莫妮卡海默里（Monika Hamori） 和布拉克柯云库（Burak Koyuncu）于2011年做了一份研究，对海外任职是通往最高管理层的必经之路这整个观念提出质疑。海默里女士和柯云库先生对欧洲500强及美国500强公司的CEO（因为其中有家公司拥有两位CEO，受访总人数达1001）进行了调查，探讨派驻海外对他们的职业生涯产生了何种影响。他们发现，职员积累的海外经验越多（即他们被派驻海外任职的岗位越多，及在海外度过的时间越长），他们要到达最高管理层所费的时日越久。
The majority of the 1,001 CEOs—60% in Europe and 76% in the United States—had never had a foreign posting. Of those with foreign experience, more than half were the CEO of a company other than the one that had sent them abroad. So, any doubts employees may have about accepting foreign postings turn out to be well-grounded. Out of sight often does mean out of mind: bosses over-reward the people they meet every day compared with those rarely seen around the office.
这1001位CEO中，绝大多数（欧洲60%，美国76%）从未在国外任职。而具有海外经验的人中，半数以上是公司的CEO，但不在派他们出国的那家公司任职。因此，员工可能对于接受海外任命的任何顾虑，原来都是有充分根据的。“眼不见”通常意味着“心不念”：与很少在办公室露面的那些人比起来，老板们通常会过度奖励他们每天会碰面的人。
Companies’ poor management of foreign transfers extends beyond their blasé treatment of individuals. Firms often justify overseas postings in terms of the circulation of ideas. But repats routinely complain that their bosses ignore the time they have spent abroad. They do not give them jobs that allow them to use their experience, let alone provide them with ways to spread their new insights to other employees. A lot of expensively accumulated global expertise is allowed to moulder away.
公司对于海外调派的管理不善延伸到了不只是对个人的冷漠对待。公司常常用思想交流作为海外任命的正当理由。但海归通常抱怨老板对于他们在国外花费的时间视而不见。他们不给海归人员提供可运用海外经验的工作，更不用说为他们提供向其他员工传播新见解的途径。任凭大量花费巨资而积累的国外专业知识腐烂变质。
Welcome (back) aboard
How can companies improve this dismal record? Half the battle lies in recognising that repatriation is a problem. Bosses need to fight the out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem by making sure that those on foreign assignments have champions back at HQ who look after their interests. They need to pay as much attention to “re-boarding” repats as they do to “on-boarding” new employees: for example, PwC holds cocktail parties at which returning staff can meet each other, and provides them with mentors to help them fit back in. Firms should also find ways to help repats disseminate what they have learned abroad. But some of the onus also lies with the employees themselves. You cannot disappear for a few years and expect to be welcomed back like a hero: you need to keep cultivating your network back home and pestering your allies and mentors to keep your name in the mix.
欢迎复职
公司如何才能改善这一不良记录？一半的努力在于认识到海归归国是一个问题。老板们应确保那些派驻海外的员工在总部仍有照顾他们利益的拥趸，这样才能防止“眼不见、心不念”的问题。他们应该像重视新员工“入职”一样，重视海归人员的“复职”，如普华永道会举办供归国员工互相碰头的鸡尾酒会，并为他们指派导师，帮助他们重新适应公司环境。公司也应该寻找途径，帮助海归分享他们在国外所学。然而，有一些也是员工自己需要承担的责任。你不可能在消失几年之后，指望受到英雄凯旋一样的欢迎。你需要不断培植在国内的网络，和你的盟友与导师打成一片。
There are some signs that companies are beginning to recognise that they have a problem—some are even talking about measuring their return on investment for foreign postings and holding senior managers responsible for the loss of repats. But the pace of improvement is glacial. Most CEOs are capable of giving an elegant spiel about how the bulk of the firm’s growth in coming years will come from cities you have never heard of, and how it is being transformed into a “learning machine” that picks up ideas from every corner of the world. That is nothing more than globaloney so long as they continue to spend millions of pounds training high-flyers only to ignore or sideline them when they return to the mothership.
有迹象表明公司已经开始认识到它们的问题，有些公司甚至在探讨测算海外岗位的投资回报率，及让高级经理人对归国人员流失承担责任。但是改进的步伐极其缓慢。大多数CEO能滔滔不绝地讲述未来几年，你从未听说过的数个城市将会如何给公司带来巨大增长，以及该公司是怎样转变成一台从世界各个角落汲取想法的“学习机器”。不过，只要他们仍然一掷千金地培训有为人士，却在他们回归本部时不理不睬或将其打入冷宫，上述言论不过是一派胡言。
是不是看完上面的介绍感到头大了，不过CBEC专门解决留学求职问题，我们都能尽力帮您哦。
更多详情请联系我们~
