Failure to Provide Repatriation Assistance Can Be An Expensive Mistake

As your company knows, international employee relocation is not a cheap enterprise. The costs associated with moving an employee across national lines or oceans tend to be much higher than simply moving an employee from state to state. For most businesses – and for most expatriate employees – an international job assignment is a major investment. As a company, you put a lot on the line to send your American employee and his or her family abroad. Conversely, your employee and their family may feel like they are putting their lives on hold for a temporary career adventure that they hope goes well.

Given the cost associated with international job assignments, it is in your company’s best interest to maximize its investment. In order to avoid expensive mistakes, one solution is to make sure that your company’s international job assignment support benefits encompass all stages of the assignment cycle.

Providing relocation services at the beginning of an international job assignment is common. Your company, as with thousands of others, has likely recognized the value of helping an employee and their family make the transition to an overseas destination. Expatriation relocation services offer employees support during the physical moving process and on-the-ground arrival, such as finding important resources and job or volunteer opportunities in the destination country. By offering these services, you have identified a way to protect your investment against the uncertainties a family may face during an international relocation – challenges that can help an international assignment succeed or fail.

But there is more to international relocations than simply helping your employees and their families get settled in the destination community.  How well do you support your employees while they’re abroad? Perhaps more importantly, how well do you support your employees when it’s time to come home?

According to Brookfield Global Relocation’s 2010 Global Relocation Trends Survey Report, repatriation is something that companies are beginning to recognize as an important part of the expatriation cycle. Why? Because this survey consistently shows that companies are losing their repatriating employees with fairly quick speed. Providing an effective repatriation assistance package is one way to alleviate this common – and costly – problem.

Like the services you provide for employees embarking on an international assignment, repatriation assistance services also help protect your company’s investment in an employee. According to Brookfield’s survey:

• 38% of repatriating employees left their company within one year of their return.
• The statistic rose 3% since 2009.
• This trend increased by 16% in the annual 15-year average of the survey.

Thus, it is essential to think about what happens to your employee and their family when an international assignment ends.

By one estimate, a company will spend at least one million dollars to send an employee overseas for several years. When that company loses the expatriate employee at any stage of the cycle, the results are costly. To lose that employee at the end of the expatriate cycle, when the employee is returning home, however, may be the most costly of all. Instead of being able to capitalize on the employee’s training, knowledge, and experience gained through the international assignment, a repatriating employee who leaves the firm takes all of those capabilities with them.

Repatriating employees and their family will find themselves returning to a changed homeland and a changed workplace. Although it’s easy to assume that because an employee is going back home, that means everything will be easy – it’s important to keep in mind that the transition home can be just as jarring as the transition abroad – if not more jarring. By accounting for this phase in the international relocation process, you can help your business continue to benefit from the investment you have already made in your employees.