“Locating employees overseas removes them from their ‘comfort zone’ and forces them to take a fresh look at how they do things and why,” says Eoghan Mackie of Challenges Worldwide. Here he looks at how you can get the most out of overseas assignments as a staff development tool.
The central tenet of HRM, that a highly engaged workforce can contribute significantly to improved business performance, dictates that employers have to create a business culture, which not only fits with employee values, but provides them with new skills and challenging experiences.
Your staff want opportunities to learn and change, but classroom-based training is rarely seen as exciting or attractive. You need engaging solutions that appeal to your executives whilst delivering the development you want. Coaching and mentoring can be invaluable in nudging the process along, but ultimately the individual has to do the learning and developing. You know your staff are capable of developing; you just need to supply them with inspiring opportunities.
The benefits of removing staff from the office context for a while to focus on developing skills such as leadership, team building, etc, are well documented and promoted by organisations like Outward Bound.
For multinational companies, the overseas posting has long been recognised as a way of broadening experience and outlook through cultural immersion. Now a new approach is starting to combine the best of both.
Inspiration
The twist is that rather than presenting candidates with manufactured tasks or adventures, they are challenged with real problems in the developing world. Adventure courses or teambuilding weekends rely on participants getting into the spirit of the thing, so levels of ‘buy-in’ can vary.
In contrast, candidates sent to the developing world realise that by developing and sharing their skills, they can make a positive and lasting difference to a community living in poverty, so they are genuinely motivated and inspired. This is especially true when they are living and working with individuals in the community, who become colleagues and friends.
Locating employees overseas removes them from their ‘comfort zone’ and forces them to take a fresh look at how they do things and why. Personal development is inevitable. In an appropriate project, professional development is always positive and often dramatic.
Many of the skills developed are at the boundary between professional and personal, for example collaboration, managing uncertainty, adaptability, ‘people skills’ and cultural awareness. They are the skills that are tricky to measure, impossible to teach in a classroom but invaluable in business.
The beauty of sending staff on assignment overseas is that they generally view it very positively. It can be presented as a reward for performance or an incentive for long service, for example, and is usually very well received. Compare that with the less than rapturous reception which too often follows the announcement of a training course…
Opportunities
When an employee puts in a request for sabbatical time or a career break, how do you react? Phone the recruitment agency for a replacement, or seize the chance to support them in their development and secure their loyalty?
You could try InterVol which gives you information and advice about volunteering opportunities overseas.
Developed in partnership by TimeBank and Challenges Worldwide, InterVol hosts a directory of over 500 organisations from all over the world looking for volunteers and a database of personal and professional development opportunities.
It also offers an International Management Development Assignment (IMDA) programme. The IMDA programme allows you to offer your employees assignments in developing countries, with training in overseas working, one-to-one coaching to focus skill development and an appraisal system to provide feedback against your selected competencies.
Each placement is individual, selected and structured for relevance to the experience, skills and needs of each candidate. The range of projects is diverse and since they are all locally-run, they are directly beneficial to the host communities.
Examples include IT professionals linking 1500 schools in Ecuador on a network to share educational materials and information; marketing for a national park and HIV awareness in Belize; HR management in NGOs in Bangladesh and the public sector in Belize; various accountancy and engineering positions and a variety of project management opportunities in Latin America and Asia.
Alternatively, follow the example of some private sector companies and create your own development programme overseas, for example PriceWaterhouse Coopers’ ‘Ulysses Project’, which sends senior executives to projects in developing countries for two months to build their leadership skills; and Zurich Financial Services, working in Southern India.
Tips for getting the most out of overseas assignments as a staff development tool
For more infomation about the International Management Development Assignment programme, email: eoghan@challengesworldwide.com or tel 0131 332 7372.
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40% of workers willing to work overseas
http://www.hrzone.co.uk/item/125402
