Performance management (PM) is a holistic activity that embraces all within the organisation. It links strategic goals with managerial, team and individual competencies and their development, underpinned by monitoring, review and continuous learning. Its activities are integrated throughout the organisation, vertically, horizontally/functionally and at all levels/grades. It aims to deliver sustained organisational success, resting upon strong principles of communication, monitoring and review.

Factors to be considered in PM

A key issue in assessing assignee performance concerns inputs/delivery against strategic objectives. It is crucial that assignees understand the strategic purpose of their assignment and are regularly kept up-to-date with strategic priorities. To understand strategic goals and their integration across the organisation requires broad experience in the company, cross-cultural communication skills, and management development.As PM involves managers, individuals and teams sharing responsibility, assignees’ managerial and communications skills are important attributes. Assignees must demonstrate the ability to deal with cross-cultural interpersonal conflict and adopt appropriate leadership styles. They must also demonstrate willingness and ability to communicate with the host country nationals. A strong social orientation is necessary such that relationships can be built across the organisation. Assignees must also demonstrate a positive attitude and outlook on the assignment. Of course, relevant professional and technical skills are also expected.These factors can be articulated as relevant competencies that would be expected to underpin high performance in a global context. These should also form the focus for performance discussions to identify and support action for continuous learning and development. Relevant competencies include:

• Ability to develop and use global strategic skills: fast response capability; working knowledge of international relationships and foreign affairs; think global, act local - a balance between national responsiveness and exploitation of global economies of scale;
• Ability to manage change and transition: manage transition from independence to inter-dependence; from control to the coordination to cooperation - to get country managers on side with the headquarters;
• Ability to manage cultural diversity: cultural sensitivity - corporate culture, brand culture, customer culture - hidden values and beliefs must be recognised, understood and managed effectively;
• Ability to function in flexible organisations: to design the structures in which they will operate and demonstrate strategic thinking and action;
• Ability to work in teams; teams which are culturally diverse, inside and outside the company e.g. suppliers and customers;
• Ability to communicate across cultures: multilingual skills; cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity; interpersonal communication;
• Ability to learn and to transfer knowledge: openness to experiences and willingness to experiment; ability to access and interpret information worldwide; willingness to take risks.

Timing of performance reviews

When assignees begin their posting, they need to adapt to their new societal and organisational environments. To function effectively and to display the competencies expected of them, assignees must be culturally competent. This takes time.The cycle of culture shock typically experienced by individuals posted to a new country can take several months to complete. It is not unusual for individuals to experience a “honeymoon” or tourist phase on arrival, followed by a period of depression when they realise that a change in their behaviours is required in order for the application of their skills and knowledge to work effectively with team members and others in the new culture. During these early phases, productivity and performance is unlikely to be at its highest. Only when assignees have adapted culturally, is it likely that high performance will result.Performance reviews should be timed to reflect this. Carrying out reviews too early can suggest poorer performance than might be expected. Early reviews can be useful though as they can help to identify the need for cultural training, in the spirit of continuous learning and development which underpins PM. Early performance appraisals which include performance ratings, however, are likely to be unfair given the assignee’s need to adapt culturally and to overcome culture shock.

Measurability of PM indicators

As can be seen, assignee performance indicators are not easily measurable in terms of metrics/ratings. This causes difficulty in assessing high performance against traditional return on investment (ROI) indicators. Organisations will need to consider how they record assignees’ progress, shortfalls, and required capability development against their expectations of assignment outcomes. It is always important to remember that what gets measured gets done and so effort must be made to record, monitor and take steps to improve aspects of performance as part of the scope of PM but also to attempt to track and measure ROI.While cost projections and actual expenses incurred can be recorded and some outcomes compared with these, traditional ROI approaches may be found to be lacking. This does not preclude the need to cost out an assignment but a direct financial return may simply not be the most relevant measure of assignment success.

ROI indicators

A number of indicators, other than direct relocation and salary costs, can be considered to link PM outcomes with ROI.Assignment planning can include career pathing schemes which set out career development and growth pathways for high performance individuals. Such career paths typically include global mobility. The impact of such schemes on career development for employees can make a difference to employee retention. While this has an obvious impact on reducing the direct costs of labour turnover, it can also affect employee engagement and morale positively and lead to higher performance and productivity.Assignee selection is another area that should be considered within the scope of linking PM to ROI. Programmes that widen the diversity of the assignee profile can bring a wide range of business benefits to the organisation. The business case for diversity is strong in that it widens the base of ideas and approaches that can be taken in conducting business, has a positive effect on the employer brand, and also helps to attract a wider range of talent.Training and development programmes are integral to the principles of PM. Assessing the benefits in the widest sense is important, rather than only focusing on programme costs.The administration of global mobility policies also has an effect on ROI. As organisations attempt to provide greater flexibility tailored to business need and improve the assignee experience, so greater efficiencies are required to manage the programmes. The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in global mobility will help to improve ROI statistics. AI can enable an efficient but highly flexible approach to the delivery of compensation and benefits as well as detailed and accurate reporting.Successful repatriation and post-assignment retention are a critical part of PM and for helping to determine ROI. Given the trend towards using international assignments for knowledge transfer and management development purposes, supporting the re-entry and retention of repatriates is crucial for organisations to benefit from international staff transfers in the long term. Repatriates share the knowledge that they acquire during their assignments and also continue to access relevant knowledge from the host unit, facilitating ongoing cross-unit organisational knowledge flows – a critical strategic issue.

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Read related articles

• Assessing assignee performance in a global context: Return on investment or expectation management?
• Outsourcing in the global mobility world
• Interview with Sofia Oragano, Senior Director of International Sales at Synergy
• The shape of mobility to come: strategy, technology, and leadership in a disrupted world
• The evolving role of global mobility: from back office to strategic business partner

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Employer actions

To follow principles of PM and to attempt to measure the ROI outcomes at the level of the individual assignment is not an easy task. Notwithstanding this, there are a number of actions that employers can take to help to raise performance amongst their international assignees. This is not prescriptive or all-encompassing list but the following suggestions can potentially assist with improving assignee productivity and achieving high performance.Successful PM rests upon excellent communications. Assignees must be included in organisational communications on an ongoing basis. The “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome commonly associated with expatriation cannot be allowed to prevail. Most importantly as high performance must be connected with the strategic level, assignees must understand current and changing strategic priorities.The principles of PM include continual learning and development. There needs to be a constant watch over development needs such that assignees are able to deploy the competencies required to meet ever-developing and fast-changing strategic goals. Learning programmes via training courses can provide a simple method of updating skills. Development, however, goes beyond improving skills capabilities to result in a change in the individual’s ways of knowing, doing and being – it results in behavioural change whereby individuals cross a threshold of significance in their lives. To achieve this requires opportunities to see the world differently by working with different people, in new and challenging environments. Working in communities of practice, networks of opportunity, action learning sets, and using the virtual world can all provide development opportunities, in addition to global mobility.PM principles involve everybody in the organisation – managers, individuals and teams. Here, organisations need to ensure that assignees are willing and able to work across all levels and functions such that they can play their part in the integration of PM vertically and horizontally across the business.Continual monitoring and regular reviews underpin successful PM. Organisations must therefore ensure that their PM processes track and record the achievement of results, their impact on performance, the competencies of individuals and teams, and how results and competencies are achieved.Organisations must focus on aspects of the global mobility process that affect assignees’ day-to-day performance and remove obstacles to raising productivity. The use of services that reduce the time spent on aspects of moving provide examples. If assignees are spending time on house and school search, for example, this clearly affects their productivity. The costs of such services can easily be outweighed by productivity and performance improvements.Organisations should also consider aspects of family life. Unhappy families create stress for assignees, again affecting performance at work. Dual career support, for example, can be seen as a cost but the benefits that flow from assisting dual career partners to follow their desired career paths can outweigh this in terms of assignee productivity.Organisations need to consider all aspects of the move throughout the expatriate cycle (from selection, in-post, through to repatriation and post-assignment retention) to identify aspects where support at potentially low financial cost can be outweighed by considerable benefits in performance outcomes.Last, but by no means least, comes employee engagement. Engaged employees are productive and typically exhibit high performance. Organisations must consider their employee engagement strategies, operations and processes and ensure that they focus on engagement principles. Employee engagement has implications for a wide range of human resource issues, including the work environment, meaningful work, job resources, communication and voice, and leadership and management. In turn these influence activities such as diversity management, reward policy and involvement and participation.

Return on investment or expectation management?

This two-part series began with a question. Should organisations expect ROI or should they manage their expectations to accept that this might not be quantifiable? There is a rationale for attempting to measure ROI in a financial sense and efforts to improve assignee performance must play a part in this. But should organisations simply accept that they need to manage their expectations because the true value of ROI in both a financial and non-financial sense cannot be achieved? Here the answer is no.There is no need for organisations to lower their expectations of what ROI can deliver in the way of useful information on the value of international assignments. Organisations should therefore not discount ROI data as it does play a valuable part in assessing assignment outcomes. However, ROI by itself is not enough. What organisations should do is to embrace the strategic nature of PM principles and consider how successful global mobility rests on a mix of ROI data and the assignment outcomes that can be expected to assist in the delivery of organisational success at the strategic level from PM processes.The combination of PM and ROI information can provide a formidable tool to ensure the strategic integration of competency development with business goals and act as the basis for high performance within global mobility.

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