Given the serious financial crisis the company is going through and very significant additional costs for each ex pat assignee, what are your thoughts about all those unnecessary ex pats.
Have you ever seen greedy employees or greedy behavior by an EM colleague that you think wasted money for the company?
Don't you think that it is better to save money from luxuries than PIPing poor souls.
Agreed. Expats are needed in minimal cases. In today’s world we can work remotely.
Keep the highlight on expat m0rons. All employees should hunt them down and say thank you.
Thank you for bridging down the corporation just because you have no talent and you only care about your own perks and pockets.
80% of expats are unnecessary.
After 2.5 years into the assignment, 100% of them are unnecessary.
I work with several worker bees in RTD and CSC who didn't do any real work while they were in Texas but then hopped on the expat boat to go make a financial career by staying in UK, France, Italy, Singapore, Malaysia, Bengaluru etc.
These American expats to many other countries come in all original nationalities —> Egyptian, Caucasian, Asian, Indian etc —> Greed knows no bounds!
Those downvoting OP (so far 4 of them) are blo0d 5ucking expat leeches. Hard working employees should buy roses and give as gifts to their rosy, worship worthy expat colleagues.
I agree. Coming from Upstream, I know expat opportunities (although well intentioned) have been thoroughly abused. The company had all the right intentions to get things done right. Then came the opportunists - I had colleagues who would start to b–ch, quarrel and make scenes in front of their supervisors if after coming back from one prolonged expat assignment, they have to be in Houston to do some real work for more than 2-3 months.
Find and recognize those fellow colleagues. They are part of the problem as well – it is just not about $$s (which is being wasted anyways), it is also about a culture that doesn't care about the company
Expat assignments if done for a short, limited time make sense with strong business justification. Unfortunately, there are many who have been career expats with little value add that does not justify the severely added costs to the company - specially EU expats who are in the US forever, or in Singapore.
Expats should try to engage and blend with the locals. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Sadly some expats behave like the locals owe them a living and they are here to try to teach the locals what to do and tick the checkbox in their career progression. Of course, this doesn't apply to all expats, but I have seen a couple. It is sad, instead of being grateful for the expat opportunity and embrace the locals, some behave like the local community can't work and perform without them.
I agree in general with the other posters. Overall it’s a net positive to the company especially for those that come here to the US. Their salaries are bumped up to the same level as US based employees so the cost of level is in line, that makes sense. They do get extra perks that can be annoying (paid daycare), which is even more heightened given today’s environment.
The solution is to limit the number of years. 5, or 7 if a manager, is just too much. Come here, get some additional skills and go back to use them at home. 2-3 years tops. Another drawback I hear is from people back at the GBCs who resent those expats because they are the ones who will be promoted, not them. But, they’ve banked money for a new car and went on all sorts of trips while here. So they can brush it off.
OP has highlighted an important problem in the company and the commenter below has explained some of the situation quite well.
I know several serial ex-pats who when they are not on an expat assignment don’t do any real work and spend all their energy looking and begging for their next ex-pat assignment. How can a company survive when a majority of the workers only aim is to support their pockets and have no clear understanding of how to provide real value to the company - aka less expense and more profit generation..
In countries with a full affiliate (upstream/downstream/projects representation) we use expat positions to share knowledge and culture. This happens in a few countries (and that list changes): US, UK, Malaysia, Singapore. In countries without a full functioning affiliate office, rather than staff up all of the necessary functions required to support a full office (HR, Accounting, Tax, Legal, Admin, Security) it is cheaper and smarter to send expats. Even in fully functioning affiliates, if there is a big program or project, rather than increase local headcount which would have to be terminated at end of the program or project, we staff with expats to cover the surge. Expats are compensated for the hassle of completely upending their lives and putting their belongings in a sea container, Ndola moving their kids to a new school in a foreign land, etc. There are some people who have made a career of this but any action against those few would not move the needle in our current financial situation.
Big companies like EM need to have a flexible program to allow employees to get company wide experience and that includes expat assignments. I was lucky enough to have 2 in my em career, one for 18 months and one for 5 years (both to the US). Both of mine were for quite specific reasons and had an end goal with respect to benefit to the company as well as a development opportunity for myself. As a UK based employee, I was happy with my expat deal, which on balance gave me a final package that made me equivalent to a comparible US employee in terms of total remuneration whilst on assignment. i.e. this was a reasonable cost to the company. What I have seen is a large number of US expats working in the UK, Asia and Europe, which is a much more expensive exercise. US employees typically earn 1.5-2x more than the UK, so when you add expat premiums and expenses on top of that....US expats are much more expensive. Additionally, you have your "career expats" who spend most, if not all of their careers on expat assignments. This was especially true in Singapore and I never understood how this was justified or tolerated. One US guy was there for 20 years on an expat assignment! Projects were pretty guilty of this practice too.
So yes it is abused, and like most other things can spoil it for those who genuinely benefit from an opportunity to go on an expat assignment. It is one of the reasons people join a large multi-national so I don't think you can complain about it in principle. When abused though, it can be demoralizing for other employees, especially when the opportunities seem to be restricted more to the "club" of top rankers!
Expenses always annoy me. Someone making 100k plus a year expensing a 2 dollar coffee. No morals