Monsanto has developed a performance appraisal plan for an expatriate that includes the following steps:
The development of performance appraisal systems for expatriates requires extreme care.’ The active involvement of the expatriate, home-country supervisor, and host- country supervisor is often important. Several things complicate the task of appraising an expatriate’s performance.
Image Source: xpatweb.com
Steps
1. Employees going overseas talk with their home-country and host-country managers to produce an action plan.
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2. The employee writes a job description and a description of what he or she is supposed to do while on the assignment.
3. Cross-cultural training then takes place to help achieve these bottom-line results.
4. When the employee arrives at the foreign location, he or she sits down with the host-country manager and reconfirms agreement on the action plan.
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5. This action plan then serves as the basis for judging the expatriate’s performance during the assignment.
Gary Addou and Mark Mendenhall make these suggestions for improving the expatriate appraisal process:
1. Stipulate the assignment’s difficulty level. Most would view being an expatriate manager in China more difficult than working in England; the appraisal should take into account such difficulty-level differences.
2. Weigh the evaluation more toward the on-site manager’s appraisal than toward the home-site manager’s distant perceptions of the employee’s performance.
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3. If (as is usually the case) the home-office manager does the actual written appraisal, have him or her use a former expatriate from the same overseas location for advice. This helps ensure consideration of unique local issues during the appraisal.
4. Modify the normal performance criteria used for that particular position to fit the overseas position.