17-4. After selecting the employees to send abroad, attention turns to training and maintaining your expatriate employees.

In terms of predeparture preparation, training efforts ideally first cover the impact of cultural differences; then, the focus moves to getting participants to understand how attitudes influence behavior, providing factual knowledge about the target country, and developing skills in areas like language and adjustment.

In compensating expatriates, most employers use the balance sheet approach; this focuses on four groups of expenses: income taxes, housing, goods and services, and discretionary expenses, and aims to ensure that the employee’s standard of living abroad is about what it would have been at home.

With terrorism a threat, most employers today take protective measures, including buying kidnapping and ransom insurance.

Well-thought-out repatriation programs emphasize keeping employees in the loop as far as what’s happening in their home offices, bringing them back to the office periodically, and providing formal repatriation services for the expatriate and his or her family to start preparing them for the return.