Firms Can Ease Reverse Culture Shock for Employees : Transition: 25% of U.S. executives quit their companies within a year of their return from assignment overseas.

After working overseas, many executives suffer a severe case of culture shock when they return to home base.

Making matters worse, many U.S. companies do little or nothing to smooth the return of their executives from foreign assignments.

Only one company in 20 provides any repatriation training, and their failure to address the issue “is a waste of time, money and people’s careers,” says J. Stewart Black, associate professor at the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Ariz.

This is one reason why 25% of all returned executives quit their companies within a year, said Black, who has worked abroad for a U.S. firm and authored a book on global assignments.

Black found from his own survey of 300 returned U.S. executives of multinational firms that 65% of them “have a harder time with reverse culture shock than they did going overseas.”

Black calls it the “Dorothy Syndrome,” after the heroine of “The Wizard of Oz,” who found Kansas just as she left it when she got home.

But unlike Dorothy’s experience, homecoming for many executives and their families can be disillusioning when so much about Kansas has changed.

According to Black, repatriated managers often discover:

* Their efforts abroad were not appreciated. “They and their families expect a hero’s welcome after returning home from a successful global assignment, but many are lucky to receive any welcome at all.”

As one photography company official complained, “I busted my butt working for them in Tokyo for five years and when I came back they didn’t even know I existed.”

* No plans have been made for them to step into new assignments. About one-third of them, Black said, “are caught in a holding pattern, with no specific job, title or responsibilities. The company hasn’t thought about what to do with them.”

* They are “out of sight and out of mind” to mentors and supervisors who posted them overseas, and therefore are virtual strangers when they return.

* They are marked by home office superiors as being “different” because they have picked up “foreign ways” or a foreign perspective.

* The broad freedom of action they enjoyed overseas has been radically reduced, as it usually is for 80% of those returning.

* The familiar ways of doing business they had mastered have changed dramatically.

“Our organizational culture was turned upside down. We now have a different strategic focus, different tools to get the job done and different buzzwords to make it happen. I had to learn a whole new corporate language,” one expatriate lamented.

* The nation itself may have changed perceptibly to the point that “Kansas isn’t Kansas anymore,” Black said.

“People often return home with incorrect mental maps of what to do, learned inabilities regarding how to do it and uncertainties about what the results of their actions will be in the now foreign home country,” Black wrote in “Global Assignments” (Josey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco).

Moreover, he says, “their closest friends can become envious and uncomfortable in their company, and their children, especially teen-agers, can feel really out of it.”

Many repatriates have become severely depressed, requiring psychiatric counseling--one more expense for a company that on average has shelled out $1.2 million to keep the executive and family abroad for a typical four-year assignment.

The good news, Black said, is that companies can ease repatriates back into the organization by assigning a mentor who will keep them informed about the home office while they are abroad.

The repatriate will also be helped by as little as one day of “repatriation training,” Black said. The session could be either before they return home or shortly thereafter.

Finally, headquarters can put the repatriate in touch with previously returned employees who understand their feelings when they realize that “Kansas isn’t Kansas anymore.”