Less than 20% of the spouses received employer-provided employment assistance. HR departments struggle to find employees who are willing to accept international. In order to enhance expatriate adjustment, reduce expatriate failure rates and to enhance expatriate performance, it is critical that HR professionals introduce spousal and children relocation programs.
How to increase ratio of a successful assignments?
Employees and their families who quickly return to a "normal" life after arrival, are more likely to succeed in new country. Our goal is to make expats, spouses and their children as comfortable, secure and confident as possible from the very beginning. We soften the process of relocation, preparing assignees and their families for the unknown to come.
How does core-flex work?
Each spouse receives access to the Core of the program. After that - it’s all up to them - if they like to work on their own and can increase your cultural intelligence in their own pace with small help of our experts or they want to use of the complimentary sessions and include their children into expatriation preparation.
FAMILY PROGRAM
The core:
- CQ-Workout (6 months access)
- Spouse support session (career, job, country specific)
The Flex (optional):
- Live online sessions on demand sessions with Expert easing settling moment and culture shock during first critical weeks after arrival (3 sessions up to 1,5h each or 6 sessions)
- Live online cultural sessions for spouse : chose 2 hours, half day or 1 day sessions
- Face-to-face cultural session for spouse: 1 day
- Children training and support (pre-departure and post arrival support)
SPOUSE
The process of adjusting to new country and culture requires a lot of effort from a spouse— dealing with feelings of isolation and homesickness, the loss of a career, and everyday life such as language barriers, different culture, lack of friends. The most important thing to realize is that spouses in fact give up their entire social, personal and professional life for their partners.
The most important objectives of our spouse support programs are help with orientating in every-day life situations, finding friends who are in the same situation, getting to know culture of the country of destination and building new relationships.
- Settling-In
The most sensitive and crucial are first days after arrival. Spouses often feel lost and overwhelmed, in need of support of other expats in the location.
Spouses can have instant access to contacting their Expert via chat/phone/email - they need to be in touch with someone who can assist them and answer all arising questions before and during first weeks of their stay.
- Cross-Cultural
Many spouses also found that they needed more practical cross-cultural information to be provided both before and after moving. They need instant and constant access to information about culture, social life and norms, building relationships.
Spouses receive access to their own profile and database with information on social and business norms in their country of destination. It is also possible to book half a day Expert session for spouses.
CHILDREN
Moving with children can be quite a challenge. They will have questions and fears, just like their parents. Children may be reluctant to leave their friends, activities and familiar surroundings to go to a strange new country. Helping them with understanding reasons of moving and explaining how their life will look like in new country can help them a lot with transition process.
We're in this together
It is helpful for the children to know that they are not alone. When moving with kids you need to consider many things – school records, documents, different language. There is also one very important thing – culture.
The Core
What is the Core of spouse preparation?
CQ-Workout is a blended-learning training based on 20 years of global experience in the areas of expats and spouses preparation. The program comprises 4 modules and each of the participants receives half year access (extendable) to the most powerful tool in the field of cultural competence and country specific information acquisition, which will allow you to return to any component of the course at any given time after finishing the program
What does the CQ-Workout contain?
- Guided learning with specific tips, divided into 4 modules
- Detailed reports on more than 90 other countries, including information on business practices, safety and travel information and culture and lifestyle
- All accessible via a MOBILE APP that can be downloaded through the app store.
- A cross-cultural preference check (20 minutes) that compares the trainee on 9 different dimensions to the preferred culture profile of Italians (and more than 90 other cultures). The preference check helps you to achieve smoother communication, to adapt the communication style for direct results and to avoid cultural misunderstandings.
- Country Comparison Tool
- Flight packs (reports available offline, ready to download for computers, tablets and smartphones)
- Hours of recorded materials and case studies for self-paced learning on cultural intelligence and international collaboration
- 4 webinars
Spouse support session is a tailor-made session which focuses on specific areas of social life in the new country and develops and practices intercultural competences. Spouses get new insights about new culture, help with preparing recruitment documents and preparing for job interviews, they get support with dealing with feelings of isolation and homesickness. The session is perfectly tailored to your needs and involves a coaching approach.
The Flex
- Live online sessions on demand sessions with Expert easing settling moment and culture shock during first critical weeks after arrival (3 sessions up to 1,5h each or 6 sessions)
- Live online cultural sessions for spouse : chose 2 hours, half day or 1 day sessions
- Face-to-face cultural session for spouse: 1 day
- Children training and support (pre-departure and post arrival support)
Cultural session for spouses covers modules:
- Roots of the culture (drivers which created norms and values ).
- Doing business in, and working with people from specific countries (their style of leadership, collaboration, communication, negotiation, decision making styles; teamwork, delegation, information sharing, meeting & greeting, providing feedback, motivating, managing conflicts, etc.).
- Socio-economic aspects and everyday life.
- Analysis of case studies and real-life examples.
- Understanding the role of mental filters, stereotypes and prejudices.
- Exploring your own cultural programming and the impact that it has on everyday life and business and comparing it to the preferred style in a specific country or region.
- Models to better understand business culture and cross-cultural communication.
- Managing culture shock.
- Debriefs of cultural preferences and gaps between yourself and foreign nationals.
Session with children
During sessions with kids we encourage them to ask questions and share their fears which they don’t want to share with their parents to help with dealing with uncertainty. Cultural sessions for your children helps them to deal with new, overwhelming situation, to overcome their fears and start treating moving as new adventure.