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Experience Management has established itself in the business environment, first in the context of the customer and user experience and recently also in the context of the employee experience. This bachelor thesis explores how to improve the experience of a particular employee, the expatriate, by experience management. For this purpose, the implementation of existing experience management concepts is examined by using secondary data. The insights gained hereby are then transferred to the expatriate experience. A corresponding procedure is developed and exemplarily applied to Beiersdorf. This includes conducting primary research in the form of qualitative interviews and results in a set of recommendations for action on how the company can improve their expatriate experience. The results suggest that experience management is a promising approach to improve the experience, not only of expatriates but also of international assignees in general, which should be subjected to further research.
There is a growing trend for multinational enterprises to send their expatriate employees on international assignments to achieve corporate development, human resource goals and to gain a competitive advantage in the global context. Therefore, the performance and productivity of international assignees play a major role for them and the organization. However, expatriate research has so far rarely taken into account the factors that do not directly relate to expatriate performance. Instead, research has focused on expatriate success and failure. However, the literature shows that neither can yet be clearly defined. Therefore, this study instead focuses on expatriate performance and productivity by placing special emphasis on literature gaps. Hence, in this study the importance of several factors is tested, namely: 1) overall international experience, 2) informal social networks, and 3) expatriate family. As this research aims to develop practical approaches to managing critical circumstances when relocating overseas, a link between theory and previous study findings has been established. To provide a point of departure for Global People Transitions GmbH, a special focus has been placed on organizational support and intercultural training. The data have been collected through guided expert interviews with six participants, three of them expatriates, two expatriate spouses, and one repatriate. The study results have found that the tested factors have an impact on expatriate adjustment and, consequently, on expatriate performance and productivity. In addition, several aspects to improve expatriate performance and productivity have been identified, such as providing organizational support or creating structures and routines. Lastly, it has become clear that research on international assignments is very elusive due to several underlying factors that influence the matter.