»poland«

My head is so full of things that still need to grow into ideas that I have a hard time to put anything down into words.

The first good news is that I'll have several interview partners. I got hooked up with two companies who have their headquarters in Germany in subsidiaries in Poland.

The first is a constructing company started cooperating with a Polish company right away in 1990. They then started to buy shares and in 2000 eventually merged the two companies into one. The Polish part of the company works independently but already looking on the names listed as members of the board, you can see some German names.

The other company is a doing logistics in Poland at four places. It used to be completeyl run by German expatriates. Nowadays they have more than 700 employees in Poland.

And as you see, I still need to gather muchmuchmore information :)

The Expatriate Business
The expatriates in a construction company are of course working on their projects long before they get to go on the construction site. Additionally, everybody is working on several projects at the same time since normally it is not clear till the end which company will actually get the order to build. From 10 projects planned only two will get ordered. Thus projects normally are kicked off four to five years in advance. For the expatriate business this as several advantages. First of all every project is run by a small fixed team. Other people will join that group during the course of the project but the leading troop will remain together. Thus by the time an expatriate mission is becoming relevant all the parties concerned are already long acquainted to each other. And of course the company tries to install groups that already proved to work well together in order to not face any additional problems. The more tricky a project is the more important the personal binding turns out to be ("bei den Schlüsselfiguren achten wir auf eine feste Bindung").
The company further promotes personal bounds by organizing workshops or training programs in which employees from all over the world join together. ("Damit möglichst viele Menschen im Konzern ein Netzwerk haben.") Thus when expatriates go to work abroad they do not arrive at a completely unknown setting. ("Normalerweise kennt man schon Kollegen aus dem anderen Land; Berührungspunkte gibt es überall.")
This concept of personal bounds also helps to avoid problems of power structures which the host country nationals often face. While it is never easy to admit mistakes or to ask strangers for help, a company is dependent on sharing knowledge. But a Polish employee would never call for help in the head office in Germany even though he might knew that the company has 100 experts sitting there especially trained in solving problems just like his. This is eased up by introducing employees to each other. Then the Polish employee does not have to call some unknown boss but calls Hans or Karl and turns to them for help as a friend.
The company also tries to consider employees personal preferences. This means if somebody often goes on vacation in Greece, he will most likely be assigned to projects taking place in Greece. As an international company they are dependent on being enrooted in the environment. They kind of expect their employees to also deploy their personal contacts and to cultivate networks ("ein Apparat will gepflegt werden").

Networking is further institutionalized by the kind of projects the company is participating in: joint-ventures are the most successful projects where each participating company is responsible for their share. Sometimes this is the only way to get into big building projects. They are often initiated by public institutions and nowadays financed through public-private-partnerships. Consequently it is difficult to give projects such as airports which are of public and national interest to a foreign company.
These professional partnerships on the other hand minimize the risks and allow access to already existing networks in the foreign market. The German company would assign a team of engineers which then would be responsible for assigning appropriate companies. The Joint-Venture-Board itself would meet once a month. And financial matters from all running construction projects are reported to the German head office every monday. While daily communication among all people in charge is absolutely essential, somebody from the German head office will visit the construction site at least every three to four weeks.

While sometimes only one expatriate will be sent abroad, a number between five to 20 is quite usual for a project with a turnover of 170 million ? and 400 employees in peak times.

Nowadays, German is still spoken in the higher management level at Volkswagen as well as at Panopa. In the second level both companies mostly employ Polish people who also speak German.

In general Panopa is sending fewer expatriates to Poland every year. In the beginning jobs in the strategic division were filled project-specific with German expatriates. Nowadays the job is done by two fixed employees and help is only sent in emergencies. Instead Panopa makes sure to grant their employees qualification trainings to build up competencies on site.
This redundantizes the business with expatriates which is comparably expensive and takes a lot of energy from the company as well as from the employees concerned: motivating employees to leave Germany and to stay abroad for weeks and months at a time for single projects, permanent shuttling, ... Dr. Hucht resumes that it is simply easier and less expensive to establish methods of qualification at the respective location. ("Wenn ich in Deutschland jemanden motiviere da rüber zu gehen, dann redet der erstmal über mehr Geld." Dr.Hucht, 13.45 min.)

For now just a link to Global Voices Online. It's a non-profit project that was initiated by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. It's kind of a metablog. About 100 bloggers summarize what is happening in different blogospheres around the globe, mainly focusing on politics. In Germany they gained quite some attention when they started cooperating with Reuters who nowadays interlink to Global Voices Online to give a more pluralistic view on things.

Panopa is a logistics company employing more than 1500 people. As a former daughter of Krupp they look back on quite some history and nowadays belong to Imperial, a huge company based in South Africa and via their subsidiaries operating world wide.

I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Karl Vieth, project manager for logistics at Panopa who has spend several years in Poland, and Dr. Andreas Hucht, division manager planning and consulting who is also responsible for quality management.

Panopa first came to Poland participating in a tender Volkswagen had called for. Volkswagen had decided to put up a factory in Poznań. Consequently they were looking for a service provider who was doing the logistics and was able to jump into the chain of processes. Panopa won the tender and thus went to Poland. Dr. Hucht that this is quite characteristic for contract logistics: they do not put up a network of stations but install different locations for exclusive clients, so-called single-user stations.
Two years ago Panopa revised their entrepreneurial orientation. Based on their first successful expansion into Poland other locations were constructed. They figured this to make sense because they already had a focus on the automotive industry and their clients were moving eastward. Thus Eastern Europe in general has become one of their target markets and Panopa nowadays resides in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The new concept also includes becoming active in the distributional field: besides the client-tailored programs for Volkswagen in Poznań, they also run a station exclusively for Opel in Gliwice. And a trans-shipment centre in Kattowice.
These stations are not connected in their own network. The people in the lead positions certainly know each other and meet every now and then but they are not institutionally interlinked. This is mostly due to the different tasks each of the stations performs

Marie was asking if I thought the difference between Poland and Germany to be big enough to make a cross-cultural training necessary. (It needs to be added that she defined this as a provocative question and did not at all aim at generally doubting my plans.)

Yes!

It reminded me of the fact that Eastern Germany was actually the hardest place for me to adapt to. I remember to have always had to explain everything I said and thought. I just seemed to trip into one misunderstanding after the other. They just pop up and it was impossible to really see the differences coming. While I will still cite this later, I need to include a quote from Bhawuk, Podsiadlowski, Graf, and Triandis:
"[P]eople from cultures with smaller cultural distance may also be confronted with major communication problems, as they do not expect each other to have different basic assumptions and they may be even less aware of their own and the others' cultural backgrounds."

Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła - Poland is not lost yet.

Actually, I don't even know where to start with the pros.

Starting with business: Poland is a Eastern European country (yes, sorry, Linda&Miro, I know, just like Slowenia not geographically but still). Thus can be considered an emerging market. (Guess, I still need numbers for that.)

Then I've been to Poland already a couple of times and it is kind of around the corner (3 hours drive) which would solve the problem of getting visual material.

Poland is strongly interlinked with Germany - despite the recent problems. Hopefully, this interdependance shows in numbers of businesses going there. (Need numbers for that as well.)

I know Polish people. Connections - yesyes! I know Polish immigrants, I know a Polish mayor (ok, actually my mum knows him, but that counts), and I know people living in Poland. But: I don't know any business people having gone to Poland; neither of German origin nor maybe immigrants having gone back to Poland. So, that is the big drawback.

Ok, still have some books lying here and then will start researching....

I had two nice interviews this week.
I'll throw you right into the second one. The text is quite long but I think it's worth reading ;-) And it was a long interview: 1.5 hours. (I add some German quotes I scribbled along since I was not allowed to record the interview. Hope they don't bother the English readers too much but I might want to use them.)

For my second interview I met a guy from the human resource management of a German constructing company. Thus he is one of the big important guys - scary. Lucky me that I did not know that before. Among other things he is responsible for the 380 expatriates his company is sending on mission abroad. He did not tell me so much about Poland in specific but drew a very interesting picture on the expatriate business.

His company first went to Poland in 1990, thus veryvery early. Mostly when they move onto new markets they follow their clients. Let's say they have done constructing for e.g. Volkswagen in Germany. Then Volkswagen decides to put up a factory in Poland - my interview partner's constructing company will for sure accompany them. In Poland they were first cooperating with a Polish company to master a huge construction project. But their expansion plans based on former clients. He said the Eastern European market to be especially interesting because the population is keen on consuming, on investing their money.

While the Polish part of his company is an independently running association, expatriates are send for several reasons:

• they are experts in their field of the construction process.
• for means of human resource development. The mission abroad is often taken as a step up in the business's hierarchy. ("Wenn der demnächst ne ganze Truppe leiten soll, soll der vorher auch mal sehen, wie der Laden im Ausland läuft.")
• they act as guarding dogs in all areas (which my interview partner described as organs, the vital parts of an organization: "Organe der Gesellschaft") but especially when it comes to financing; in this function the expat is responsible to do or see through the processes of planning, calculating, thus watch that everything is running smoothly and that the right numbers are reported, since everything will flow into the overall big balance.
• Every now and then expatriates are also installed in the Board of Executives, sometimes as guarding dogs and sometimes to profit from their experience when it comes to installing a whole new division for example.

They try to run a regular cycle with their expatriates ranging from two till four years. Every now and then they might send somebody on a half-year mission but that only happens in special cases where experts are needed. They normally do not stay longer to prevent fraternization.

Their biggest problem is actually to find enough people who are willing to go on an expatriate mission. ("Es ist nicht viel Auswahl. Wir freuen uns, wenn wir für eine Position drei Kandidaten haben, meistens sind es nur zwei.") They try to meet this problem already in their hiring practice where they especially look for people with international experience or for people with a multi-ethnic background. ("Wir suchen nach Menschen mit zwei Seelen in der Brust; Menschen mit zwei, drei Mentalitäten.") Thus they normal advertise their jobs already in English since on 80% of the construction sites English is the main language. They look for people who are mobile, adroit, open-minded and who already studied or worked in foreign countries. They have to show a certain ambitiousness and joy at other people and other cultures; they have to show a gipsy-mentality.

At the same time they try to work on the Polish side by means of ongoing training. This has several advantages. In the long-term they hope to reduce the need for expatriates. For the moment further training is simply necessary to work with qualified staff and then to draw employees close to the company. My interview partner described Poland as one of the hot markets where it is relatively easy to make a career if you are keen on that. ("Osteuropa - das sind heiße Märkte, da bewegt sich unheimlich viel.") Nobody has the patience to run through a solid three-year apprenticeship while you can make the big bucks so much faster.
In general companies are faced with a much higher fluctuation than in Germany. Qualified staff is rare and competitors are willing to pay higher salaries if they do not have to invest into education. But there is a natural limit to paying employees for staying. My interview partner's company tries to bind people by offering them a future, by cultivating personal relations, and by giving them the outlook to work for a successful, well-positioned company, thus employ their reputation. A profound job marketing and close connections to the universities leads to 30.000-40.000 job applications annually. ("Jung finden und selbst backen." - Find young and bake yourself.) Nevertheless, this procedure implies that only in 10-15 years you will have the staff that you are looking for.

Thus: back to expatriates.
(I split the summary so you'll have to check out the next article linked aboved.)

In Poznań Panopa employs about 700 people which are responsible to store materials and parts as well as assemble some of them ready for delivery and distribute them just-in-time and just-in-sequence at Volkswagen. The smooth functioning is guaranteed by regular communication between and within the companies. ("Weil einfach die Verzahnung der ganzen Kette so eng ist, dass die Information ein wesentlicher Bestandteil ist; ansonsten können Sie den Job nicht machen." Vieth, 04.00min) Every morning at 8a.m. Panopa and Volkswagen sit together to review the last 24 hours: where did something go wrong? Were there distributional bottle necks? How can we avoid them next time? In this Volkswagen, Panopa and in this case Mr. Vieth follow the claim that nothing is worse than a mistake happening twice. Thus all operational departments, and Panopa as service provider is taken as just another operational department, sit together and make sure everything is set for the next day. Quite naturally the cooperation between Volkswagen and Panopa offered more possible sources of friction in the beginning than it does nowadays were the daily meetings can be performed within half an hour.

Start-up problems were diminished by the fact that both parties were basically run by German expatriates: the top two levels of management were occupied by Germans. Consequently, German was enforced as first language within the organizational structures. The situation was further eased by the fact that Volkswagen is the biggest employer in the area which facilitates the communication with the municipal authorities and communities. In terms of infrastructure for example the authorities renovated a quite decrepit bridge which was connecting Panopa's warehouse with Volkswagen's factory 6km away.
Dr. Hucht resumes that it was quite helpful for them to work for a well-known client who is conducting projects which are of public interest and widely appreciated. Nevertheless there were no networks Panopa could fall back onto. Their first project manager, interestingly enough a French, looked for a contact person on site who was then responsible for getting all the necessary admissions (water, electricity, ...). Without knowing a single word in Polish it would have been impossible to talk to the authorities and to apply for permits. ("Weil wenn Sie kein Polnisch sprechen, haben Sie keine Chance." Vieth, 09.14min) The only thing that was not run by their contact person was the building of the storehouse. That was done by a German architect who was already living in Poland since 14 years which left Panopa with hardly any work on that topic of admissions. ("Das ganze übrige Geschäft [..] haben wir eigentlich eingekauft." Vieth, 09.30min) Meanwhile several societies and groups came into existence which establish and open up networks to foreign entrepreneurs. This certainly facilitates start up and the possibilities to gain information.

When Panopa first came to Poland they also faced problems with the different legislation. Since it used to very be difficult for foreigner to actually buy a piece of land in Panopa built their first storehouse onto a site which did not belong to themselves. While they were putting up the lease contracts they had to find out that by Polish Law the building belongs to the owner of the site. ("Weil man eben doch die deutschen Zusammenhänge und Gepflogenheiten überträgt auf das andere Land und dann eventuell auch in eine Falle rein rennt, wo man gar nicht mit gerechnet hat." Dr. Hucht, 11.02 min.) Problems in that direction piled up because as a company you were not allowed to build a house before you were not operating in Poland since two years - but which company can actually wait two years. Thus you need somebody who talks with the parties concerned and explains that Panopa is interested in being a reliable partner and a future employer. ("Sie müssen da irgendeinen Sachverständigen haben, der für Sie dort hingeht und klar macht, dass Sie da eine Halle bauen dürfen; [...] dass Sie ein guter Partner sind, die nächsten Jahre in Polen auch für Arbeitsplätze sorgen und so weiter und so fort." Vieth, 11.52 min)

I defnitely need to focus on introducing German expatriates to one specific country (and maybe the other way round as well). I've known that from the beginning on.

First I had wanted to take a country I have lived in myself. Thus: Canada, South Africa, France, or Belgium. Israel with my sister living there would have been another option. The States should have been ok as well. I had wanted to take a country familiar to me because I was hoping I could better judge on the country-specific information I'm reading.
Well, the countries I've lived in are not expatriate-wonderland, they are not relevant to German expatriates (don't pin me down on that, it's just a naive impression of mine).

Asia is surely the biggest issue in expatriate research which reflects the interests of German businesses.
I have no clue about Asia!

Other emerging markets seem to be Eastern Europe and South America. From a German perspective I thought Turkey might be interesting.

Now it's like: Why not Poland?