In this context, international job rotation programs can play a decisive role. Insights into the everyday work of subsidiaries or affiliates and learning about culturally accepted behavior create understanding of how the assessment of employees in these countries is to be interpreted. At the same time, the acquiring company learns something about the way its behavior is viewed against a culturally different background. The result of this process is a slow rapprochement of the viewpoints across cultural boundaries. At corporate headquarters, information is evaluated against the backdrop of an intercultural awareness, and the foreign subsidiary adapts the information it must provide according to the cultural background of headquarters. Although extensive job rotation programs cannot create a fundamental cultural transformation, communication can be freed of cultural aspects. This is a major contribution to raising the intercultural competence and to improving the transparency, fairness, and comparability of the appraisals of performance and potential of staffs.  

Another measure for the promotion of intercultural competence can be seen in the deliberate recruiting of employees with substantial professional experience in other cultures, from a migration background, or whose parents are of different nationalities. In all of these cases, it is decisive that understanding for the various forms of assessment conduct be strengthened across cultural boundaries and that these differences be taken into account in the interpretation of the results and the definition of the appropriate measures in such a way that existing differences can by and large be compensated. 

Key success factors for the implementation of professional performance review and talent management

A further development in the above sense significantly enhances the quality of performance review and talent management. However, it can be achieved only within the framework of a long-term, broad-based process. Moreover, the measures briefly described here are not the only influencing factors for the success of company-wide performance and potential management programs; on the contrary, the process design alone during the implementation of these programs has a long-term effect on their quality. On the whole, Detecon has identified the following critical success factors on the basis of its experience from relevant projects: 

• Early involvement of works councils and data protection at home and abroad to ensure a standard process worldwide with uniform assessment criteria and the usability of the collected data
• Continuous change management support for performance and potential review and successor management to assure acceptance of the measure on which the quality of the collected data is decisively dependent
• Integration with other HR processes such as skills management, successor management, or market compensation so as to create a holistic model and to obtain the greatest possible benefits from the acquired data
• Securing of uniform assessment criteria worldwide and, as far as possible, elimination of cultural factors abroad to achieve the best fit when filling positions
• Support with powerful tools which guarantee the evaluation of the complex data and the efficient performance of the process, thereby enabling professionalization and creation of transparency

There can be no question that the international implementation of performance review and talent management systems which satisfy the requirements derived from this list and are accompanied by measures for the long-term surmounting of cultural barriers is expensive and time-consuming. But it is equally without question that this is an important investment in the future which justifies such expenditures. Effective talent management, long-term development of the potential existing in a company, and intercultural competence and global thinking on the part of managers are all factors which are becoming more and more decisive for the competitiveness of companies operating internationally.   
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