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Chapter 27: Personnel Department – Chevron Corporation

As I had traveled overseas I’d found that our American employ-
ees and their wives had been poorly prepared for their foreign assign-
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ilarities between his overseas and domestic jobs. If he’s a geologist,
for example, he knows the professional techniques and administrative
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He is usually working for an American manager who has a company
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self faced with not only the language adjustment that she shares with her
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up. Her children’s schooling is not in the public school she has known
in the United States. Even the electric voltage and amperage may be dif-
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are only examples of the adjustments that must be made. To me there
were two keys in the situation:

1. People needed to know in advance what the conditions are at the
foreign location where they were being sent. If there were minimal
surprises they could accept them much better.

2. By knowing the conditions in advance of their departure from the
United States, they could act more wisely with regard to what appli-
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It is surprising how keenly people can become upset about
materials that are unavailable at an overseas site. The most frequent
complaints I encountered overseas were the lack of peanut butter and
ketchup!

To help overcome these problems I developed a format for sim-
ple brochures to be provided to an employee and his wife at the time they
were preparing to go into foreign service. I sent a copy of the outline for

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