The trend that was hiding in plain sight: Mobility as a tool for retention

By Caitlin Pyett, Consulting Lead and Director of Account Management Asia Crown World Mobility

June 10 2024 - Crown World Mobility's recent 'Mobility Matters' survey uncovered many interesting viewpoints about the state of global mobility in 2023, when it was conducted. Chief among them was that mobility is wanted and indeed expected in career paths, particularly by younger employees, but that employers are not capitalising on this. Instead, mobility is frequently used as a tool to retain employees who are threatening to leave companies; it is like a rabbit pulled out of a hat at the last moment, because mobility and talent departments within companies are not aligned.

"Global mobility has been evolving over several years and is seen as a service that is detached from talent, to call upon when it is needed," says a contact of mine in the mobility department of a global medical equipment provider.

"Even today in many organisations, Global Mobility reports into Global Reward or another part of the business when ideally it would be a better fit with the talent development team, as is starting to happen at some companies, including ours," my contact adds.

We are in an era when Global Mobility and Talent Development need to start working together as a strategic part of a business's decision-making processes. We're not quite there yet, but Mobility are striving to be at the front end of succession planning and development. It's still a journey of educating HR and the business with Mobility working with Talent Development.

The trend of flexible working

"We recognise flexible working, domestically and on occasions globally," says my contact.

"There is, however, the question of how this international flexibility can be met without extortionate costs and a huge burden of administration to ensure compliance with corporate tax requirements. This is evaluated from HR and legal perspectives before research into whether a permanent transition can be made to a local contract," she continues.

The right to work is vital. Even if the employee only wishes to work elsewhere temporarily, if they do not have the right to work in the location they choose then it is a hard 'no' from the start. Equally, if there is no employing entity then that would also be a hard no.

"We are exploring how they might use an Employer of Record where there is no current employing entity - but this is very much in its exploratory/infancy stage," comments my contact.

"An Employer of Record would open up the possibility of employing people in different countries without necessarily having an entity - a registered employing office that handles administration such as payroll - in that territory. Again, this would need to form a wider education piece to HR, Talent and Reward leaders as well as business heads," she adds.

Measuring an assignee's productivity

Crown World Mobility's survey also found that more than 80% of respondents say their employees are more productive when they are on assignment than when they work in their home country. This suggests very much a 'win-win' situation for the employee - who gets their desired move - and the company, which gets a more productive worker.

It is helpful to have a preview of how employees were performing before they departed on their international assignment which can then inform progress while they are on assignment.

This is currently a manual process for many companies because mobility is not yet integrated with talent nor has the ability to draw down reports on the international population from their HRIS system.

This is where you can unlock data which shows, performance, potential, diversity and so on, to provide evidence of the benefits of global mobility programmes and help Talent and HR make more informed decisions.

"In our company, we are looking at adding tags to employment records of employees who have been on assignment, repatriated or relocated more permanently to another country," says my contact.

"This will enable us to pull reports on this population, as mentioned above, so we can see the full picture of development and return on investment, over time. We are also recording why an employee is relocated.

"We have a formal approval process which requires a justification for the move before approval, but we can now look at the number of people who moved for personal development reasons or for skills-based reasons, and should be able to evaluate how they are performing as they progress through their assignment and future in the business," she concludes.

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