Levelling-up global talent mobility for the world of tomorrow

As the world of work continues to change irrevocably, many in the workforce are now being forced to adapt to new roles to remain relevant. As a result, it’s never been so important that employees are ready and empowered to take on new roles and develop new skills. Organizations globally must find ways to ensure their workforce is resilient and ready for new purposes and goals.

To be successful, global talent mobility teams must simultaneously level up their strategies and operations. To understand just how to do this Kate Graham, Head of Content Labs and Insights at UNLEASH is joined by Cathy Koslowski, VP of Solution Consulting at Equus Software as they discuss what technologies, strategies, metrics and insights can support this.

Since the pandemic, everything has changed and understanding the data and what data you need… is super important.

Cathy Koslowski, VP of SolutionConsulting at Equus Software

Watch on-demand to:

• Hear about why global talent mobility functions need access to high-quality reporting and easy-to-access metrics.
• Understand why the technology that supports your technology function has to offer ROI in its own right.
• Learn about the strategies that can ensure HR and global talent mobility function success.

The future and immediate challenges of global mobility

Many firms increasingly turned to global internal talent mobility as the impact of the pandemic impacted their external recruitment activities, as well as their usual retention management techniques. This puts particular pressure on HR firms as they had to pivot away from their usual practices and start to understand talent, retention, and engagement within a global paradigm, learning on global mobility teams to better understand this. And with so much change, it can be difficult to know what to prioritize in this new era of global talent mobility. Especially as HR is under more pressure to instantly, efficiently, and effectively deliver mobility as part of a broader talent and business strategy which simultaneously enhances the employee experience and gives the right competitive advantage by the correct distribution of talent.

Here, as Koslowski explained, getting the correct data and metrics in place can be an effective starting point. First off, to help get buy-in from the business for any program here, HR has to know the costs of and where it can improve the talent pipeline and retention and even aspects of business life, such as TSG and D&I. It also has to know where a global mobility strategy might intersect with other important changes, such as expectations of flexible and remote working and how talent and global mobility teams might start to work more closely. For example, they will likely have to better understand what happens if a worker wants to move abroad to continue in the same role or wants to move country and role altogether. It can get even more complex if they move to one country to work remotely and then get sent on assignment to a different country. Here, everyone has to be savvy about the tax and financial risks and responsibilities.

And there can be no proverbial head in the sand as this is a pandemic-changed world that is disrupted at an ever greater rate. In fact, with uncertainty and change a given, the war in Ukraine being a clear example from 2022, global mobility strategy will be impacted and thus need resilience and deep understanding built into them.

Basics, quirks, and further global mobility considerations

It isn’t just growing demand and increased expectations that global mobility will have to deal with. It’s the individual details that will make up how global mobility works in operation, too. There will be the need to re-assess global mobility guidelines – Do we need a global framework? Should it be localized? – as well as the need to consider a new flexible approach. There will also be a need to assess remote and global mobility frameworks, too; with HR likely having to move to a permission rather than forgiveness model. There will also need to be better connections between HR, tax, and Global Mobility teams to understand compliance, immigration details, and business benefits.

Basics cannot be forgotten either. Privacy, data, and other regulatory compliance still need to be taken into account. As does an understanding of immigration and visa rules. Here, as Koslowski laid out, organizations should consider whether they create specific programs that leans into increased workforce demand for global mobility or whether they let them figure it out for themselves. Something to remember if an employee desires to work near a beach remotely and on foreign shores!

Knowing your global mobility stakeholders

It is also important for HR to understand who their stakeholders are when their talent moves around globally. It isn’t just the individual employee concerned but the business leaders, compliance teams and HR itself. All of these teams have different priorities and must be managed as such.

For example. Compliance teams, such as tax and legal departments, want to ensure they keep to regulations and are less concerned about the experience of the employee. However, business leaders of course care about the experience of the employee moving around – they understand what this means against key HR and business metrics – but also want to know about costs, deployment speed, and whether a move will impact productivity.

For HR, the priorities might be more contingent and informed by an increasingly VUCA world. They might want to know what risks they have to mitigate against and what care they might need to provide i.e. Koslowski recounted how during the pandemic many firms rang around their expatriate colleagues to get a better understanding of how their globally mobile employees were doing and what support they might need.

This, of course, links to how employees might view their global mobility adventures: they want to know what support and ease of access their employer might provide, from daycare to language lessons to cultural training. And this doesn’t end at the move itself. Support is needed all the way through the process because, as Koslowski stated earlier, disruption is a given.

A lot for global mobility and HR teams to handle.