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Global employee mobility
Continued from p26
5. To overcome travel bans and assignment delays, HR may focus on hiring local talent who already have work rights (i.e. nationality or Permanent Resident status) in host locations rather than relocate existing staff.
6. Mobility teams will need to work with internal risk to develop sophisticated Business Continuity Plans to be able to trigger in the future, in terms of security in place, evacuations, ensuring families are together, business travel management, etc. Ideally policy support should be developed so that cases are dealt with in a consistent and fair way, as opposed to ad-hoc.
7. With the expected economic downturn – will companies re-evaluate projects and assignments? Will assignments currently on hold still go ahead once restrictions are lifted or will companies rethink investments? What mobility alternatives are available? Cost management will become more important and mobility managers will need to think of new
and creative ways to control costs. 8. In some industries, especially involving
larger long-term projects such as infrastructure and engineering, mobility operations will likely return to normal as soon as the restrictions are lifted. However, mobility managers and team members will need to focus more on new skills as we move forward. The ‘reluctant assignee’ and their family may require much more empathy than before and the manager may need to increase the use of external relocation specialists for coaching to assist with this empathy and assurances, as well as to be better equipped to provide assignees with more detailed information about healthcare systems, insurance and other aspects of the destination country.
9. Finally, although there may be fewer assignments, the ones which do go ahead may be more business critical and expensive, which will contradict the pressure to reduce costs. Rather than trying to reduce costs and
limit exceptions, HR teams will need to be able to ensure managers do not cut corners on protecting the assignee and family, and will provide them with access to ongoing relocation support services, spouse and family support etc.
caring and reassurance
While we believe that Gibraltar can showcase its great success in withstanding the corona pandemic, in order to attract talented employees to the jurisdiction, successful employers will be those who place more attention on caring and reassurance for their relocating employees both before and throughout the relocation period, providing their assignees with access to both
internal and external personal and spouse support.
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28 Gibraltar International
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