Guest Post by Oyindamola Adedokun
My GPT Experience
Having just recently graduated from studying international relations at the university in 2020, I was frantically searching for a role that would give me some sort of international experience. Coupled with that was a desperate desire to find someone who could mentor and guide me in an international setting. On one of those days, when I was surfing the internet to see what opportunity I could get, I came in contact with Angie on Instagram. Unknown to me that she is the Managing Director of Global People Transitions, GmbH, I asked that she mentor me in the global mobility field. She graciously requested that I shared my resume with her and informed me about a six-month internship opportunity with her company. This was the beginning of what would soon become an employer-employee relationship and, more significantly, a mentor-mentee relationship.
Four Advantages of Working at GPT
You Get to Work in a Multicultural Setting
GPT was my first significant experience working with people from different cultural backgrounds. You are exposed to hands-on experience building your cultural agility when you intern at GPT, as you meet people from different parts of the world. Apart from the fact that we had a team that spanned three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa, I had the privilege of meeting and interacting with clients from different parts of the world, from America to Germany, the United Kingdom to India, from Switzerland to Bangladesh, etc. This experience is surreal!
You Learn From a Cutting Edge Industry Guru
Angie Weinberger is undoubtedly a force in the global mobility profession who has lots of experience to share with both newbies and industry professionals. Angie is an expat career coach, author, conference speaker, and guest lecturer and has a long-standing history of expertise in the corporate world. Can you imagine feeding from a person with this repertoire of knowledge and experience?
You Get a High-Value Coaching Session With Angie for Free
As I mentioned, Angie is an experienced and seasoned coach who is highly sought after. She would take you one-on-one on your career and professional goals. She gives tasks that help you gain clarity on your goals and what to do to achieve them. These sessions helped me gain insight into what I really wanted for my career.
General Upgrade of Your Skill Set and Your Knowledge of Global Mobility
At Global People Transitions, you would be in charge of the general administrative tasks. This exposes you to lots of hands-on, relevant real-world experience to learn how to perform effectively and efficiently in the 21st-century workplace. Additionally, being Angie’s right-hand person exposes you to everything in between global mobility and relocation to coaching and training professionals to acquire intercultural communication and team management skills, and many more among the plethora of professional skills Angie shares from her Swiss-Army knife of a professional skills repertoire. I am happy to mention that these experiences have helped me land a fantastic job as an Experienced Analyst in one of the ‘Big Four’ professional services companies in Lagos, Nigeria. In this role, I will be supporting expats from different countries to settle in Nigeria, from ensuring that there are no statutory and regulatory complications to helping them seamlessly integrate into the culture in Nigeria. The skills and experience I garnered while working at GPT would be helpful as I have watched Angie coached expats that had just newly moved into new countries.
I unequivocally recommend interning at GPT to anyone, especially final-year students and fresh graduates, who are ready to jumpstart their career in a fast-paced, international and multicultural setting. Angie is such an engaging and caring manager, coach, and mentor who would be not only interested in how well you perform on the job but also in how you can achieve your long-term career goals. Angie demonstrated this by recommending many jobs and opportunities for me to apply to. Not limited to these, she also showed care for my personal well-being during the internship as I interned with her during a period when there was a protest that led to unrest in Lagos. The best lesson you will learn from her; she is on a mission to bring the human touch to global mobility. As an intern, you will experience firsthand how it makes a world of difference and realize this is the added value you can later contribute to your future employers.
Do you know Darth Vader, the dark force in many of the Star Wars movies? Did you know that we all have a bit of Darth Vader in us? We are driven by our fears. The Star Wars movies are full of allusions to deep psychology and how our attachments and fears form our behaviors and life. With this post, I would like to give you an understanding of how we are influenced by our fears and how you can change to become a Jedi.
Fritz Riemann, a deep psychologist established a theory based on four basic forms of fear (“Grundformen der Angst”). The four basic forms of angst are formed in our early childhood and determine to a large extent how we behave when we are grown up. In the extreme form these fears turn into psychological illnesses.
For Riemann, the Sith are schizoid, depressed, obsessive and hysterical people. You have to be aware that even though these terms have found their way into our everyday language the clinical spectrum of these illnesses is serious and needs treatment through therapy.
Carl Gustav Jung, another deep psychologist discovered the “shadow”. Jung assumed that all of our relationships with other people are based on unconscious projections of our own wishes and expectations into their behavior.
According to Jung, the shadow is the part of us that we have driven into the unconscious as it was unwanted (for example behavior as a child) as opposed to our “Persona” which was the desired (performing) part of us.
Did you ever notice that you don’t like traits in another person and later someone told you that you have this trait too?
To speak in Star Wars terminology: You might have a bit of Darth Vader within you even though you might be a Jedi most of the time.
Like Darth Vader, we were not always bad. Some of us had negative experiences. Other lost trust in the world because of a traumatic experience. Our education system did not help either. We were ruled by authority and we had to perform. If you did not have your homework back in the 70-ies and 80-ies you were punished.
No one told us that we are great because we are creative, or even because we are who we are. We were taught to perform for making it in life. My parents had a different approach to education, but they also were young and idealistic and sometimes forgot their own children over the ones they took care of.
Today when you watch TV or check an ad statement you will see that what is often shown to us is a world full of existential angst or full of gold-coated “happy families”.
We are torn between a world to be afraid in and a world where everyone is on happy pills all the time. It’s like a world where the dark forces rule and were the Sith have won. Everywhere.
Could you still become a Jedi?
What if you decided that you did not want to be ruled by fear and anxiety?
What if you wanted to be the light and show others to stay “good” or to stay on their mission?
What if you could be Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia Organa?
You see that the Jedis confront their fears all the time. They deal with it. They do what they are afraid to do and they fight evil step-by-step. They don’t stop. They sometimes take a break to train or to collect the force. They retreat to be able to focus on their mission again.
Real change happens only through taking action. You start by confronting what you are afraid of. You go into the dark tunnel and the abyss of your soul. You dive deep into the black sea of concern and unconscious. There, you will find the monsters, the Sith, the evil you need to handle. You need to work through those with a light-saber. You tackle one relationship after the next relationship. You go through them all. All your fears, projections, shadows. I’ll stay by your side like Obi Wan Kenobi.
Cherish the people who criticize you, but don’t let their criticism stop you from what you think is right.
Stay on your path.
One day you will look back and only see Jedis around you.
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I promised you 10 life-saving rules from my experience as a Global Mobility Coach when you embark on your Expat Journey. Moving to another country poses a lot of challenges. Too often we all rely on our employers and hope that they will make sure everything is done properly.
When we get an indication that an international assignment could have challenges because we talk to other expats, we might not take those so seriously or we might think that certain issues do not apply to us. You probably also think you can outsmart everybody else, correct?
Still, here are 10 rules you should follow when embarking on your Expat Journey.
- Host Market Salary: Often the salary in the host country is determined at “peer” level. However, it might not be very transparent what that exactly means. Often there is room for negotiation. Familiarise yourself online with the cost of living especially for rent. Try to budget your spending in the first months as you might not have a good feeling for the currency yet.
- Host Grade / Title and Role: All too often we accept an offer that does not totally match our experience level. Try to find out what your role entails and address your expectations early in the process. Get a written role description.
- Repatriation or Transition Plan: I have seen many assignees who never clearly articulated what they would like to get out of their international assignment experience. They also do not know how the experience would lead to a new role in the home entity. Formulate a plan for your repatriation before you go on the assignment.
- Immigration, Tax and Social Security: Usually assignees see those three areas as burdensome administration. However, mistakes in immigration, social security or tax can be costly. Follow the instructions from your employer closely. Make sure you have understood what the assignment conditions are in these three areas. Do you know what is expected of you and when you have to meet certain deadlines? If you are not getting supported by your company seek external help.
- Life Partners & Spouses: Many of my assignees discuss the assignment with their life partners and spouses and rely on their consent to come along with them. Often though I get the impression that the decision is a wish of the assignee and the other partner has to decide to come along to maintain the relationship. Often this puts a high strain on the relationship because in the host country your spouse or life partner is on his or her own, does not have a network and even worse does not have a meaningful job like you have. Get coaching and find communities on the internet before you embark on your journey. Building up a network in the host country is key.
- Kids and Teens: I do not have children myself but I can imagine the strain of having to take your child out of school and moving to another place since I was one of those children too. It is hard and your children might need more attention than usual. Often they have to learn a new language and make new friends. Work with your spouse/life partner through the issues, find out how easy an international education will be in the host country, discuss with other global parents and most importantly listen to your children’s needs too.
- Parents and elderly family members in the home country: Before you embark on your journey consider what to do in family emergencies. What can you do if your parents need help or have an accident? What about your old auntie or uncle who was always there for you and is all alone now?
- Emergencies in the host countries: We all believe that we will live forever but there are moments in our life when we are suddenly in the middle of a bomb attack, civil unrest or exposed to a natural catastrophe such as a Tsunami. Have an emergency plan ready. Discuss with your partner and friends at home what to do in case of you getting injured or dying. Learn the emergency services of your companies and their phone numbers by heart so you can call them. Enrol on their websites.
- Global Mobility Experts: Accept that there are professionals in the field who support expatriates all the time. Seek their advice and support. Be nice to them! We usually have very good relationships with our assignees. We know a lot about your personal concerns. For us, an assignee is a human first. So if you are nice to us we will gladly help you through all your topics and hold your hand when the going gets tough.
- Make friends for life: In our global world today it is easy to feel at home in most places once you have established some meaningful relationships and once you have had a chance to see the country you moved to. Work is important but remember: Work will always be there. The moments you will remember later are those you have either shared with people, been to places or doing special activities.
All the best for your adventure.
Guest post by Lucie Koch
I have been in Zürich for a few weeks now and I am starting to adjust to Swiss city life. I am amazed every day by how cosmopolitan Zürich is with all the languages heard in the tram. It’s wonderful.
In my last blog post, I wrote about how entry into professional life was one kind of culture shock. I have started to adapt to the professional and Swiss cultural frame. Working for Global People Transitions is a very interesting experience, especially since I get to be involved in very diverse tasks, from administrative paperwork to exciting business development projects. I am discovering how many gearwheels must be activated and maintained for the business machine to work properly.
While I expected to have to adjust to the professional culture, I wasn’t quite prepared for the general culture shock that I experienced in Switzerland. As a child who grew up in France with parents from the cantons of Zurich and Luzern, and many family ties in Switzerland, I have been exposed to Swiss culture throughout my upbringing. I spent a few holidays in Switzerland when I was younger and identified quite strongly as Swiss. But then this month, I found myself suddenly confronted with cultural and structural enigmas: What is the deal with these expensive trash bags? Why do people eat so early? I also found myself confused about how to greet new people properly – do I offer a handshake? Should I do the ‘bise’ (kiss)? – which resulted in some awkward moments of hesitation and embarrassed smiles. It turns out, I might be more French than I thought.
These experiences made me think about the topic of mixed cultural identities, especially in the case of expatriation and specifically about the children of expatriates who grow up abroad.
Indeed, when you grow up in a country as a foreigner, especially in an area of low cultural diversity as it is the case for the French countryside where I grew up, the Swiss identity makes one stand out, especially for children. You don’t understand the other kids’ popular culture references and you speak another language with your family. The scarcity of Swiss items like cervela, landjäger, and swiss chips or mayonnaise turn them into ‘precious’ objects for the expat parents and to expat children, they appear as relics of Swiss-ness that you get to share once every other month in a kind of family tradition.
In the end, as a ‘born-expat’, one gets a reflected image of the parent’s culture. Indeed, a born-expat’s understanding of the ‘culture-of-origin’ is imagined (through the information absorbed from the media, short stays in the country or from the family’s opinions and stories) and not experienced. Therefore, young expats born abroad have an incomplete picture of a culture with which they strongly identify. The resulting culture shock, when the born-expat realizes how different reality is, can be very difficult, especially since it touches the perception of one’s own identity.
Children of expatriates are a very interesting focus of study when it comes to intercultural competence and how culture affects one’s identity and life. We are quite aware of how being an expatriate family is complicated logistically, emotionally and mentally on all members during the first years of immigration or how tricky it can be to raise children in a country in which we are not completely familiar with the education system. It is, however, important to consider that expat-children may face identity struggles when they grow up and to actively address the issues of identity and nationality during the upbringing.
Have you experienced any issues related to identity as an expat? Do you know a good way to address the question of identity with expat children?
I hope you enjoyed the read, I’ll write again next month.
Until then, have a great day!
Lucie
Lucie Koch was an intern at Global People Transitions GmbH in Zurich, Switzerland. She graduated with an Intercultural Management Master study, which led her to study in Dijon, France, a city she was already familiar with and in unfamiliar Finland (for one semester). Previously, she studied one year at Durham University (UK) as part of a Bachelor Erasmus Mobility program. She was born in 1994 to a Swiss expat couple in France. She grew up in the French countryside, around horses. She’s a self-confessed introvert, fascinated by different languages, cultures, science (especially astronomy and biology) and philosophy. She also likes to spend time drawing, painting or in cinemas.
We have lived in a world dominated by political, economic, and environmental uncertainty for many years. However, the past three years have been exceptional and challenging for most of us. The global health crisis caused by Covid-19 has brought the entire planet to its knees. The pandemic impacted all aspects of life and radically changed the way we work. The world of Global Mobility will never be the same. We are beyond Global Mobility and ride into a new way of working.
Considering the impact caused by the pandemic, it does not take a fortune teller to foresee that Global Mobility Managers will have to deal with the blow of the crisis in the years to come. If you thought that one global crisis was enough, you were up for a shock in February of this year when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Geopolitical tension, including in and around China, seems more pervasive than ever. Insecurity around energy, food supplies, inflation, and other dystopian scenarios cause many anxieties and mental health issues. The Global Mobility Manager of 2022 is a crisis manager. All “crisis” cycles show that Global Mobility Managers continue to be incredibly resilient and are constantly coming up with immediate and creative solutions to face issues that arise overnight.
Imagine the difficulty of suddenly repatriating an Expat (or an Expat family) who was temporarily on holiday in a third country and remains stuck there without any other assistance. You might have to find a quick solution for someone who was about to go on assignment but had to postpone their departure. Their household goods are on their way to the host location. You book a serviced apartment for them in the home country.
Teams in war zones continue to work or relocate to a haven, refugees integrate into the workforce, and business travelers overstretch their stays in locations and create a tax liability.
Having handled many crises in the past, guarding the life of Expat families has become our daily bread. We continue to bring the human touch back into Global Mobility. As I already mentioned in my book in 2019, it is more important for all of us to keep our sanity. It’s more important than ever to put on our oxygen masks and work on our inner strength.
Let’s continue to build up our support gang and raise the next generation of Global Mobility Managers through an excellent education with the Global Mobility Master Course at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. I also favor a mentor system where experienced Global Mobility Jedis foster and guide a Padawan. (Yes, I draw much inspiration from movies, books, and music.)
When you need guidance, we all have our favorite book, and I turned to my religion for advice and found a fantastic guideline for the winter to come.
1) I am the EXPAT, your client: You shall not have strange people before me.
Our Expat population is changing. Nowadays, an ever more diverse population is embarking on international assignments. Expats vary in cultural background, family situation, age, gender, etc. It is impossible to address these various groups’ needs in a one-size-fits-all policy. A more diverse workforce equals a variety of individual assignees’ expectations, resulting in a proposition that might be desirable for one employee while not appealing for another. The Expat is our main client. We need to take care of their interests before we consider other parties in the process. In case of doubt, focus on people over processes (see also: Agile Manifesto).
In the AIRINC Mobility Outlook Survey 2021, 65% of respondents expect that the demand for flexibility from the business will increase. Meanwhile, 52% of the companies surveyed expect that adding more flexibility to policies is the best response to this demand, followed by 28% who think using a wider variety of policy types is the better solution. According to the Mercer 2019 Flexible Mobility Policies Survey, the most popular policy elements for which the participants introduced flexibility are family-related: housing, spousal support, child education, and home leave tickets are all items that can help improve the Expat Experience while on assignment.
2) You shall not take the name of the POLICY, your bible in vain.
There are reasons for quoting the policy, the law, or other regulatory insights. However, this should not be your go-to-wording for anything that “is not possible.” With the crisis, we all accepted that the duty of care belongs to our role. Policies should foster the well-being of employees.
Flexible policies have prepared some companies to deal more efficiently with urgent repatriations and unforeseen mobility scenarios. Other companies adopting flexible policies have found them inapplicable and inappropriate in the context of urgency. In my view, we will be moving away from policies altogether and designing individual packages for the Expat that fits like a bespoke, handmade business suit.
We mentioned last year that immigration gets more complex, and it could be that the host country’s legislation has not kept up with modern family constructs, for example. Communication about what is possible and how we can support it is critical here. Communicate openly about longer lead times and backlogs at authorities (for example, post-BREXIT, the UK immigration process currently takes much longer than we were used to.).
3) Remember to keep holy the DIGITAL DETOX DAY
Keep a “digital detox day” because your work never ends. We have constantly worked across time zones, holiday schedules, and daily demands. For your sanity and energy maintenance, it is essential to get away from all media for 24 hours at least. I practice DDD but observed with my coaching clients that the pandemic has blurred the lines between work and personal time.
Many organizations have focused on digitization which means moving to more digital formats. While digitalization means strategically shifting to digital processes and activities. Often the term digitalization is used for both interchangeably.
One of the biggest challenges is incorporating technology into the business to add value to the company and its employees. One positive example of digitalization is reporting assignees through an intuitive HR system and tracking assignees through security apps such as the International SOS Assistance App.
Your level of digital engagement depends on how “digitally mature” your global mobility program is. You might be just ‘exploring digital,’ using robotics to carry out simple and repetitive tasks, while others might be already ‘becoming digital’ with a formal digital strategy.
You are already experiencing success where automation performs tasks humans generally handle, such as periodic emails or copying and pasting information from public or private sources.
Adopting and introducing those techniques into existing processes will focus on diminishing costs, increasing productivity by improving operational efficiency, and retaining talent.
Some of the latest HR systems like Success Factors or Workday, offer essential workflow functions for international assignments. Still, they cannot yet run the entire end-to-end process with all the external vendors involved. Data needs to shift from the HR System to the vendor platform, but an integrated solution, which I call “the Holy Grail,” has yet to be invented (it exists mainly in my fantasy brain). As I filled another Excel sheet with numbers and birth dates, I kept reminding myself that this was how I started in the field in 1999. Before that, we used to calculate on paper.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology is another exciting use of AI in the field. We speed up transactional processes in mobility functions. Equally important is that automation can also reveal itself as crucial in reducing hierarchical thinking. If you want to read more about this topic, this article on our blog might interest you.
Core office technologies such as telephone, word processing platforms, and email have evolved to expand connected and collaborative working possibilities. Expats can now access the latest information, join video conferences, and share and work on the same documents or workspace at their convenience, from a device and location of their choice. It is an excellent aid tool for managing assignee package creation. It makes it possible for our teams to communicate closely with our Expats worldwide.
As for Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR and VR, respectively), they can transform the onboarding experience into the organization or allow them to meet and collaborate with colleagues in other countries. Additionally, you can virtually recreate cities to immerse oneself in the new environment before deciding to move there. Many serviced apartments use VR to show their apartments.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already helping organizations go beyond traditional ways of managing the global workforce by using intelligent devices to predict, detect, and prevent risks in moving people around the globe. With the massive increase in the data volume available to organizations, the emergence of advanced AI-based algorithms, and the growing availability of data scientists, systems become increasingly self-managing and potentially self-defending against risks.
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) deals with more natural ways humans and computers can work together in the future. Watch this space as it could again help us in Global Mobility and reduce our stress levels. For example, instead of sitting at a desk for 12 hours, we could work by walking outside and taking the Expat Family with us on a virtual tour of the city. Or we can use voice commands to fill out a form instead of retyping the data.
4) Honor the Expat’s Host and Home Manager (and Sponsors)
We have structured Global Mobility drivers and assignment types and integrated Global Mobility with the Talent function. We still need to bring back the Human Touch, and we especially need to align the home and host line manager’s interest in the Expat’s goals and performance criteria.
We also need to remember to nominate a sponsor so that the Expat has a home they can return to and a guardian angel who watches out for their interests in the home company. You will have fewer headaches if you initially reduce the assignment length to a maximum of two years. It’s always easier to extend an assignment that works well than to “early repatriate” someone for whatever reasons.
Since the 1990s, assignment types have evolved from only having long-term or short-term assignments. In the 2000s, new kinds of assignments emerged, such as the rotator, the international transfer, the globalist, and the commuter. Then, the 2010s saw the rise of business travelers, international new hires, and domestic relocations. In the present decade, we will see the assignment types evolve and diversify further with new possibilities like virtual roles, contingent workers, remote workers, and other future mobility options we have not thought about yet.
Depending on your situation, you might want to consider your primary use cases and create suitable assignment types around them. For example, we started the “Cross-Border Project Worker” type as someone who is employed in one location, lives in a second location, and might commute twice a week to a third location. European legislation now adopts the “Teleworker” as an assignment type. Be creative so you have a handle on managing or accepting our other reality of dealing with every case on a customized basis.
5) You shall not fire any EXPAT.
Have you solved the dilemma of succession planning and repatriation in your company yet? If so, I’d be interested in exchanging with you as it still seems that we are utilizing 1999 methods in recruiting and global resourcing. We should have understood that firing an Expat is never a good idea. It shows that we did not do our job well in the selection or assignment. Maybe we forgot to nominate a sponsor in the home company, or we assigned the Expats without a clear Global Mobility driver. We should make it our priority to retain our Expats in the organization.
6) You shall not solicit from your VENDORS.
As I mentioned in the Global Mobility Workbook, we need to collaborate better with all our vendors to enhance the Expat Experience (XX) further. One ground rule is that you cannot poach staff from your vendors. I would also suggest you build long-term relationships with everyone involved in the process.
You are one team at the end of the day, and the Expat and their family will feel it if you work together like a well-oiled machine instead of blaming each other when there is a break in the process. I would encourage you to search for the cracks in the “Process Porcelain” because most of the time, you can solve an issue best if you look at the process in every detail, handover, and sub-step.
7) You shall not reduce BENEFITS.
Now that companies diversify their compensation approaches, you need to dig deeper into base pay, benefits, and short-term and long-term incentives to have a more comprehensive financial understanding of the implications of an international move. It’s time to broaden your reward skills and ensure you understand compensation models, host-based compensation, and inflation rates by country. As a basic principle, try to maintain equity in the compensation approach. Balance out a lower salary than the host market by providing an additional market allowance or a benefit such as corporate housing.
8) You shall not bear false witness against your EXPAT.
Building a trusted relationship with your Expat and their Spouse will be a crucial success factor for any international assignment. Try to communicate openly and honestly and be transparent about your limitations. Let them know how you justify exceptions, how you make package decisions, how you can offer specific benefits, and under what circumstances. Show them your “box of chocolates” and give them one to taste.
We think it is too short-sighted to discuss employee experience only in the context of our work and want you to focus on the Expat Experience (XX) specifically.
9) You shall not Neglect the EXPAT SPOUSE.
The lack of Expat Spouse career opportunities is still among the top five reasons assignments fail (AIRINC Mobility Outlook Survey 2021). I have written extensively about why that is and given you ideas on how you can support the Expat Spouse. Over the last ten years, I have seen no significant improvement in how we integrate and support the Expat Spouse. Only a few companies offer Expat Partner Career Support. Let’s also agree that we want to see an improvement on that front.
10) You shall not move your EXPAT’s goods.
The climate and energy crisis will force us to rethink Global Mobility altogether. Expats want to work from anywhere in the world, and at the same time, moving furniture from Hong Kong to Singapore to New York or flying home every week might not be the best and most sustainable solution for the future. If you are serious about reducing the carbon footprint, you will need to incentivize environmentally friendly solutions in favor of the “classical approach.” For example, you could pay for storage rather than moving household goods. You could support rental furniture instead of giving an allowance for buying new furniture. You could pay for train travel instead of flights within a certain distance.
We will need to give up our resistance to “work from anywhere (WFA),” meaning that employees can also work in a third country of choice (not the home country or the location benefiting from the task performed). This possibility enables Expats to become digital nomads as they are no longer bound to a specific location. Implementing a more significant number of Virtual Assignments also means acknowledging and accepting that working arrangements are changing fast in response to technology, generational changes, and sudden business disruptions.
Of course, there are limits to this as well. The most obvious is that not all jobs are remote, which is also one of the reasons why virtual Mobility will not replace traditional Mobility. Tax and compliance issues can pose a risk too. The company having no existing operations and not wishing to have a permanent establishment in the location where the employee would like to be based can be another possible barrier to Virtual Assignments. Some organizations are also concerned that Virtual Assignments could hinder company culture and teamwork, with the risk of the employee feeling like a perpetual outsider. The final point worth considering is that cost saving is not necessarily automatic. Sometimes, the assignee wants to live in a high-cost country where sending them will cost the company much more (Mercer, 2021b).
It is now easier to see how virtual Mobility’s popularity closely relates to increasing a more dispersed international workforce. As companies upgrade their technology and become more agile, they could decide to assign projects and tasks to mobile people rather than moving defined jobs as such. In other words, instead of trying to fit assignees into predefined boxes, the aim is to manage a diverse workforce more fluidly and coordinatedly (Mercer, 2021d).
Moving jobs to people instead of moving people to jobs will not substitute the traditional way of thinking about Global Mobility. Still, it is one more tool companies can use in their global operations. We live in an era where recruitment should be location-independent.
As organizations gradually embrace best practices to manage a distributed international workforce, it will be essential for Global Mobility teams to adapt to a new way of thinking and learn to implement Virtual Assignments successfully. Also, the Global Employment Company adage will have a rebirth like the latest 80ies fashion.
As every year, I wish you great success in all your endeavors. You know you can always contact me via LinkedIn or good old bottle post or show me your love by reading my weekly brain dump (The Global People Club Sandwich). If you wish to bulk order “The Global Mobility Workbook,” please contact our team here.
Kind regards
Angie Weinberger
References and Further Reading
AIRINC. (2021). Mobility Outlook Survey 2021. Retrieved 18 August 2021, from https://www.air-inc.com/library/2021-mobility-outlook-survey/
Baker McKenzie. (2019). ‘The Global Employer: Focus on Global Immigration and Mobility.’ Baker McKenzie. Retrieved May 27, 2020, from https://www.bakermckenzie.com/en-/media/files/insight/publications/2019/12/the-global-employer-focus-on-immigration-and-mobility_041219.pdf
Beck, P., Eisenhut, P. and Thomas, L. (2018). „Fokus Arbeitsmarkt: Fit für die Zukunft?”. Stiftung Zukunft.li. Retrieved 28 May, 2020, from https://www.stiftungzukunft.li/publikationen/fokus-arbeitsmart-fit-fuer-die-zukunft
Bertolino, M. (2020). ‘How Covid-19 Is Disrupting Immigration Policies and Worker Mobility: A Tracker’. Ernst and Young. Retrieved May 28, 2020, from https://www.ey.com/en_gl/tax/how-covid-19-is-disrupting-immigration-policies-and-worker-mobility-a-tracker
Crown. (2021). Five Standout Talent Mobility Trends for 2021. Retrieved 18 August 2021, from https://www.crownworldmobility.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/5-standout-talent-mobility-trends-for-2021_digital-CWM.pdf
Deloitte. (2019). ’Global Workforce Insight 2019.’ Deloitte. Retrieved 18 August 2021, from https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ch/Documents/tax/deloitte-ch-Back-to-the-future-global-workforce.pdf
Deloitte. (2020). ‘2020 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Survey. Deloitte.’ Deloitte. Retrieved 18 August 2021, from https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/us/articles/us43244_human-capital-trends-2020/us43244_human-capital-trends-2020/di_hc-trends-2020.pdf
Dictionary.cambridge.org. (2021). multi-skilling. Retrieved 18 August 2021, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/multi-skilling
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Vialto https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6943208654061850624/
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EPIC BLOG POSTS
https://globalpeopletransitions.com/our-eight-commandments-global-mobility-trends-2021/
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