25 Oct Global Mobility Is Under Pressure to Prove What Every Move Is Worth

Global mobility has traditionally been judged by how well a move was executed. Was the employee relocated on schedule? Was housing arranged? Were tax and immigration requirements addressed? Did the assignment stay within budget? Those questions still matter. But companies are increasingly asking another one: What did the move accomplish for the business?

That change is evident in KPMG’s 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report. Demonstrating return on investment is now the number-one challenge facing mobility leaders, cited by 31% of respondents. At the same time, cost management fell from a top priority for 39% of organizations in the previous year to 18%. global-mobility-benchmarking-su…

That does not necessarily mean companies are worrying less about costs. Instead, the conversation is broadening. It is no longer enough to know what an assignment costs. Employers increasingly want to understand what they are getting in return.

A relocation is becoming a business investment

International assignments can carry significant costs, from travel and corporate housing to tax support, immigration services, allowances and family assistance. But evaluating an assignment solely on those expenses can miss the larger picture.

An expensive relocation could still make business sense if it places a specialist in a market where local expertise is unavailable, prevents a project from being delayed, transfers knowledge to a local team or helps establish an operation in a new market.

This is why KPMG recommends that mobility teams define clear success metrics and continue measuring the value an assignment produces after the employee has moved. global-mobility-benchmarking-su…

The distinction is important. Completing 100 relocations tells management how busy a mobility program is. It does not necessarily tell management what those relocations accomplished.

A more useful measure might show that placing engineers at a new facility accelerated its opening by several months, or that an international assignment gave a future executive experience needed for a larger leadership role.

Companies also have more alternatives to relocation

The decision has become more complicated because a traditional expatriate assignment is only one way to deploy talent.

Companies can use short-term assignments, permanent transfers, international hires, commuters, business travelers, remote workers and virtual teams. That gives organizations more flexibility, but it also makes the business case for each move more important.

KPMG found that 70% of respondents are using short-term assignments, often as a lower-cost alternative to traditional long-term assignments. global-mobility-benchmarking-su…

Mercer’s 2025 Talent Mobility Outlook points in the same direction. Thirty-four percent of respondents expected short-term assignments to increase, while only 18% expected growth in long-term assignments. Mercer also found that companies are looking for ways to improve productivity and control costs without simply reducing mobility programs.

For mobility leaders, this changes the job considerably. The question is no longer simply how to arrange an assignment, but whether moving the employee is the best way to solve the business problem in the first place.

A specialist needed for four months, for example, may not require a two-year expatriate package. In another situation, physically relocating an executive may be essential because the assignment requires building a team, developing customer relationships or understanding a new market firsthand.

Flexibility brings another kind of cost

Alternatives to relocation can save money, but they can also introduce risks that are not immediately visible.

An employee working temporarily from another country, for example, may appear to be a less complicated option than an international transfer. Yet cross-border remote work and frequent business travel can trigger tax, payroll and immigration requirements.

Deloitte’s 2026 mobile workforce compliance survey found that companies are putting greater attention on business travel and cross-border remote work compliance, with more organizations moving compliance checks into the pre-trip approval process. Deloitte also emphasizes the need for coordination among mobility, tax, payroll and HR. 

That makes risk part of the ROI calculation.

A cheaper deployment model may not ultimately be cheaper if it creates unexpected compliance costs, administrative work or disruption later. The same applies to assignments that fail because employees or their families cannot adjust to the destination.

The data problem is still significant

One of the biggest obstacles to measuring mobility’s value is that many companies still do not have the systems needed to connect relocation activity with business results.

According to KPMG, 72% of organizations still rely largely on spreadsheets for mobility reporting and analytics, while only 16% use analytics platforms such as Power BI or Tableau. More than half identified data spread across multiple systems as a major analytics challenge. global-mobility-benchmarking-su…

That makes ROI difficult to demonstrate because the information needed to evaluate an assignment may sit in several places. Mobility may know the relocation cost. Finance may know the project results. HR may have retention and performance information. Talent management may know whether the employee was promoted after returning.

Until those pieces are connected, much of mobility’s business value remains difficult to quantify.

Mobility is moving closer to business strategy

Other research suggests that the pressure to show results is not going away.

EY’s 2026 Mobility Reimagined Survey, based on more than 1,000 mobility professionals and mobile employees, found that mobility functions characterized by higher levels of trust reported stronger returns on mobility investment and faster deployment of employees into new markets. High-trust functions were 1.6 times more likely to report significantly positive ROI and 1.9 times more likely to report faster deployment into new markets than low-trust functions.

KPMG, meanwhile, found that mobility leaders currently rate the strategic value of their programs at 6.0 out of 10 but expect that figure to rise to 7.1 within 12 to 18 months. global-mobility-benchmarking-su…

The opportunity is significant. But becoming more strategic will require mobility teams to look beyond the successful completion of a move.

Before approving an assignment, companies increasingly need to know why the employee needs to move, why that particular location and duration make sense, what alternatives are available, what the full cost and risk will be and, most importantly, what result will show that the investment worked.

That represents a meaningful change for global mobility. Its value will increasingly be measured not simply by how effectively it moves people, but by how effectively those moves help the organization achieve something it could not have achieved as easily without them.