26 Aug International Experience is Most Sought-After in the Post-Pandemic Era

Tighter border control and restrictions have slowed down global mobility efforts in the past years due to the pandemic. However, businesses maintained that even amid an ongoing pandemic, global mobility should be a priority in any organization. But how do organizations create a workaround with these present circumstances?

Relocate Global suggests that businesses ought to account for the recent changes that are shaping the future of mobility efforts. 

As the pandemic drastically changed the way businesses are run, there has been a focus on a wider external talent pool due to the inevitable digitization of business processes. Moreover, international experience has become one of the most sought-after qualifications in employee resourcing.

To help businesses adapt to the future of global mobility, a KPMG 2021 report elaborates on its forecast of global mobility, its trends in risk, talent, and digital.

The report states that remote working, employee compliance, and corporate compliance are trends in global mobility that businesses should look into.

Remote work

Businesses were forced to adopt a mobile workforce at the height of the pandemic. But evidently, countries are now starting to ease travel restrictions and are even slowly transitioning to onsite work. While there are businesses whose processes thrive with a digital workforce, some businesses, mostly leaning toward the brick and mortar nature, are still waiting to see how they would benefit from a mobile workforce.

For companies offering flexible work, KPMG suggests conducting a risk review by assessing the risk and compliance actions required for existing populations and identifying talent management concerns.

Employee compliance

Although some businesses have prior experience in handling mobile workforces, no one anticipated the degree of the surge in the mobile workforce population due to the pandemic. With the lack of prior knowledge and experience, businesses can find themselves in a less than ideal position if they fail to adapt to these changes. This can result in mishandling of employee compliance and later incur high costs.

Companies need to become more involved in employee compliance as authorities are holding them more accountable for the welfare of their employees.

Corporate compliance

Work-from-anywhere seems to be a working model that isn’t going away any time soon. With quite a volume of employees in different locations, how do employers ensure their duty of care towards their workforce?

KPMG suggests looking into the following:

• Ensuring the mental health of long term remote workers
• Challenge of leading dispersed and virtual teams
• Data security and privacy — personal and client data
• Successful onboarding and maintaining succession
• Employee health and safety in remote locations
• Validity of existing employer and employee insurance coverages
• Employee accident risk outside conventional office location
• Training and talent management

Targeted rewards

Now with a broader pool of applicants, it is advantageous for mobility professionals to weigh in as to what kind of reward they’re going to provide to attract new employees and maintain high-performing ones in the company.

Global mobility professionals aren’t advised to implement traditional pre-pandemic rewards systems as the needs of the workforce have evolved over the years. They should devise a reward system covering these key areas:

• Salary levels across remote working locations
• Flexible employee choice benefit programs
• Performance conditions for incentives and consider extending the eligibility to all employees
• Remote work employee experience through access to innovation tools.

Employee experience

Global mobility professionals should focus on employee health and wellbeing in the middle of a health crisis. They play a key role in ensuring that their workforce is well supported while on assignments, whether remote or physical. 

Immigration

One of the best ways to attract global talent is by offering efficient immigration processes. Although this has been an existing tactic to lead qualified applicants, border closures, tightened travel restrictions, and health protocols complicate the process. With that said, compliance with regulations mandated by authorities is key to executing far better immigration programs for global talent.

At the start of Q2 of 2021, Envoy Global identified immigration as a trend. It explains that employers are willing to go to lengths to ease the process for international candidates.

Maintaining control

Having given birth to mobile assignments in the middle of a health crisis, companies are left to provide a blend of robust policies and technology. With many businesses adopting a work-from-anywhere model, they are forced to utilize technology to keep track of mobile assignees’ location and performance.

Connected and secure

The globe is more interconnected than it has ever been due to the pandemic. However, data privacy and security have been subject to cyber threats. Local authorities are figuring out where to draw the boundaries on the data privacy for both employees and companies. 

Discovering insights

With a lot more processes digitized in global mobility, employers ought to leverage how they derive insights from the data they collect. Mobility teams now have to build tools quickly to analyze data they’ve gathered to make data-supported decisions in crafting different working policies.

It’s no surprise that the ongoing pandemic caused much uncertainty within the global mobility realm. That’s why global mobility representatives have to keep themselves up to date with the latest trends to anticipate the abrupt changes so that they can formulate the best-fitting strategies to counter them.