TALENT MOBILTY
her UK-based team of five manages mobility globally for the whole $1,858 million turnover business, handling around 100 moves a year from its UK HQ centre of excellence in Denham, Buckinghamshire. This gives an insight into how much international mobility has
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moved up the agenda, at IHG and more widely. As the team has grown, the type of support it offers has changed,
developing from reporting in to HR shared services on an ad hoc basis and providing functional support drafting contracts and assignment letters, to becoming a valued partner to the business, managing all aspects of its international mobility process in an ever-more- challenging and fast-changing landscape.
Award-winning strategic partnership A tangible acknowledgment of the team’s success in this respect,
and one that reinforces the value of its support to the business, came in the form of the 2014/15 Re:locate Best Managing or Growing Talent Initiative award. IHG’s winning entry was based on its China-Ready initiative,
an impressive international strategic partnership between talent development and mobility, which is helping the company to grow its business and individuals to achieve their career ambitions. Feedback from the initiative has been overwhelmingly positive.
The international mobility team is taking the learning gained from it into new projects that support both the business and individuals to achieve their aims. “Putting the individual at the heart of the business and the
international experience is very important to us at IHG,” says Wendy Maynard. “It is part of the character and ethos of everything that we do, and very much part of our employer brand. “Investing in colleagues is key to delivering business performance
and an excellent and memorable experience for guests,” she adds. “Our international assignment programmes are produced to ensure that they deliver a great experience for the participants and result in the increase in talent and knowledge the business requires.”
Working across boundaries The international mobility team at IHG has a direct line of report
into IHG’s executive rewards team. Both are part of the global HR directorate. Given the nature of international mobility today, Wendy Maynard and her team work across the business and across boundaries, connecting with colleagues in the tax, legal, compensation and benefits, HR and finance teams on a regular basis. “We deal with a very diverse expatriate population, from people
who work at a corporate, HQ level right across to the hotels IHG manages, which are truly global,” explains Wendy Maynard. “We have very strong core global policies around this. But, as you can imagine, managing such diversity and the complexities around all aspects of the assignment, particularly now with compliance, can be very challenging, and it’s not going to get any easier. “We outsource as much as we can as a team; while we know a great
deal and collaborate with our colleagues in the business, it is impossible to know absolutely everything about everywhere we go, or plan to go.” Another facet of the role for Wendy Maynard is knowing when
to call in external experts and service providers who have specific knowledge and experience. This requires her and the team to assess and make decisions based on this information.
Raising the game further An area Wendy Maynard and her team are keen to develop to
hen Wendy Maynard, director of International Mobility at InterContintental Hotels Group (IHG), joined the company six years ago, she was a team of one. Today,
match IHG’s wider approach and its support of individual assignees is around vendor involvement. With international mobility playing an increasingly important
role in supporting the company’s business aims, talent management and the other strategic aspects of HR, she believes that there is an opportunity for vendors to “step up and offer a less transactional and more consultative service” to match that of in-house mobility specialists. Such engagement with the issues
offers great mutual benefits, suggests Wendy Maynard. “We hear a lot from vendors, especially the bigger firms, about how GM must be more strategic,” she explains. “There are lots of white papers, for instance, that describe how global mobility practitioners’ roles are becoming more strategic. “At IHG, our team has always been
strategic, in that our business has a plan. We, as a team, help to deliver that plan in line with existing HR policies and as efficiently as possible. “What we are now finding is
that vendors could help us deliver more, and more effectively, by being more strategic, perhaps less transactional, themselves. It would be great to have more proactive thinking around the request – for example, identifying what our end goal is. This would support us as we seek to deliver on our objectives in this increasingly complex landscape.”
Opportunities for vendors IHG is continually setting up in, or assigning people to, new
territories. Says Wendy Maynard, “We often ask vendors to get involved halfway through the process, having already done an awful lot of the work ourselves. “When we ask a specific question, we often get a specific answer,
but it is often not quite the full answer, one that takes in the full extent of what it is we are asking, or one that goes that bit further to increase understanding of the issues for our business. “International mobility is no longer just a transactional service,
because we are engaging at the front and from the start. The challenges are ongoing, but, just as we strive to do in house, vendors have a fantastic opportunity to put themselves head and shoulders above the rest by helping to resolve complex issues by making sure they really understand the question and the context.” Such sentiments, focusing on continuous improvement, echo
the spirit of the Re:locate Awards, which celebrate the successes and leading-edge practices of the array of specialist service providers supporting mobility practitioners and assignees today. As well as sharing and acknowledging great practice, the Re:locate
Awards encourage everyone involved in supporting globally mobile workers to raise the standard still further as the challenges and the profile of the sector increase and assignment volumes grow. “Now is a great time to get ahead by understanding what it means
in the increasing diversity of circumstances to relocate people to new destinations,” Wendy Maynard says.
For the latest international assignments news and articles, and to enter the Re:locate Awards 2015/16, visit
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