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GLOBAL SURVEY


are incorporated into employees’ performance reviews while they are on assignment. Developing a global talent pool for future assignments is an


increasingly popular strategy. Tracking post-assignment retention and advancement are high on the list of strategies being considered, indicating an increasing awareness that it is during the return phase of an assignment that the company is most often vulnerable to employee attrition and loss of expertise.


Emerging move types: the way forward The survey results also suggested that a number of emerging move types were being used increasingly to meet companies’ relocation goals. These included employee-initiated assignments (cited by 58 per cent of respondents), expat-lite assignments (46 per cent), permanent transfers with repatriation (37 per cent), and talent swaps (25 per cent). Just over half the organisation surveyed had a policy to accommodate


employee-initiated moves. Respondents whose companies used employee-initiated assignments or relocations indicated that the main benefit for the organisation was employee career development, followed by cost savings. Half of the organisations surveyed said that requests for employee-initiated assignments were staying the same, and 47 per cent said that they were increasing. Not surprisingly for a policy type with reduced benefits, the


principal attraction of expat-lite policies for organisations was cost savings, followed by developmental assignments and supporting lower-level employees. The main benefits being scaled back for this type of assignment were education support for dependants, partner assistance, home-country housing, and home leave.


Concerns about partners’ careers and family issues can have a


huge impact on an assignee’s willingness to undertake an assignment. Respondents to Cartus’s 2014 Global Mobility Policy & PracticesSurvey listed inability of the family to adjust (61 per cent) as the second-most-important reason for assignment failure, and 76 per cent of respondents rated family or personal circumstances as the number-one reason for their employees to refuse assignments. For assignees with families, therefore, it is important to factor in the


likely impact of scaled-back benefits on assignment success. A large majority of survey respondents (80 per cent) were seeing


permanent transfers with repatriation, with 43 per cent of those repatriating doing so at the company’s request and 37 per cent doing so at their own request. The most common time for repatriation to occur was two to three years into the assignment. A talent swap is when two employees from different offices or


regions exchange jobs on a temporary basis. Such swaps are on the increase in about half of respondents’ companies, with the key issues being cost control, visa challenges, and compliance risk. For organisations, by far the greatest benefit of talent swaps,


according to respondents, is employee career development, followed by ‘employee global awareness in a distant second place’.


Powering ahead It’s clear from the survey’s findings that, as companies expand into new regions and the need for mobility grows, HR and relocation practitioners, with their organisations, will need to be agile and creative if they are to keep pace with an ever-changing mobility landscape.


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