Learning from employee experience
An innovative workshop hosted by Weichert Workforce Mobility at the Canadian Employee Relocation Council (CERC) annual conference this September leverages design thinking to improve the repatriation experience – the final, and often the most overlooked stage, of international assignment planning. Ahead of the conference, Relocate’s HR and Global Mobility writer, Ruth Holmes, speaks to Ellie Sullivan, senior vice president of advisory services at Weichert Workforce Mobility, and Dario Kosarac, managing director and head of total rewards at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), to find out more.
A
s any global mobility manager and returnee knows, repatriation is fraught with challenges. There are the
practical issues of moving household goods, end-of-tenancy agreements, sometimes visa, immigration and tax considerations, and education. Then there are the career implications
of the role an employee is returning to, with questions around how to best engage and use the skills and experience they gained overseas – and not lose them to a competitor. Add to this the emotional and social
impact on the repatriating assignee and family. Reverse culture shock and feeling like a foreigner in your own country are real and
unsettling features of repatriation. Despite these well-documented difficulties, surveys repeatedly show that for many employees, repatriation is a blind spot for employers in the relocation life cycle.
DESIGNING AN EXCEPTIONAL EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE Even though repatriation is the end of the assignment life cycle, it seems a natural place to start the process of re-imagining an exceptional employee experience. That is the objective of a workshop happening at the CERC conference, which will use this as the starting point to look at the experience through the all-important lens of the employee.
The event’s aim is both to help delegates
better understand and improve their process and practices, and to equip people with tools and practices they can apply to other elements of the relocation life cycle. Workshop leader Ellie Sullivan, who
in addition to her role at Weichert is a certified practitioner in design thinking – a user-focused approach to complex problem solving – explains, “This CERC session is an ‘experiential workshop’ designed to help global mobility managers and relocation providers better understand the repatriation process from the employee’s point of view. Here, they can explore what they can do to re- arrange, eliminate or add in terms of services or process to improve the experience.”
36 | RELOCATE | AUTUMN 2019
REP A TRIA TION
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