"Alternative" international assignment (AIA) policies and practices survey

Short-term assignments

• Trends and demographics
• Policy framework
• Compensation approaches
• Cost-of-living/daily living costs
• Tax
• Housing and utilities
• Mobility and hardship premiums
• Education and childcare
• Transportation
• Travel and home leave
• Additional support
• Benefits

Short-term assignment is defined as an assignment of temporary duration (usually up to one year) to another country and not resulting in change of formal place of residence. Short-term assignees may or may not be accompanied by their families.

Permanent moves/one-way transfers and internationally hired foreigners

• Trends and management
• Compensation approaches
• "Plus" allowances, benefits in kind and relocation support — eligibility, delivery, tax and recurrence
• Benefits

Permanent/open-ended transfer or one-way move is defined as international relocation of an existing non-local employee to another country.

An internationally hired foreigner is a non-local employee hired from outside the country of employment, usually to work on an open-ended employment contract. Often also referred to as an “international hire,” “international local hire” or “direct international hire.”

Short-term assignments report

• Numbers are increasing again post pandemic: Nearly half of the participants reported an increase in the number of STAs during the last two years (2021–2022, and more than half expect further growth in the next two years (2023–2024)
• Cost containment resurged as the foremost concern for managing STAs, after having dropped to the sixth position in the previous survey
• Just above a third of the surveyed companies have accompanied (non-single) STAs, while half do not, and 14% stated that such arrangements would not be deemed the company’s responsibility.
• Nearly 60% of the surveyed companies allow family members to visit short-term assignees at the assignment location in lieu of a home leave trip, and one-third allow short-term assignees to spend their home leave in a different location than their home country.

Permanent moves/one-way transfers report

• The most frequent reason for employers to relocate employees internationally permanently is company/business unit relocation. Of the surveyed companies, 30% identified this as a key reason on a scale from 1: Not a reason to 4: A key reason. Just a bit fewer than 30% of respondents identified providing career opportunities for employees as another key reason for permanent employee relocation. This reason was indicated as the primary one in the previous edition.
• Similar to the previous edition, tax filing, tax and social security briefing assistance, language training, and cross-cultural training remain the most common “plus” allowances or benefits provided to permanently transferred employees, provided by more than half of respondents. The fifth most prevalent benefit in the current edition is a lump sum, moving up from eighth in the 2021 survey.
• A majority of participants follow the same remuneration approach for both internationally hired foreigners and one-way transfers, a pure local/host-based approach, relying on local market data.
• Most participants apply the same approach or policy to one-way transfers and internationally hired foreigners even though internationally hired foreigners are less often managed by the global mobility team.
• Most survey respondents indicated that they provide the same allowances/benefits (61%) and relocation support items (71%) to internationally hired foreigners as to one-way transfers.

Commuter assignments report

• Close to 70% of companies track the number of days commuters spend outside their home countries, a noticeable increase from the 56% in the previous edition.
• Fifty-seven percent of companies, a 22-percentage-point increase from the 2018 edition, have a formal commuting policy.
• Global mobility is more involved in commuter management than in the previous edition (61% in 2020-2021 versus 55% in 2018). Likewise, a higher proportion of respondents in this edition (34% versus 19% in 2018) indicate that global mobility is the function qualified to offer the commuter policy or practice rather than other actors, such as home-country HR or business unit.