Zainab Sultani-Naby is a global mobility consultant for TomTom based in Amsterdam. She is an expert in mobility compliance and risk analysis. She holds a bachelor's degrees from the University of Applied Science in Amsterdam and bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Amsterdam. Ms. Sultani-Naby spoke to Mercer about her role in leading global mobility at TomTom and the trends she sees in the mobility field.
Tell us a little bit about your role and background.
The Global Mobility team is run from Amsterdam. We manage all relocations, not only local and intercompany moves, but also all global assignments, from the start of assignment to repatriation. The work is growing at the moment.
Before I started at TomTom I was working at British American Tobacco, managing the Western Europe region and mainly the assignment-related moves. The role at TomTom is much broader.
I was studying psychology in Amsterdam and I did an internship at ING bank in the performance management expat center and a six-month project right after. The experience was very valuable. It was interesting to see all the different fields in HR, taste a little bit of all the organizational decisions in a matrix organization. It's a big organization so it's very complex: Who are the stakeholders? Who are we managing? What are we doing? It was a great experience and I wanted to stay in the HR field.
After graduating, I started to search for jobs as an HR generalist. I wanted to start a bit broad to experience HR in the broad sense and then narrow it down to a specialist area. A six-month, temporary position came up at BAT as an International Mobility Executive. I worked approximately 3 years at BAT. Unfortunately, they were moving the global mobility department to London and I made the decision to stay in Amsterdam for personal reasons.
You had the experience of picking up and moving to a new country and all that it entails. Can you tell us a little bit about moving from Afghanistan to the Netherlands?
I was approximately 10 years old when we arrived in the Netherlands. The whole journey took about two years. We were refugees and had to flee a very dangerous situation in Afghanistan. It was a long journey by foot, by car, by boat. After 2 years of travelling we ended up in the Netherlands.
Even though you're quite young it's difficult to cope with a new life, leaving everything behind, moving to a new country, learning the language, making sure you fit, learning the cultural ways of a new country which are very different than my own. From a learning perspective, I think the language was easiest for me as a child. When you are a bit older the language can be challenging. The difficult part was the cultural aspects and I have to say I still struggle with that even now after 20-plus years in the Netherlands.
Does that experience help you identify with the people you're supporting today?
Yes. I can relate to many of the conversations and concerns of expats and their partners. It's easier to understand them and advise them. Because of your own experience you can relate more which gives the expats more ease for their own situation. They are more comfortable with sharing personal details with me. You actually feel and understand what they are saying.
Tell us a little about the expats from TomTom.
We are a technology-based company so most of our people are engineers or in a related field. "Expats" for us is an entire group of people who are not from the country they are hired in: if they're moving to the Netherlands, or any other country, for a long-term assignment, short-term assignment, commuters, but also local moves, intercompany moves or local hires. We call that whole group of people expats.
Assignment-related locations are mainly from the head office here in the Netherlands, to the U.K., Germany, the U.S., South America, Poland, and India. Locally we hire a lot of Ukrainian, Russian and Indian employees to be relocated to the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Poland, and other locations
After Amsterdam, our two biggest locations are Poland and India. In Poland, we still see a lot of relocation, but in India, they have a lot of local resources and knowledge to hire from.
What are the most important issues an expat has to consider and how can you help them?
Expats tend to live in a pink cloud when they're hired in another country. They like the idea of moving to a new country, the opportunity, the salary. But they tend to forget that moving to a new country means leaving everything behind, starting from scratch, dealing with cultural differences that are very different than yours. Culture is an important element they tend to just ignore. Language is also one of the bigger issues.
What I always do when I contact the expat is to try to make sure that they understand the challenges, especially when we're talking about assignments where partners are involved in the conversation. Usually what you see is that the assignee is managing the process and informs the partner. From an HR point of you if you have direct contact with the partner you can explain things better. You see that the partner has bigger concerns in terms of family issues: the children, the schools, the cultural differences, the language.
Do you have recommendations on how a spouse can make a successful adjustment?
What I would recommend is to always involve the partner in the conversation. Next is the support that you can provide the partner directly: with the school search, with providing the partner cultural training before the actual move, assisting with language courses for the partner and children. Those things can help, especially the cultural part. They can see what they're actually buying, which is a big eye-opener for a lot of people.
Of course, we still deal with the problem of the partner losing their job because of the move. That's a concern for the entire family.
The partner is most of times female. Staying home with kids all day may be something she is not used to but with an assignment is something she can choose to do.
Are dual careers a common problem? How do you handle that issue?
Dual career is indeed a huge problem. Many companies with big unlimited budgets try to solve it by compensating in cash to ensure the salary of the wife is covered at least partially.
But what I've seen is compensating with cash does not solve the problem. It's not the cash the partner is seeking. It's more the social interactions, being away from home, making new friends. What we try here at TomTom is to help the wife. At first, we make sure the wife is authorized to work in the host country and we pay for that. We help the partner take courses, go on a job search, attend social activities etc.
Are there any specific examples of cultural differences you can share?
The whole concept of culture is very broad. A huge cultural problem is the differences in communicating non-verbally between people.
As an example, Dutch people tend to split the bill. If you invite friends to have a couple of drinks and some bites, is the bill is usually split 50-50 or with bigger groups "you ordered X and I ordered Y”. This is considered fair in the Dutch culture. When you're not used to that, it can be very offensive. This is a very small thing that can have a big impact. You start to not like the country because you think everyone is that way.
It's better if you can prepare people for these things in advance instead of moving and experiencing it yourself and getting annoyed or frustrated. At least you'll be familiar with several types of cultural differences.
Do you facilitate cultural training?
Yes, however, we don't have a structural process for it yet. This is one of the things that I want to implement: to have a solid cultural training agency or training from one of the better firms and make sure we can apply it in all countries. That's the most important part.
What we do now is provide cultural training based on the request of the individual and approval of the business. Rather than selectively provide it to some people, I want to provide it to the whole assignment population, so we eliminate some of these problems in the future.
How often do you review policies and guidelines and implement policy changes?
When I joined TomTom in September 2014 the first thing I wanted to tackle was the policies. At the end of 2015, we implemented new policies for every type of assignment or move. Before I joined there was just 1 policy for the entire population distinguishing high cost impact moves such as assignments. What I wanted was to have clear policies and guidelines for each type of assignment/move.
Policies now are clear and understandable and answer questions for the individuals. They can be shared with the business and the expat. But you still see policies change based on the population, business strategy, law changes, compliance, and risk. What I tried to do is implement a policy review at least once a year to make sure we are compliant but also still meeting our organizational strategy.
How do you stay up to date on mobility trends?
It's amazing how much you can find online. There are a lot of groups of mobility organizations that share knowledge. Anything related to mobility is pretty much out there.
How do you influence stakeholders internally?
That's a benefit of TomTom. The lines are very short here. If I want to make a policy change and I have a good reason, a good business case, it is usually reviewed and accepted. You can really make your mark here and mean something.
How do you make sure your policies are competitive? What strategies to you use?
During the last review, we looked at competitors and compared our International compensation and benefits. We do a lot of research in HR on the type of people we hire. We are a very diverse organization so our population is mainly foreigners coming from abroad.
What we try not to do is to compare ourselves each time with our competitors. We want to be unique. We don't want to imitate what a lot of companies do but want to provide unique experiences.
We try to do that with our company culture. We want to ensure our company culture is so interesting that you would choose TomTom no matter the compensation. That is our main goal. We still need to be competitive in the way we provide our mobility packages for our employees of course. It's very much looking at the individual needs and base our package on that.
For example, you can imagine a family is very interested in schools for their children – a concern that a couple without children doesn’t have. So we try to not treat everyone the same, but rather treat everyone individually and assess their need.
We're actually working the other way around. Instead of determining the policy and forcing it on our employees we are looking at our employees and giving them what they actually need.
How do you go about comparing policies and information on things like cost-of-living adjustments?
When it comes to general policies, the given compensation and how it's provided can be found online. In the Netherlands, you have the Relocation Information Network (RIN) for example. There's a lot shared between companies in the Netherlands.
Our direct people competitors are located mainly in the Netherlands. A lot of engineers are moving from one company to another in the Netherlands, and the companies are mostly part of the RIN. We exchange a lot of information with each other in terms of policy, compensation and benefits.
Then you have all these Big Five companies. They're doing a lot of research on mobility as well, in terms of taxes but also the implication of benefits and compensation on taxes. So you see a lot of comparisons there as well.
You also have the real-time data, for example, the cost-of-living data, the hardship allowances, the hardship locations, short-term living allowances. I do have to say that the cost of living calculated by Mercer is quite accurate. You can play nicely with it. You can choose your own way of determining the cost of living based on your policies.
Online, if you Google "cost of living" you get a couple of websites where you can calculate the cost-of-living adjustment but they're definitely not as detailed as you get from Mercer. You cannot distinguish the way you want to calculate the cost of living. From that perspective, I think Mercer is very good in the way they provide the data. It's very strong.
How do you pay employees, in their home countries or new countries?
Our Assignment population is paid in their home countries using a home payroll approach. All our local employees are paid in their new countries.
What other approaches can you use?
We currently only use the home payroll approach. There are two other approaches.
The split payroll approach takes everything agreed and spend in the host country, like the housing allowance, the cost-of-living allowance, the car allowance etc. Anything that is spent in the host company is delivered in the host currency in the host bank account. All other items remain on the Home payroll.
The last approach is the host payroll approach, which is just converting everything that we have agreed to in the home country to the host currency and then pay that on a monthly basis in the host country.
Basically, all of these approaches have pros and cons. For us, the main problem at the moment is currency fluctuation in some of the countries that we are doing business in, like Chile, and some countries where transferring money is quite expensive. You have double costs for employees that need to transfer on a monthly basis.
For example, if an employee has to transfer $5,000 to cover their costs in the host country, they may have to pay $500 to transfer the money, which is quite a lot on a monthly basis.
Then you also have the fluctuation of each currency. Sometimes it's better to keep the home approach because the host currency is so volatile. In Brazil, for example, if you receive cash, you can't take it out of the country. It just stays there and a lot of people don't want that. They'd rather stick to the home approach: "I just want to get my salary in Euros in the Netherlands instead of in my Brazilian bank account where at the end of my assignment I can't touch it anymore."
So there are so many pros and cons that you need to weigh based on the location you send your people to and the volume. As the volume increases and the need for one approach more than the other is present, you need to look at the policies again.
Have there been any challenges related to Brexit?
To be honest I was surprised because when Brexit was coming we though a lot of problems would arise. But nothing really happened. We are still following the trends to see how the impact will be shown in companies like ours. We have many, many U.K. employees here working in the Netherlands but also in Germany and in Belgium. But we also have a lot of EU employees working in our U.K. office.
It's something to keep an eye on but looking at the trends, I think from an immigration point of view there will be some kind of open-border policy implemented. I don't think they will close down all the borders and make sure everyone pays for their immigration status because that's not just sustainable.
It has a huge economic impact and in terms of currency fluctuation, yes, we have seen that with our assignees from U.K. to another country. What we see is the currency, it's just awful. The currency is fluctuating so enormously that we need to compensate assignees in one way or another. We need to compensate for the loss. In terms of all our other local support, I don't think there will be a huge impact actually.
How important is it to maintain a consistent policy across the company?
For us, it's not! We see that people do not want to be treated equally because everyone has their own wishes, personal life, and personal situation. So they want to be treated fairly. That's different than consistently.
What I mean by "fairly" is they want to be considered as an individual rather than a group of people. They want to be heard. They want to know, based on policy, that their situation is taken into account. That's why we are aiming to be flexible with our policies: to make sure that we don't treat everyone the same. We want to treat them fairly and make sure we address the specific needs of families, singles and couples without children.
Another example are salespeople. They generally have a very different view of how they want to be compensated than an HR person. A salesperson is more driven by cash, commission and hard targets, whereas HR is more focused on the individuals, a softer approach.
Also the new employees coming into the market are very flexibility-oriented. You see the Millennials, and the new generation Z coming into the market, that are not seeking for consistency. "I don't want what you have. I want what I need." That's how they actually speak to you during an interview. They are very flexible.
Overall it's a combination of different HR functions to make sure the policies fit your people and organization.
You have a leadership development program called Achieve More. How is that connected to mobility?
Well, it all starts with mobility at TomTom. We have a big population foreign employees working for TomTom worldwide, so it's a huge, huge, huge amount of people. What we always do in our mobility strategy is make sure the employees that we hire are employees that want to achieve more and can achieve more.
We try to facilitate that based on our strategy by providing for example development assignments. Employees want to gain experience abroad. They want to move abroad. They want to know how it is to work in another office for six months, a year or more.
We actually try to motivate them and to speak to their managers for a development assignment. We don't provide a huge package because we think that a development assignment is something for the growth of the individual but also for the organization. So it's a 50-50 approach.
For example, we reimburse 50 percent of the assignment costs as the employees requesting these development assignments don't do it for the cash. They do it for the experience. They do it for their own career development. We want to give them opportunity to grow and learn and Achieve More within TomTom. We think TomTom is the best workplace there is and our employees should make use of all these programs.
In my view global mobility has turned into talent mobility instead of mobility alone. It's actually facilitating your ‘talent’ within the organization.
How is the company's bonus plan affected by mobility?
If we relocate people within the TomTom office, we have two different approaches. One approach is on a local contract. We just terminate everything in the home country and make sure that everything is sent up in the host country as a local employee.
The other approach is to maintain their home contract and send them temporarily to a host country. The bonus works the same way. If you go on a local contract, for example, your local compensation structure will apply. If you stay on your home employment contract, your home employment contract will apply.
In your 2015 annual report, the chief operational risk is the inability to attract, develop and retain talent. Does the possibility of relocation increase that risk or reduce that risk?
Relocation will have a positive effect on attracting, developing and retaining talent there were relocation is approached in the most effective way. As described, we have several programs to ensure our employees enjoy their work and feel they can develop themselves personally and professionally. Of course taking into account that relocation is not always the best solution for every individual.
Are there any places employees are reluctant to transfer to?
To be honest, we do not have a lot of TomTom entities in countries that are real hardship locations, unstable, dangerous or isolated. It's more common for oil and gas companies to have those kinds of locations. For us it's not that common.
What are the main reasons employees turn down a mobility assignment?
Family issues! That's the main reason, like the wife is pregnant or they have concerns with their younger children or school.
What are the most common reasons an employee is unsuccessful in completing an assignment?
Looking at the numbers since we started, we haven't had a lot of employees that were not successful. The ones who resign, leave because of cultural problems and the language barriers. It's more of a personal thing instead of work-related. However, that personal aspect affects your work in such a negative way that you tend to either not perform or resign.
You also see family issues. If you don't get the wife to agree on the assignment and she does it without 100% committing to it, the assignment could prematurely end - just because of the family situation.
Can you give us some numbers on expats who are moving in a year?
In 2015 we had 177 local moves and 40 assignment-related moves. In 2016, we're looking at numbers through the end of the second quarter of 108 local and 47 assignment-related moves.
Are there any other trends in mobility you'd like to share?
What I see in mobility is that the professionals try to keep the old-fashioned mobility business running instead of looking into alternatives. By alternatives I mean, stepping away from the whole traditional policy-oriented approach to being a bit more flexible based on the population of the organization.
In terms of trends there's not much happening in mobility and talent mobility. You see in HR a lot of companies looking at their own populations: who's coming in, who's going out, what is the new workforce. But I think mobility management should be focusing on how we can be a better partner to the business instead of just facilitating the moves upon request.
Being an active business partner to the business and making sure that you have a say in the whole talent pipeline and whole talent mobility strategy, is not yet what I'm seeing.
What I do see, however, is a lot happening in the relocation world. You saw that companies were experimenting with providing, a relocation budget instead of a relocation package, for example.
In my opinion, that's not wise to do so. Let's say you provide a $10,000 mobility budget and you tell your relocating employee they can choose whatever assistance they think they need. Of course, they can do that, but they can also keep the money. There is a lot of experimenting going on but I think, unfortunately, not yet in the right direction. Making sure that mobility matters in an organization in a way that it contributes to the whole strategy instead of just being the facilitating role.