Mercer held a talent mobility conference in summer 2023 to discuss the future of mobility functions. In this article, we will highlight some of the key discussion points — with insights from two experts at the conference who have already gone down the transformation path:
- Guillermo Gonzalez-Prieto, Global Lead, Mobility, Cargill
- Christiane Grabow, Partner Manager, Siemens
Three decades of globalization, cultural change and technological advancements have drastically altered how companies and their employees view mobility. By the 2010s, many companies were assigning talent to fit jobs on a global basis — and dedicated mobility functions were becoming involved earlier in the process.
The debate has moved on to how mobility can become more strategic and integrated to add greater value to the business. Some companies have made significant progress, but many are only starting their journeys toward this integrated talent mobility model.
The shift toward integrated talent mobility is being driven by these factors:
- Ensuring the international talent pool is managed as efficiently as possible to place the right skills in the right job
- The post-pandemic shift to remote working, creating a distributed international workforce that requires more nuance and judgment
- The importance of diversity and inclusion — how do we ensure that women and minorities can gain international experience that will further their careers?
- Technological change that will automate many administrative tasks that mobility functions have thought of as their basic activities
- Shortages of certain skills in a competitive global market for talented employees
- Protecting and supporting important employees by making sure they are working in active markets
- High inflation that affects the incomes of international assignees — making them vulnerable to offers from competitors if compensation packages don’t keep pace
- Changing employee expectations about their experience at work, encompassing well-being, flexibility, diversity and more
Christiane Grabow:
At Siemens Global Mobility Management (GMM), we have had a long journey. We started back in 2008 when we began coordinating local activities centrally. We now have a dedicated global mobility team located in six hubs serving our customers. At Siemens, we have 300,000 employees worldwide with a tremendous number of international movements: 1,000 long-term delegations, 100,000 short-term business trips and 30,000 productive on-site work assignments a year. Additionally, we support local hires and international remote workers. We are talking about thousands of cases each year. That volume calls for standardization and a strong global mobility team spread across those hubs.
Introducing global talent brokering
Talent brokering connects businesses looking for skilled people with talent owners/sources. External recruiters carry out this task, but it also takes place within companies to match individuals’ talents with business units and functions across geographies — connecting the dots of a globally distributed workforce. In this context, talent brokering means more than recruitment and covers the whole process to identify, nurture and match talent within a consistent framework for talent and job mobility. International talent brokering requires collaboration across functions.
The world has become more complex, but complexity creates opportunities as well as risks. Consider these important, connected trends and how as a global talent broker your mobility function could help your organization manage change:
- International remote working — The pandemic dramatically altered employees’ expectations about remote working, forcing organizations to rethink their approaches. The result is that mobility can mean moving jobs to people instead of people to jobs — and this requires collaboration between mobility, compliance and risk functions to address complexities.
- Employee experience — In a competitive employment market featuring labor shortages and high demand for certain skills, organizations are seeking to create an environment that makes employees feel valued and understood. Global talent brokering can play an important role in fostering engagement for a distributed international workforce.
- Diversity and inclusion — Diverse workforces help companies succeed, but what does this mean for people who go on international assignments? Connecting people with the right jobs means enabling all groups to take these opportunities. Potential scenarios range from people with family commitments or single parents to employees making cultural adjustments or with health problems.
- Compliance — Multiple new forms of mobility create additional compliance headaches. You risk triggering new tax liabilities, breaking labor laws, and causing immigration or data privacy issues if safeguards aren’t in place. Mobility can take a lead to build bridges with other functions, identify these risks and ensure they are dealt with.
Guillermo Gonzalez-Prieto:
Because we have integrated the tax team, I’m attempting to upskill the team from the notion of tax to the broader notion of compliance. This means we’re considering adding immigration as one of the new core competencies for the team so we can provide integrated advice and solutions that are more about compliance rather than just tax.
Christiane Grabow:
Compliance nowadays is seen as a bread-and-butter business. It’s not something special, and it’s taken for granted. Our latest transformation started four years ago. New ways of working, ever-changing environments, and making GMM attractive and competitive for the future led to major changes in the organization. These included more global teams with a greater customer orientation, flat hierarchies, self-organized teams and working in interdisciplinary ways to focus on customers’ needs.
Ask yourself tough questions
Faced with these considerations, mobility functions need to do some soul-searching. Mobility has developed into a niche subsector with its own way of doing things — but now isn’t the time to be set in your ways. Here are some questions you should think about:
- Are you content to stay more or less as you are — or are you prepared to move out of your comfort zone to adopt a new mentality?
- If you opt for the status quo, will you be serving the organization in the best way — and will the business accept this in the long run?
- If you embrace change, are you equipped to sell your new approach and what it requires to the business and your colleagues in HR?
- How do you position yourself along the spectrum from traditional relocation administrator to consultant to the business with valued expertise?
- What is the appetite within your organization for you to change and innovate?
Guillermo Gonzalez-Prieto:
For the shifting role of the mobility function, we need to bring the learning and development conversations and tools into our place. I don’t think we can make the shift without redefining our core professional competencies and the core leadership competencies. It’s important to define that framework. You identify the core competencies, and then you ask what proficiency level you need for your different mobility roles.
Christiane Grabow:
We now offer our services not only to Siemens but also to non-Siemens companies, so that’s a big shift. We are merged into the Global Business Services team within HR. We serve Siemens as our biggest client but also other DAX-listed Siemens as well as non-Siemens companies.
For GMM, it’s not only about revenue and cost charging, it’s about transforming on the expertise side and the consultancy side. Nothing is taken for granted — the business, our customer, questions everything. You can’t just say: “It’s written in the regulation.” We have to adapt to the businesses’ needs and fulfill compliance at the same time.
Why be more strategic?
In an era of volatility, standing still isn’t an option. Faced with changes to working life, high inflation, disrupted supply chains, economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, all business functions need to think about how they are positioned.
For mobility functions, there are three key reasons to consider a broader strategic role and how to achieve it:
- Self-preservation — In a world in flux, everyone has to justify their existence. Administration can be outsourced or, increasingly, automated. Digital tools and artificial intelligence will absorb many routine tasks but work requiring nuance, people skills and strategic judgment is likely to require humans.
- It’s what the business needs — Your company wants to attract and retain the most talented people in a competitive global employment market. This goal is becoming ever more complex and requires a rethink of required skills, new processes and technologies, and changes in supply chains.
- It’s what your employees need — Global mobility can help high-potential individuals match their skills with the right job, get the experience they need to progress their careers, gain access to mentors and influencers, and put arrangements in place that allow them to be effective in their roles.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that you will probably have to do all the work and convince others that your plan is in their interest. Top management has other priorities and won’t have an opinion. They view mobility as a niche tactical function, and if you want to become more strategic, you will have to come up with your own plan.
Guillermo Gonzalez-Prieto:
We have moved from a regional model to a fully global team that integrates policy, strategy, delivery, tax and governance. We shifted from a regional mindset to a global mindset, and I think that brought a lot of cross-fertilization and opportunities for the whole team. And then we made another change by moving an organization tailored by country to a fully customer-centric enterprise model where we have dedicated global mobility consultants assigned to our business.
That has created challenges, but we have had very positive feedback from the business because we start to get more intimacy with the business and we start to put a lot of business context around any single move. Before, we were pretty much asked to move one person from Country A to Country B. Now there’s a lot of discussion on the background, how this relates to the global strategy of that business, what the business case is and what our succession plan is. So now the global mobility consultants are able to put every move into a larger framework, and I think that’s beneficial for all of us.
Christiane Grabow:
We all know that global mobility can be a pretty messy place, especially in recent years. The funny thing is, I believe it is not going to change. Our own transformation started before the COVID pandemic, which actually gave all the new working models a boost. It’s not going away. Mobile (remote) work, for example, is something we introduced recently. We are still in a phase of rolling this out to more countries, and our employees are allowed to work for up to 30 days a year in defined countries.
With the volume of moves we handle, digitalization is key. Siemens is an engineering and digital company, and we want to have lean processes. We don’t want to send out emails and follow up manually. We have a workflow tool in place and are facilitating robotics. We will always have traditional mobility moves, but the number has been decreasing for eight or 10 years, and with COVID, it has decreased even more. We need to offer new mobile assignment models and ways of serving the business.
Don’t seek perfection
Your new operating model will need to balance conflicting requirements to meet the particular character of your organization. The goal is to find the best non-perfect solution. And this isn’t a one-off exercise: You’ll need to monitor and adapt your plan to make sure it continues to deliver the benefits the business needs.
Here are some potential challenges to consider:
- Joining up the siloes in HR — Can you build bridges to work more closely with recruitment, tax management and talent management teams? Is it feasible to merge your operations?
- Taking on greater responsibility with limited resources — With budgets under pressure, you may struggle to convince top management that your goals require extra people or money.
- Changing while keeping the best of what you have — Shifting from a country or regional model to an enterprise model will put you closer to the business, but you need to retain valuable local knowledge.
- Maintaining control of essential channels while refocusing on strategic work — Outsourcing and automation can free you up to become a strategic advisor, but pay attention to the details so you retain links with the people you have assigned.
Guillermo Gonzalez-Prieto:
Moving to an enterprise model raises the question: Are we losing our traditional country-specific expertise? Before, we were very much focused on keeping up to date with what happens in the countries. Now, we’re shifting the focus to the enterprise, to the business and not to the country specifics. One of the key notions is end-to-end ownership and accountability. So what we’re trying to define is that we have very clear accountabilities across the business for all the different functions, whether it’s global mobility, benefits, compensation or the rest.
Christiane Grabow:
Should we be afraid of what’s happening? Fear is always a bad advisor. I deeply believe that global mobility — in our organization and in yours — is the place to go for all these future cross-border mobility challenges. Don’t leave that to anybody else in your organization. We are the experts on sending people across borders, whether it’s a classic delegation, a commuter, a local hire, a workation or working from anywhere. While integrating that work into talent development and selecting the right people, I think we need to play a significant role.
Join the debate
Add your voice to the important, evolving discussion about the role of mobility at our next Talent Mobility Conference in summer 2024.
Talent Mobility Conference 2024
June 11–12 | Seville, Spain
Contact us to find out more: Please contact the Mercer Global Events team.