Building a single source of truth

One of the struggles many mobility teams deal with is finding a way to gather appropriate data and use it to drive decision making.

We often hear from mobility teams that they’re not viewed as strategic partners within the business. Many feel the mobility department is viewed as more transactional than tactical. There are a lot of reasons this happens, but one of them is that mobility teams don’t always have the hard data to support their recommendations to the business. Often, decisions need to be made based on experience or industry trends without the company-specific metrics to back it up.

The article below shows the importance of building a data-driven decision culture, and all of the things you need to make that happen: 

• Stakeholder buy-in
• A single source of truth
• Availability in real time
• A format that’s easy to understand 

People like to talk about the need for analytics but more often than not, it’s only focused on one thing: the money. There’s an element of the data that’s completely missing from mobility. Things like, how do our employees perform while on assignment? What’s their performance upon return? How many promotions do they receive in the following years? How many people left the company immediately after the payback agreement ended?

There’s a lot of data missing on the front end too. Data that could answer questions like: Who are we providing opportunities to? Are we offering a proportionate amount of opportunities to women? What is the performance of these assignees prior to their offer?

There is a real need for data collection throughout the employee life cycle to make better use of mobility opportunities.

And most mobility departments know this. They know it’s valuable information, but they don’t have access to the systems to track the information they want, or they can’t get the buy-in to build the integrations they need.

For some of these programs, the answer might start outside of tech solutions. It can start with having meetings with managers to find out how many assignees they had, how many people were interviewed, why some people were turned down, how many candidate assessments were done, and how many they considered successful. Qualitative interviews with the managers could give some real insight into the behaviors and be a clue into what information your company needs to track.

With all of this together, you’ll start to see a very clear picture of how successful your mobility programs are, and what kind of return the company is getting on that investment.

Calculating ROI on relocation doesn’t need to be a “million-dollar question." Better data leads to better results, and yes, even better ROI.