If things are different (#newnormal), is your global mobility program ready?

Is Eric Loff (of GTN) the Nostradamus of global mobility? Michel de Nostredame was a French astrologer, physician and reputed seer who is best known for his book "Les Prophéties," a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events. Like Nostradamus, Eric wrote an article way back in March of 2021 (yes, that seems like forever ago) where he optimistically told of a future where your mobility programs would ramp back up and your businesses would be calling on their mobility teams to help them once again get the right people to the right place ASAP.

He called out a number of challenges that mobility teams could be facing, from backlogs of cross-border movement that would be impacted by various lingering COVID-19 immigration and travel restrictions to new locations and new policies needed to jumpstart a company's latest initiatives. With such a wide variety of impacts that the pandemic has had on companies, many mobility programs are in an assessment and re-alignment period as they work to make sure they understand where the business needs key talent and make recommendations for how best to deploy employees. Hybrid and remote work models still seem to allow for and even call for relocations and assignments as part of the overall talent-management strategy. If you agree that the war for talent is still raging, that makes global mobility all the more important. But as Eric asks: Is your global mobility program ready or does it need a few tweaks or maybe even a full-on overhaul?

You already know that talent mobility is a key strategic endeavor with many moving parts that is not a cheap investment of time, talent and money. In fact, despite these expensive investments, many organizations view their international assignments as less than successful, with failure rates of 40% or greater often reported. Ouch. So even if your mobility program was compliant and successful before, will it still be post-pandemic? Is this the time to re-evaluate your policies, processes and partners? Is it time for a deeper level of outsourcing to prepare for the future? Have you learned anything specific that needs to be maintained going forward? Have you assessed where you are at, where you want or need to go, and how best to get there?

We agree with Eric (easy to say now, right?) that by taking time now to review your program capabilities, resources, policies and processes, you can make sure that your program is prepared to support organizational goals when a resurgence in globally mobile employees is again (soon) possible. For many, this is currently underway, so is time of the essence for you to consider how to develop or maintain your world-class mobility program? Whether that is a serious deep dive with the consideration of blowing things up to start completely over or taking a "gemba walk" to look for incremental updates to the program, now might be the right time to revisit, review and renew.