Thinking ahead series: How can cross-border mobility unlock organizational success?

Andrea Wolfson: [00:00:09] Hello and welcome to our next edition of EY's Thinking Ahead webcast series, where we discuss the trends and insights into topics that are influencing and shaping the people agenda. This series is brought to you by our team of specialists from People Advisory Services here at EY, some of whom are on this call today. And we're going it together, share some data, some views, and answer your questions. There's a lot going on in the world right now. Every year we conduct a global CEO survey to find out what's top of mind for the most prominent leaders around our world. In our most recent 2023 survey, the economy was, of course, a hot topic we were curious about, and the responses we got showed that CEOs, as they look to the year ahead, the majority of them are planning for some sort of global and local downturn. And while we've been seeing some organizations have been reducing headcount, particularly in the tech sector, the overall labour market remains very tight. This illustrates the fine line all organizations have to walk. The balance between managing costs and preserving investments and talent that have been made over the last several years. So, as we're counting down the last few days of spring and summer is set to start, I don't want to be all doom and gloom and cross border mobility can be an important lever in making sure you have the right talent in the right place with the right skills. And so mobility is going to be the focus for our discussion today. Next slide, please. My name is Andrea Wolfson and I will be your moderator for this webcast. I'm the national lead for our Organization Workforce Transformation Capability and lead our People Advisory Services Practice for financial services in Canada, here at EY. I'm joined today by three of my colleagues, Sandra Hamilton, Nadia Allibhai, and Andy Leung, who have loads of interesting perspectives and insights from their work with clients across sectors in Canada and internationally. So, on the agenda today, we're going to take a brief look at the macro trends, shaping how organizations are looking at talent. Then we'll review some data from our recent mobility survey, and then we'll move into our panel discussion where we're going to explore these trends and insights in more depth with Sandra, Nadia and Andy. And please, we want to hear from you. As with all our webcasts, we want to keep them as engaging as possible. So, please send us your questions using the Q & A box in the bottom right of your screen. And don't feel you have to hold them until the Q&A at the end. We'll be keeping an eye on your questions throughout. Next slide, please. So, since 2020, with Covid, we're experiencing one of the most interesting times in history with multiple factors impacting and changing the world. We can bravely say that we're facing trends we've never seen before, and organizations are being challenged to react and respond quickly to this disruption. Based on EY research and our vast experiences working with different organizations, we're seeing five critical macro trends that are really impacting everything from a people standpoint in organizations. The first trend is something that we see every day on the news and I touched on earlier. It's about the economic uncertainty, raging inflation, slowing of GDP and the fearful world recession. With an inflation-induced economic slowdown, the balance of power between employer and employee, that we saw shifting during the last few years of the pandemic, may start to rebalance between employer and employee. Leading organizations who have their eyes on the future to balancing the cost pressures with talent strategy, so they retain the skills and the people that were hard fought for over the last few years and are positioning themselves to be in a leading position during the recovery. Another critical trend that is shaping our world is geopolitics, something that's inevitable in our global economy. Protectionism, the shift of global power with Russia and China, is impacting the accessibility of talent and defining new guardrails for the changing global talent dynamics. We also cannot neglect the power of technology with the exponential growth in new technology, a vast majority of organizations, 90%, are reporting significant skills gaps caused by tech. New and shifting skills needs are happening every day, and rapid learning and upskilling of talent is a key success factor for businesses. Let us not forget us, the humans, and our shrinking population, lower birth rates, aging population, flattening of working age population, talent scarcity is worsening around the globe, so finding the desired talent at the desired pay, time and location in the future will also continue to be a key challenge. Last but not least, protecting the world is a key focus. No longer just at the government level, but for everyone. Making sure that ESG and diversity are built into an organization's culture, while dealing with a global workforce is top of mind. With these five trends, we have entered a new erawith global boundaryless war for talent. Now, as we take a look at the survey, we reflected back over the last several years, pre-pandemic, during the pandemic and now post-pandemic. We're seeing that mobility programs are having a really powerful impact on the global race for talent, both from a strategic and an operational perspective. We were curious to better understand how organizations are thinking about mobility today, and we conducted a survey of more than 1000 employers and employees across sectors and countries. This included global mobility professionals and people recently posted on international assignments. What we saw is that employers see great value in mobility. It's a way to attract, retain and grow the best talent. It's a way to address the global talent shortage, and it's seen as critical to business continuity. And on the employee side, what we saw is that many employees are interested in having life changing experiences through their work and see international experience as a great way to do this. So, in our panel, let's move to the next slide, please. We will explore some of the keyways that mobility can unlock organizational success. We'll look at the role mobility plays in our post-COVID hybrid and remote work models. We'll take a look at some demographic considerations for mobility programs. We'll discuss how you can really tap into a global talent market and keep costs top of mind through all of this so that mobility programs can deliver the right value at the right cost. So, without further ado, let's move on to our panel discussion. I'd love to pause for a moment to have my wonderful, esteemed colleagues introduce themselves. Sandra, how about we start with you?

Sandra Hamilton: [00:06:34] Great. Thank you, Andrea. So, I'm Sandra Hamilton, a partner also in our People Advisory Services practice. I've been with EY for over 25 years, I realize this weekend and over 20 years of that has been in mobility. And you know what? The last few years have been the most interesting of my career because we're dealing with an environment where the talent agenda has become critical, and mobility has gotten more complex than ever. And so, I've been playing in the space of mobility with regards to talent agenda. And we're going to talk a lot about that today.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:07:08] Great. Thanks, Sandra. Nadia, how about over to you?

Nadia Allibhai: [00:07:12] Thanks, Andrea and hi everyone. My name is Nadia Allibhai and I'm also a partner with the People Advisory Services Practice focusing in our global immigration space. I'm based in Ottawa and I'm very excited to be here today to discuss, really what's top of mind with organizations and the role of mobility. And we've seen a big shift over the last three years, and Andrea's really started that discussion. So, I'm really excited to share some of those insights and look forward to our discussion. I'll pass it to Andy to introduce himself.

Andy Leung: [00:07:44] Thank you, Nadia. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Andy. Andy Leung. I'm currently a director from the Advisory Services in the Workforce Advisory Team. In the past 20 years, I've been helping organizations to think about their talent strategy, thinking about how to bring the best talent to support the business needs. As a personal affront, I'm also an international citizen where I work in multiple places where I truly appreciate the possibility of mobility that can help both organizations and employees in achieving greater outcome. Very look forward to this discussion today and sharing more with the team here.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:08:22] Great. Thank you so much, team. Well, why don't we get started? And I'd love to start by digging in more to those macro trends that we covered earlier in the call. And Andy, how about we go back to you first and let's start with technology. Can you tell us more about what you're seeing in the market around technology and talent?

Andy Leung: [00:08:40] Yeah, absolutely. So, as Andrea mentioned early in the macro trend, we all see that the technology is really creating a skill deficit that over 90% of the companies are seeing that there's a skill shortage. But more interesting to understand about the technology is impacting is the different distributions of talents availability. What happened it means is because of this technology, evolution is so quick, there are no longer such a huge leading position in certain countries, like actually very quick development of talent pools around the world in many markets, is less dominated by 1 or 2 cities. Imagine in tech, in the old days we may think about, oh, let's reach out to Silicon Valley, let's call San Jose. Those areas think about the tech talent. But that is no longer the case. There's like Warsaw in Poland, different cities in India. You're talking about Buenos Aires in Argentina. All these places are incubating great tech talent. So, with technology changing the overall talent dynamics, we really need to tap into the world more than the non-traditional markets and make sure that we can bring the talent effectively. And mobility is going to be absolute forefront to making sure that we can reach to all these markets, to making sure that we find the talent to support the business needs.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:10:04] Yeah. Thanks, Andy. It's so true. There's so many great places that are really investing in building up the tech talent. And I wonder if we move Sandra over to you next and spend a moment on inflation and economic uncertainty. We'd love to hear what you can share about what you've been seeing in the market recently.

Sandra Hamilton: [00:10:22] Sure. So, economic uncertainty, I think, has us all pausing and thinking about our personal lives and our financial situations, and that includes the employee population pausing and thinking about the uncertainty that they may face. And so, I think second guessing whether they're going to jump ship and make a career change. And so, I think the level of attrition has come down not for all companies and not for all industries. But I think, you know, from a year to two years ago where attrition rates were very high pretty, much consistently across companies, many companies have seen attrition come down. And what that's done is reduce some of the pressure. Also, of the demands from employees. So, wanting to work from home or work remotely, I'm not saying those demands have gone away. Those demands still exist. But I think the pressure has come down. They're not maybe asking quite as much as they were a year ago. And I think the balance between employees and employers has changed, so that employers feel a little bit more like they can start to draw some lines, maybe answer no to some of the employee’s requests, because that economic uncertainty, I think, is having employees stick to their current jobs a little more than they were a year ago. So, I think a really quick change in the environment and quite a dramatic one.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:11:43] Yeah. Thank you, Sandra. Things are definitely shifting. And on that topic, I wonder, Nadia, if you could share with us a little bit of what you're seeing from a geopolitical perspective and the implications on talent there.

Nadia Allibhai: [00:11:57] Yeah. So, also super topical, you know, on the geopolitical side with an economic downturn. And it's interesting because you are definitely seeing industries like tech reduce their workforce but in a lot of areas, the war for talent is still really tight. And so, from a geopolitical perspective, what you see in these kinds of economic downturns, whether it's a perception or reality, that unemployment is going up, you'll see governments globally look at protecting their labour markets. So, we'll start seeing a little bit of a shift to protectionism mindset globally, depending on what's going on in that country and what labour shortages or unemployment rates look like. Immigration, we'll focus a little bit more on immigration. Immigration is very political, and there's always changes to immigration programs when governments either change or when there's economic uncertainty. Governments do start taking a protectionist position. Using Canada as an example, Canada has actually been really bold on saying that immigration will continue to play and drive economic growth and economic recovery. Canadian immigration policy is still very favourable and looking up between 2023, 2024 and 2025, the Canadian government has actually set really ambitious targets to have 1.5 million new immigrants landed as permanent residents. And if you pause for a second, that's a lot of new landed immigrants that will come 60 to 70% through economic pathways. The Canadian government continues to look at immigration policy and adapting policy to align with labour needs and labour shortages. So, recently, just a couple of weeks ago, the Canadian government, for example, did advise that they will be launching skills-based draws to attract permanent residents in certain areas where there is a skill shortage. So, it'll be really interesting to see how the next kind of 6 to 12 months evolve not only in Canada but globally, because we will start seeing governments pull back on immigration policy to really protect their labour markets but other countries like Canada, who will really take a position that it's a balance on what does immigration policy should it look like, and how does immigration play a key role in talent development and talent growth?

Andrea Wolfson: [00:14:25] Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much, Nadia. I wonder, for those of us that aren't as close and deep in the topic as you are, you mentioned economic pathways that 60 to 70% of that 1.5 will be through economic pathways. Could you just describe to people what economic pathways means?

Nadia Allibhai: [00:14:44] Yeah, So that's a great, great question, Andrea. So, economic immigrants come in either skilled, semi-skilled or low skilled occupations. So, they generally come to Canada, generally speaking, through work permits. And then once they get a work permit, depending on their background skills, credentials, they can look at applying for permanent residence through one of the economic streams. There's also non-economic streams of immigration. So, for example, family class sponsorship. So, there is an ability to sponsor your family, parents, or grandparents. So, that also drives permanent residence in Canada. And there's also various refugee programs and Canada's very involved with various refugee initiatives to really support the global humanitarian crises and, you know, really support displaced migrants that are looking to make Canada their home. So, there is a number of people that will come through refugee programs, and they will make Canada their permanent home.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:15:44] Yeah, that's super helpful. Thank you so much. And so then, you know, thinking about all of this sort of moving people around, Andy, I wonder if we come back to you and the mega trend around the shrinking population, could you tell us a little bit more on what you're seeing around that?

Andy Leung: [00:16:00] Yeah, absolutely. But before that, I just want to really want to say something really resonating with an audience comment earlier is, why this is such an interesting topic, because by now you will hear that these mega trends, sometimes they are creating some conflicting or competing impacts. Some of them are helping, some of them are worsening the situation, the war of talent. But the most important thing is the complexity of the thing that we're dealing with is that these phenomenon’s are not one size fits all for the different workforce segments such as the skew or the non-skilled, et cetera. And that what makes us HR practitioner very interesting work because they're very different, such as like we're talking about a low skill areas, probably is not as competitive comparing to like the retiring senior executive or hot skills and digital tech. So, I think for us, just want to highlight this like it needs really deliberate customized approach. And that is the interesting piece. But back to your question. Sorry, Andrea, but like in terms of the shrinking population, obviously this is a huge thing that is impacting the entire supply of talent. So, why or how mobility is helping? First thing, of course, how mobility can be appealing thing for organizations when they try to compete in the war for talent. As Andrea, you mentioned earlier in the survey, we found that international assignment has been seen as the one of the most life changing elements that employees experience in their careers. So, if it's something that impactful, obviously it is that appealing to people. So, that is a major, major lever organizations are utilizing in the war for talent when this shrinking populations. Second thing, we talk about shrinking populations, again yes, globally it is shrinking, but there are certain countries or certain region that is shrinking more quicker than the others. Unfortunately, to say that in North America is definitely one of the region that has the quickest shrinking populations. So, thinking about mobility, where we can try to tap into region that is still growing or shrinking less quickly compared to North America. And last but not least, when we think about mobility or international assignment, how can we have that stickiness? Most of the times when you're thinking about international assignment, it is usually induce a longer durations of engagement, etcetera. You're talking about one year or two year, and even thinking about after they have moved away or going back to their home countries. So, generally speaking, when employees or workforce that engage in international assignment or mobility, it is a natural setting that they will be thinking about longer term. And these longer-term thinking create greater stickiness and ipso facto help your retention of your workforce.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:18:53] Yeah. Thank you so much, Andy, for those perspectives. And so, why don't we move next to the fifth megatrend, which is around ESG. And Sandra, we'd love to hear from you on some of the things that you're observing relative to ESG and mobility.

Sandra Hamilton: [00:19:09] Sure. Okay. Well, there's a few items. One would be, you know, the pandemic taught us all we can work remotely. I think right now we as presenters today are speaking from four different locations or three. Three locations across Canada. We absolutely can work remotely. And I think one and a benefit we saw during the pandemic of working remotely was our carbon footprint from travel reduced. And so, now we have a situation where some companies are really trying to keep that carbon footprint low by keeping the levels of travel low. So, mobility is not necessarily, you're not seeing as much short-term business travel. And it could be because some companies are trying to keep the carbon footprint low. Other companies might be just doing it from a, The driver might be cost reduction, but in many cases, they're also seeing the benefit of a low carbon footprint and that might be what they're touting internally with their employee workforce or publicly for some of them that do reporting on their ESG efforts. So yeah, there's an impact on short term business travel coming down with ESG. And then I'd say another thing again, pandemic-driven, is people started to relocate their homes and maybe further from their work locations. So, you started to get this dispersed workforce. You then have also had since the pandemic, you know, formalized hiring protocols for some companies that were hiring people in different locations and not having them relocate. So, you have, unlike any other time in history, teams that might be physically dispersed. And what remains to be seen, and I think it's going to be really interesting in the next year or two as we have more data to measure this is, is that going to keep travel levels lower or not? Because you kind of have this, if you have dispersed teams and you need to get together for some kind of in-person teaming, you have people getting on planes versus where we didn't have that before. You had people getting in cars and commuting to offices every day. So, it'll be interesting to see after some time if these dispersed workforces are actually helping our sustainability and environment efforts or actually harming them. I don't think we know yet.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:21:29] Yeah, such a great point, Sandra. You know, all the sort of research and popular views around the new work models talks a lot about making sure that you get together still, but with a purpose. And so, it's around connectivity, around collaboration, around celebration. And so, you know, there's very few examples, I think, out there of organizations that have always been entirely remote. There's always some element of coming together for some in person, whether it's, you know, it can be more frequently or less frequently, but there's always some examples of needing to come together in person, right? And so, as we're coming out the pandemic now and that becomes more of an available option, It will be interesting to see what the, you know, sort of emerging or dominant models might be around that. So, thank you for the insights around those five megatrends everyone. Why don't we focus now and start digging really deep into mobility and how you know, Andy, we know that mobility can really expand an organization's ability to access talent and access scarce skills. And so, I'm curious, how have you historically seen mobility to be really an enabler of an organization's talent strategy?

Andy Leung: [00:22:43] Yeah, absolutely. As we discussed, mobility has been around for such a long time as a critical enabler to talent. So, one of the things that we typically see is how we utilize mobility program to support high potential or even executive succession planning. Just to share that I work with our clients before where international clients with multiple locations. One thing in their succession planning program or in terms of the succession development. It is part of the mandate that candidate, like the incumbent, the successor candidate, must have a cross, national, or even international exposures. Trying out different positions in different markets is part of the career pathing. So, it is crucial for them to actually have that exposure, understanding of the different market in order for them to move up the ladder, becoming the executive that who can really lead a global organization. We have also seen an organization that even one organization doesn't have operations overseas. He's still encouraged that incumbent or successor to have that international exposure because most of the time they will need to have that international sensitivity to do so. So absolutely, mobility has such a critical piece because that needs to bring in the knowledge and experience for executive to deal with this today's global business.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:24:13] Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Andy. And so, you know, there's always been a lot of value and opportunity to be gained from a mobility program. But we also know that nothing comes without its challenges. So, I'm curious, Sandra, what challenges do organizations typically face when it comes to managing the complexity that can come with a mobility program, considering tax, immigration, and regulatory risks?

Sandra Hamilton: [00:24:38] Right. So you know what, Andrea? If I could, I want to actually jump back to your previous question, because I have another, I think, really recent example where mobility has come into play to facilitate the talent agenda. So, a really recent example is, you know, the war on talent and the fact that the employees so recently were asking to work in other jurisdictions. So, mobility is all around helping people work in other jurisdictions. So, this remote working element was a really important mobility play for the talent strategy. And there's been some really interesting examples of it of like quite a public example was our Canadian Shopify entity that really came out there and said employees can work from anywhere pretty much all of the time. And the reality is for these companies that they really did have guardrails in place to make sure that they were being compliant with their employees. So, sometimes the guardrails would limit where they could work, the duration, or other types of guardrails to manage the risks of work from anywhere. So, just wanted to bring up, I thought, you know, succession planning, I think is definitely one way mobility has addressed the talent agenda, but also remote working is another example where mobility has come into play on the talent agenda. So sorry. Now I'll address the question you just posed to me, and it was around risk mitigation, right? So, there's lots of risks that come with mobility and companies have to understand those risks and think about which risks they're going to mitigate, which risks they're going to accept. It's very expensive to completely eliminate all of these risks. I think the number one risk, and it's often a tough one for HR to manage, they definitely need to team with their corporate tax team around this. And that is the concept of creating a corporate permanent establishment. And so, what that means is that a country, if you have enough, sustained and sufficient presence in another country, your company has a sustained and sufficient presence in another country, you will become, you will reach the threshold where you might create a permanent establishment. And what that means is you would have a corporate presence in the other country with no intention of creating that. Your employees being physically present in another country for a certain duration, for a certain frequency. The nature of what they're doing, all of those things come together to create a risk, of creating a permanent establishment in another country. And then all of a sudden, your employer, the company, may have to file a tax return in that country, may have to pay tax in that country. So that's a significant risk that has to be managed when it comes to mobility, cross border mobility. And then, whether there's corporate tax filings or just personal tax filings or employer payroll, there's compliance that has to be done when you have employees working in another jurisdiction. So, there's the cost of that compliance. And it's important to understand that compliance, those compliance requirements up front, understand the cost of that so that people are making informed decisions. So, the business has that information, is making an informed decision about mobility. And then last but not least, you know, this complexity comes with a lot of effort on behalf of the administrators. So, your mobility team, your tax team, your payroll team, maybe legal, other people in your organization, that administrative effort shouldn't be discounted. It takes a lot of people to make mobility happen in a compliant way, and that needs to be considered. And you need to think about the risk of using too much resources relative to the benefit of mobility. So, it's a fine balance. Those are the elements I would say are the risks that you need to think about and mitigate.

Nadia Allibhai: [00:28:29] And then maybe to add there, there's also, you know, the immigration risk that ties in with either cross border mobility or remote work. And immigration, we always say you either get it right or wrong, right? You get into the country, and you do it right or you get it wrong. But there is a huge element of grey, right. And you know, what we saw a lot in March 2020 was when organizations said go home. Organizations meant go to your residence in your country of residence, not go home to your country of nationality. But what we saw a lot is people literally went home. And then with borders closed. People were working in jurisdictions whereby virtue of being there, depending on their role, depending on what they were doing, was creating a number of risks that Sandra spoke about. But also, you know, organizations found that someone went home to their vacation home in France or elsewhere. And so there is also a huge immigration risk on what are your activities. A lot of organizations have sponsorship licenses that are very tied to compliance. And so really understanding, you know, if you have someone working remotely and it's creating exposure and risk, that could also then have a long-term impact on your ability to sponsor other people in those jurisdictions. So, there is a lot of immigration risks that come with cross border mobility and working from home that should be considered. You know, and organizations do hear, well, you know, I'm a citizen of this country, I can work there, no issue. Could be true from an immigration perspective but does create a whole slew of other risks. Or conversely, you know, there are countries that are now having these nomad visas. So, for example, I believe Bermuda is one who doesn't want to work in Bermuda when, you know, winter in Canada is six months long. Everyone wants a nomad visa. So might work from an immigration perspective, but then creates a whole lot of other issues. So, these are what, you know, the world of mobility and mobility professionals have has drastically shifted to this whole other area of risk that is now come up with this hybrid workplace, work from anywhere type work framework.

Sandra Hamilton: [00:30:38] You know, another risk that is not tax or immigration specific, but it often gets overlooked. And it's, you know, people, a lot of administrative effort, like I spoke to earlier, has gone into making a transfer happen. And then all of a sudden last minute, they realize this person has some kind of special designation or licensing and that licensing could be tied to them performing their services in a certain jurisdiction. And so, it's really important to think through any kind of regulatory impact as well, even certain compensation packages. You know, the UK has something called code staff and you know, if you transfer somebody to Canada, the UK and you're trying to keep them tied to their home compensation package, will that home compensation package could be offside to the UK rules if certain rules apply to them. So, taking a look, you know, beyond immigration tax and thinking through regulatory compliance in your home and host jurisdiction that you're thinking about is also something that has to be teed up early on so that there's not wasted resources.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:31:39] Yeah, that's a really good point, Sandra. So, we're going on this journey here. We all got really excited. Oh, there's so much value to be gained from mobility programs and now we know there's a lot of risks and challenges that really need to be considered when you're putting this in place. And so, I wonder if we sort of lift ourselves back up. And Sandra, could you share a little bit of how you can overcome these challenges? How can you mitigate these risks to make sure that you can really take advantage of all that mobility programs can bring to an organization?

Sandra Hamilton: [00:32:13] Sure. I think it's you know, I think mobility is a great thing. I, too, like Andy, I've been on to mobile assignments. It's been life changing for me and my family. I love it. And I think it is important for your talent strategy. And so, you know, our job, my job as a tax accountant is to let you know about your risks. So, I'm good at speaking to those, but it doesn't mean it should stop organizations. These risks shouldn't stop organizations from doing mobility. It's understanding them. So, I'd say it's understanding your risks, understanding which risks you're going to accept versus where you're going to take actions, effort to mitigate the risks and communication around those risks. You don't want people blindsided in the organization. So, you know, understand what your talent goal is and then what you would want from a mobility perspective to achieve that talent goal. Then consult to understand all your risks, the costs, the effort, and then make sure that it's in writing to the business. They understand the end to end effort and cost so that they're signing off on agreeing on a mobility arrangement without being surprised in the future. And that's not just, you know, there's the upfront of transferring somebody but a business needs to understand that, you know, when the assignment ends, the cost of that assignment don't end. You know, most organizations, at least public organizations, are going to have an incentive plan that often has a trail of, you know, 2 or 3 years. And where that's the case, then these going on a mobile assignment, there could be a mobile cost impact for 2 or 3 years after an assignment ends. And so, it's important to just be understand your risks, where you're going to make an effort to mitigate those risks and communicate it out so that there's full transparency.

Andy Leung: [00:34:01] Yeah. May I quickly interject here? Great to hear, Sandra about the communication piece because, just want to flag one very important risk that from an employee standpoint is actually the employee engagement or expectation risk. You know, from now we have talked about how great international assignments and mobility program can be and how appealing it could be for employees, but it is also irony that a lot of people actually don't understand what mobility or international assignment mean for them. You know, they could always think that, oh, that is the absolute utopia or oh, that is a silver bullet and give you everything. That expectation is actually sometimes poorly managed and backfire. So, like they may think that, oh, I get international assignment. That may mean that I will move to a lower cost of living places and help me to save money quickly for the next few years and can retire early. Or like, oh, I'm going to get food tax equalization, so I'm going to be, oh, get into a happy place. And even they do not understand sometimes there's regulatory licensing that's prohibiting them to work somewhere. So, like with the limited or like less awareness than we hope for from employees of understanding on the complexity of what they can really get from mobility programs. This is something that is sometimes more than just communication. It is really a good expectation and education we need to do. If it's not, then it is a backfire risk that we will face when we're trying to do the good.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:35:40] Yeah, such great points. Andy and Sandra. At the end of the day, I think there's a lot of people, a lot of employees that don't fully appreciate the level of complexity that goes into working remotely and certainly abroad. And you know, Nadia, you mentioned, I think it was you earlier about the Nomad visas. It's been so interesting how quickly the legislative landscape has been changing recently. You know, even in the last month, we've seen 13 new countries to be exempt. And what this tells me is that organizations really need to be agile to be able to respond to the ever-changing landscape. And so, Nadia, I would love for you to share with all of us what are you seeing organizations do to be able to be flexible in their policies, their processes, and practices so that they're really able to respond to these ongoing legislative changes?

Nadia Allibhai: [00:36:35] Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, I think it depends where you are organizationally. And so, there's probably people listening that are thinking, you know, don't really have a policy. And, you know, we'll talk about that a little bit in a little while. But also, there's organizations thinking my policy is way too rigid and doesn't really have any flexibility. And so, organizations are really looking at, you know, what did the last three years teach us? So, you know, 2020, the world was uncertain. 2021 borders were still closed. You know, then there was vaccination mandates globally. Then there were other challenges and there was because of the uncertainty, employees were also more and more reluctant to travel. And you know what? I think we're now in this period of what I would say is post-pandemic and really evaluating, like what did we learn from the last three years? And one of the things I think organizations really learned is either they didn't have a policy, so there was an exception to every single issue that arose, and you were kind of learning on the fly or the policy actually didn't make sense and wasn't very flexible. You know, in the world of mobility, things change fast and quickly, right? And you'll see different countries take different positions. But what I think organizations are looking at is how do you build a long-term sustainable policy that takes into account, you know, all the macro trends we're seeing. How do you build a policy that that considers, you know, ESG elements and diversity elements. And so, it's about, we always tell clients your policy can look great on paper. It can be beautiful; it can be structured really well. But if there's not that change management discussion and really understanding how does mobility fit within the broader talent agenda? You know, the world of mobility shifted in the last decade or two decades that it's no longer a compliance exercise. It really is a strategic enabler to the talent growth and economic growth. And so, looking at your policy on where does this fit in talent and then how do you create that flexibility? So, whether it's quarterly reviews or every, you know, biannual reviews so that your policy does really sit within where you want to go organizationally, keeping in mind that there has to be that flexibility that, you know, if there was another crisis that organizations have that flexibility and ability to pivot quite quickly.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:38:59] Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much, Nadia. And actually, everyone, we're getting some really good questions here. So, keep sharing your questions with us, please. And so, building off that, we have a question here so we don't have a mobility program currently, how do you get started? I wonder, Sandra, do you want to take that one?

Sandra Hamilton: [00:39:17] Sure. It's a big question. I would actually somewhat echo a little bit of what Nadia just said. I think a starting point is, as an organization, understand the purpose of wanting a mobility program. Is it to fill skills gaps? Is it to develop employees for that succession planning that Andy spoke to? So, understand the purpose, you know, for some, is it to be appealing to attract and retain talent? Is it a perk that you're going to give high performing employees? That will inform you of what your policy should be like. So, how generous your policy is going to be, how much your policy is going to encourage employees to go on mobility or accommodate employees to go on a mobile assignment. So, I think understanding the objective of your mobility program, then you can develop a policy. And that policy, as we just spoke about, you want it to have some flexibility so it can be agile for changes that happen in the world and also to accommodate elements to minimize exceptions. Exceptions are expensive. Exceptions are expensive because it takes more resources, because that's where errors happen. So, you want to try and have a policy that is nimble for options and to minimize exceptions, you want processes thought through so you can be efficient as possible on how you, you know, do candidate selection right through to repatriating people. You want to think about the processes end to end. And then I would say you want to try it out on a small population. You don't want to roll this out across your whole organization and make it available for everybody. You want to try and learn. So, it's baby steps. So, you know, develop your policy and process and try it out on a few assignments, have some lessons learned, and then maybe do some tweaks and then do a full rollout. That's what I would think would be a good plan. Very high level two-minute answer, not even, for that question.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:41:36] Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much, Sandra. And I'm just thinking about how, you know, mobility programs touch on a lot of different groups across an organization. It's not something that one person can just sort of draft up effectively at their desk. And so, what are all the different sort of functions or areas of an organization that would be important to involve in the development of a mobility program?

Sandra Hamilton: [00:42:01] I don't think people are going to like the answer to this because it makes it sound like a lot of work, but I think literally all parts of the organization because you either are going to be a functional area that is going to inform a risk and what risk is acceptable and how you're going to mitigate it. So, your legal department, your tax department, your compliance department, those are all areas that need to be involved, but all the other areas you want user input because if you don't get user input, you're going to have more pushback later. So, you want user input from all your departments for things like, you know, do we want the comp structure to be tied to the home or host jurisdiction? You know, the cost-of-living allowance, you know, what should be included, what should be excluded. So, you really want that user input so that when you roll this out, you have leadership buy in from all those different functions that are going to say, no, I gave my input to that policy. I'm on board with that policy and you don't have them fighting against you for an exception because I said before, you don't want exceptions.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:43:04] Yeah, that's a that's a great point, Sandra. It is a pretty, really good to have input from all sorts of stakeholders to make sure you're all sort of clear on what you're doing and marching together. Another question here. Building on ESG, which of course is, you know, such an important topic right now. We've got a question around how can mobility support diversity initiatives? I wonder, Nadia, do you want to take that one?

Nadia Allibhai: [00:43:33] Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think, you know, ESG is obviously top of mind because it spans lots of areas of the organization, but so is diversity. Right. And, you know, I think organizations are very deliberately looking at how do they tailor programs, policies to support that diverse workforce. You know, there's data that shows that diverse workforces create those high performing teams, and you want to be able to create opportunities for a diverse workforce to really enable your talent, objectives and talent agenda. You know, and mobility and diversity is really interesting because when we take look at policy and organizations are taking inventory of their policy, does your policy support a diverse workforce? And that's a question to really consider. You know, it's no longer a one size fits all package. There is different family compositions. There's different requirements for diverse workforce. So, really take that stock and inventory as is your policy or processes really inclusive to a diverse workforce. And if it's not, can you use mobility as an enabler to actually attract a diverse workforce? Right. And so, there's mobility really can drive diversity initiatives. It can really drive opportunities for a diverse workforce. So, really look at how can you use mobility and some of the great opportunities to really create lasting opportunities and framework to attract and retain a diverse workforce? Because diversity does, at the end of the day, create new ideas, new thought and high performing teams.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:45:17] Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nadia. Here's another good question from the audience, especially as we come up on summertime and people are able to get on airplanes again like we haven't been before and travel the world again. The question is, how do small organizations manage workcation type policies that allow short term work internationally without incurring huge costs? Are they just adopting risk? Sandra, do you want to take that one?

Sandra Hamilton: [00:45:50] I was just going to say, I'm happy to take that one. Yeah, I know, it's hard for smaller organizations because of they don't have as many resources to draw on to deal with the administrative efforts. There might be more cost restraints. So, I've talked to numerous smaller organizations and it's a challenge. So yeah, I think it's a balance between taking on risk and mitigating risk. And I would suggest there's probably a few risks that are nonstarters even for most small organizations, and that's having work authorization in the jurisdiction. So, you know, somebody might be going to a country for two weeks and they want to tag on two weeks of working while they're there. So, they're there for a whole month. As an organization, that person may not be authorized to work there and you have to be careful around whether you want to be associated with employees, you know, being associated with authorizing employees to be there and do work when they don't have work authorization. So, it's a question that a lot of organizations are grappling with. I would say what I tend to see is most companies are getting comfortable with accepting the risk of a week or two on top of vacation because, I mean, the reality is in our work lives these days, often there's days of vacation where we're even doing work. It's not intentional, it's not planned. It just happens with the pace of work. So, I'm kind of am seeing that with clients. But I would say, immigration tends to be a nonstarter for anything beyond two weeks to go somewhere. But yeah, I would say smaller organizations in some ways are taking on risk, but the longer the duration, the higher the risk as well. So, keeping it short while somebody is on vacation, adding a few workdays here and there tends to be what we're seeing.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:47:36] Yeah, that's a great point, Sandra. I think like from a risk perspective, on top of all the things that we talked about, you know, just to highlight again that there could be certain roles where people have accreditations that prevent them from working remotely. And I know a lot of organizations are very concerned also about data and data residency. And, you know, if you bring your laptop into another jurisdiction and you do work there, what are the implications of doing that and what risk you might be exposing yourself to? And so that's, you know, further to your involve everybody point, I think that technology piece is an important one to also keep in mind when you're thinking of these things. So, another question we got here is, okay, success, how do you measure the success of a mobility program to know you're getting the ROI?

Sandra Hamilton: [00:48:26] I'm happy to take that one, too.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:48:28] Yeah. Thank you.

Sandra Hamilton: [00:48:30] I'd say that generally most companies are not measuring the success. They want to, but they're not actually doing it. So first and foremost, thought I would share that. And as for how you measure it, I think it goes back to what I was saying in a previous comment. What is the driver of your mobility? So, if your driver of your mobility is to fill a skills gap. Then I think your measurement needs to be tied to. Was that skills gap filled or not? If your objective of mobility is to develop future leaders, perhaps a good measurement is people who've gone on assignment. Are they being promoted at a rate equal to or faster than their peers? If your objective of mobility is to reward high performing employees. Well, taking a look, you know, two years, four years, six years after an assignment, what's your retention rate on those high performing employees? Are you keeping them, or do they have the same attrition rate as other employees? So think, you know, tying what you measure back to what was the objective overall of your mobility program or your mobility program may have multiple objectives. So, what was the objective of that particular employee mobility transfer? And then measuring that in the future, I think is how you would go about it. It's not going to be, for a tax person like me, I love my numbers and my excel. It's not going to be a black and white number. It's going to be something that's a little softer, tied to what the objective was.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:50:10] Yeah. Thank you so much, Sandra. So, keep the questions coming, people. I guess. Let me see. Looks like we've got. Are we through all of our questions?

Sandra Hamilton: [00:50:34] I can't see the the audience question, so I can't help. Sorry.

Andrea Wolfson: [00:50:39] Yeah, I think. I think we got through them, actually. So, thank you so much for all of the great questions, everyone. Maybe with that, we can wrap this up for today. And before we go, I really want to thank Sandra. Nadia, Andy, thank you so much for sharing all of your insights with us today. And thank you to everyone who joined the call with us. We covered a lot of ground today. We talked about how mobility brings a lot of opportunity as the world is opening back up. And while there are some things that we learned during the pandemic that have forever shaped the way we work, mobility really continues. And there are lots of ways to build flexibility and risk management into your programs. And so, your feedback is really valuable to us. There's going to be a short survey that's going to show up in just a couple minutes. And so, we would really love for you to take a moment to fill that in because we take that seriously. And this is part of a series. And so, your feedback will help shape the next one of our webinars in our series. And so right now, our next one is planned for the fall, and it will continue to explore the trends and insights into the topics that are influencing and shaping the people agenda. And so please let us know if there's any particular topics that are really important to you. And until next time, you can also look out for an email from us in the next few days. We do record all of our sessions and so you will get the recording as well as the contact information for all of our speakers. And so please feel free to reach out to them with any of your questions and we look forward to working closely with you on any of your opportunities or challenges. We are here for you. So, thank you again to everyone for taking the time to join in this discussion. Have a great rest of your day and a wonderful summer.

Sandra Hamilton: [00:52:47] Thanks, Andrea.