Global mobility, employee flexibility and remote work - all important variables in the talent market.
Marc Burrows, one of KPMG's mobility experts, talks exclusively to UNLEASH about the past, present and future of talent mobility.
Share
UNLEASH editor Jon Kennard talks to Marc Burrows, KPMG’s head of global mobility services, about the big developments and trends in talent mobility in 2022, since the last time they spoke about the organization’s always-anticipated GAPP (global assignment policies and practices) report. We join the conversation as Marc details the pressures that talent mobility teams are currently facing…
+++
Marc Burrows: Within mobility, a lot of that conversation or a lot of the development in those three areas, you could attach to this theme of increased and expanded employee flexibility, and both the demand for flexibility from talent or exploring new options, utilizing flexibility from employers. And with that comes a scaling of demand on mobility teams like we haven’t seen before.
As you expand across all the various types of international or cross border mobility, including much more employee-driven remote work-type discussions, those demands are not being met with significant increases in headcount in most organizations.
And so the answer to that capacity challenge, or that need for dramatically increased output from mobility teams is technology; better use of data, better use of automation.
On the benefit side of some of those changes, the more progressive mobility organizations are looking at a whole new range of opportunities as a result of more flexibility being considered in the employee-employer relationship.
D,E&I, you mentioned, starting to look at international experience, or cross-cultural experience or cross-departmental experience, exploring how you can get international experience to more of your talent around the world, without needing always to be a traditional physical move from one location to another, or long term move from one location to another – that’s really opened up possibilities, whether it be looking at providing experience to protected categories within an organization, that the data has shown have a higher tendency to self select out of a process for an international move, or those where there are certain political restrictions in certain jurisdictions that might make making move difficult, and so on.
But the expanded range of virtual experiences, and what virtual international experiences can bring people is an area of great interest and great excitement. And for me, I feel like it’s an area where we can start to unlock solutions to some of the age old mobility problems, like for example, the challenge of dual career households, where there’s a need for a person to physically move to another location within their household to fulfill their potential and to get the best talent, the best place for their employer. Remote work could for example provide a solution for the other partner within that relationship to continue to develop their career without the need for significant sacrifice.
Jon Kennard: Let’s talk about remote work a little bit more actually. From the key findings in the 2021 report, it said ‘work from anywhere continued into 2021 (and may be here to stay) – *may* be here to stay. And then in 2022 report, I think the wording was ‘the remote work experiment continued into 2022 (but selectively). Does this mean, from your findings, that you’ve seen a reversal now, where companies are doing less or they’re going more towards hybrid? What’s the data saying?
MB: Essentially, the indications are not that there’s a reversal, but there’s a maturing in the conversation. We’re effectively three years into this disruption now. And we’ve evolved through that journey from a highly reactive, crisis-initiated 2020 into a almost like a temporary holding period in 2021, where we didn’t know what the world might look like, or whether talent was interested in long term flexibility.
In 2022, we’ve emerged from widespread restrictions on travel, widespread barriers to entry in many countries, to a much more open world. We’ve also realized that the demand for flexibility from the talent market is here to stay. And on top of that, many organizations have put in place some form of cross-border remote working policy, or ‘work from anywhere’ policy.
We now have 12 to 18 months of lived experience to draw from in terms of how that’s working and and how they might select a longer term approach to flexible working that they can introduce with a bit more certainty to their talent population.
There’s also some lived experience around how you manage those processes from a volume perspective, from a technology standpoint, the way you manage data and and that leads into the governance and risk and compliance element of it where employers are wanting to make sure that whatever flexibility they offer, they’re doing so in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily expose the company, that they’re confident that they are doing the right thing from a governance standpoint.
So I think the conversation has moved towards ‘what do we do now in a more long-term, mature outlook?’, recognizing that the world is still not a stable place, and the volatility that has brought us to embracing these kinds of flexibility, whether that’s medical and health or geopolitical, those destabilizing, challenging factors are still with us, and and the experts are predicting that those factors will be here for some time to come.
JK: Yeah, I think it’s safe to say there’s more instability to come. But like you say, we’ve definitely matured in our outlook. And we’ve got more data. And we’ve got more experience behind us about how these things are working. So obviously, it’s going to get better…
