In the spring of 2021, we gauged a diverse group of Global Mobility, Reward, Payroll and HR leaders, working for companies with key decision units in Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and the UK with HQ locations all across the globe, on the future of Global Mobility. How are they managing current Global Mobility opportunities and challenges – and how they will step into the “next normal”?

Key highlights

• Evolution of assignments: respondents expect a large increase of remote workers across borders and a significant increase of cross-border workers. They claim that digitalisation has a (large) impact on their number of international assignments.

• The approach and strategy of remote work differs from organisation to organisation: 27% of companies note that remote work policies are temporary as a result of the pandemic; 33% are looking to develop a longer-term remote working policy for all or parts of their organisation.

• Business travel: 4 out of 10 organisations are using technology to allow tracking of employees or have concrete plans to do so, while 6 out of 10 have no plans to use any technology.

• Brexit: 17% of respondents expect changes in their assignment population due to Brexit.
  

Our conclusion

The pandemic accelerated the need for a clear global workforce vision and strategy. The role of Global Mobility is clearly further evolving from a limited advisory function to a true integrated partner that is human-centric, design-led and data-driven. Global Mobility and HR leaders keeping both the compliance spectrum as well as the strategic spectrum under control, will see a clear need arise to further develop a service delivery model fit for purpose.