If our products and services are focused on customer experience and our HR teams are aligned to the business on this strong mindset, are our mobility teams prioritizing these for the same employee experience?
Welcome to the VUCA world! This is why we need to be agile. This is where we accept the unexpected challenges (Volatility), make changes even when they’re not given and with lack of the usual information (Uncertainty), face interconnected parts and variables of situations (Complexity) and accept to work on unknowns and without precedents (Ambiguity). Thinking about it, this happens almost everyday for us in Talent Mobility.
Ways of working: are we supporting our assignees to fit quickly in their cultural changes?
We know that cultural diversity drives and inspires creativity and innovation. Intercultural trainings have never been as important as before now that we are in a globalized world. We look at the fast-paced welcome of newcomers. How do we do this? We pair up our culturally diverse employees and we set the stage for their mentoring. We encourage our business partners for appreciation of employees implementing their unique talent, skills, or achievements.
Policy and process: are we reviewing them with the eyes of our assignees, not just Reward, Recruitment, Talent and Learning professionals? Do we have an assignee persona and identify what works and what doesn’t work for them?
Beyond duty of care and compliance, one model is we are implementing package flexibility where assignees are offered more choices on the benefits. An example is that we provide immigration service support to parents of single assignees or give them lump sum and/or cash allowance as their needs are different from the standard package.
More importantly, do we wait for a long time to deliver these changes on a big bang (Waterfall) or deliver small decisions continuously (Agile) for our assignees to experience these improvements?
We could think that Agile might not be common for us in mobility as it had always been implemented as an IT-focused manifesto. But how we are implementing this is that our mobility teams have changed from just process and operations-oriented, to becoming mobility professionals and internal consultants to the business, assignees and partners. We manage the changing conditions of our international talent moves. We can adapt to new challenges quickly and efficiently holding a flexible approach to work, where our teams leverage their expertise and collaborate with one another without being constrained by rigid roles under their job descriptions.
Based on what I have seen for more than a decade, talent mobility had always been in the space connecting with several experts to build the best experience of our assignees. This time though, we need to be ready and accept the VUCA world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emmarie Castañeda (Marie) is TEMi’s Member Experience Manager, responsible for developing and implementing TEMI’s member benefits program.
As a human resources professional specializing in global mobility, Marie has more than 10 years of solid experience in HR and people management. She is a certified Global Professional in Human Resources (GPHR) and with exposure to international HR principles and practices.
In her experience in various corporations, Marie has transitioned processes into Philippines operations and implemented improvement initiatives. She possesses strong stakeholder management capabilities and established leadership of diverse leaders and teams located in various countries.
Marie is focused on improving the employee experience on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion especially for gender diversity, cultural diversity, racial diversity and non-traditional families.
If you have any questions about the TEMI taskforce or TEMi Talent Member program, feel free to reach out!
