3 big ways Covid-19 has impacted HR and global mobility

Overnight, COVID-19 challenged the status quo of individuals, organisations, and countries and significantly impacted the world of global mobility.

The global economic recession of 2009 placed Chief Finance Officers (CFOs) at the core of the crisis. But the human nature of the Covid-19 crisis brings Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) to the forefront.

Covid-19 forced businesses to make difficult decisions.

Business leaders had to make fast decisions that fundamentally affected people’s lives.

  • Who should stay at work, and who should go home?
  • How and where can people work digitally?
  • When can international assignees go home? Should they be sent home early?
  • What are the priorities? How can we best communicate these priorities to employees?

The list could go on…

At an organisational level, decision-makers, particularly in multinational enterprises (MNEs), had to act fast to alleviate the pandemic’s impact. The most basic of these actions are related to managing distances and rethinking boundaries.

Factors for enabling global mobility

Questions were raised about the future of international mobility.

  • What legacy will the pandemic leave?
  • Will the pandemic lead to a decline in international mobility, or will it gradually increase again over time?
  • Will companies take the opportunity to reduce numbers (and costs), or is the belief that international mobility continues to be beneficial to run and develop a global business efficiently?
  • What doesn’t work about the current approaches? How can we develop successful strategies?

Changing the traditional approach to international work.

One thing is clear – the pandemic indefinitely changed the world of work, especially international work. Having to rethink how MNEs use global teams, virtual collaborations, and international assignments could lead to a reconfiguration of the function of International Human Resource Management. Even large organisations with highly sophisticated IHRM policies are likely to rewrite the rules.

However, there is also an opportunity for International Human Resource Management teams to research and collect all relevant and valuable evidence that examines the role of IHRM during and after the pandemic. This research can help facilitate global mobility and international work in the future.

The changing playing field of global mobility.

The currently available literature energetically debates how GM departments are changing their traditional approach of moving people to their international work and, instead, moving the international work to the people.

As travel restrictions ease, employers and individuals will decide whether, when and where they feel safe to travel. IHRM scholarship offer an evidence base to assess the many impending changes to careers that globally mobile individuals are likely to experience and to develop insights into how their organisations can select, develop, support and manage these.

Career counsellors must learn to understand the substantial changes to the experience of working abroad and its effect on careers. This might mean that any career interventions aimed at individuals or organisational approaches need to acknowledge the changing field of global mobility in a highly volatile, uncertain and sometimes hostile world.

Die drei großen Auswirkungen von Covid-19 auf HR und globale Mobilität

Insights from the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2022.

Main findings:

1. The number of assignments used by MNEs will return to a different level than before the pandemic.

There are different forms of global work:

  • Long-term assignments (LTAs)
  • Short-term assignments (STAs)
  • International Business Travels (IBTs)
  • Self-initiated Expatriates (SIEs)

LTAs are the more traditional and expensive. They involved at least one year of living and working abroad. There is still a demand for this type of work, particularly in leadership development, knowledge sharing, competency gap filling and control and coordination.

However, the pandemic showed organisations that it is possible to perform some of these roles remotely. Combining remote work for these roles with less expensive types of global work, such as IBTs and STAs, can be highly beneficial to both the company and the employee. Naturally, this combination is highly dependent on industry and other contextual factors. In some cases, remote working may compromise the international expansion of organisations.

2. The rise of remote working. Moving work to people rather than people to work.

The pandemic triggered the rise of remote working as a flexible work arrangement to deal with the ban on global mobility.

Post-pandemic, it then became clear that some segments of workers could easily deliver their jobs from wherever they are in the world. The requests for flexibility in working locations rose exponentially.

However, there were strategic and operational concerns from managers. These included the cultural and institutional shocks when dealing with compensations, assessments, taxes, insurance, etc. For employees that were suddenly wanting to work from different countries and even continents. There are good practices about when such flexibility works well and when it does not.

3. Overall implications for the future management of global mobility.

Articles found that the future envisaged by global mobility managers differed across industries.

On the one hand, global leaders in knowledge-intensive industries expect a reduction of costly and traditional forms of global work, such as long-term assignments. Less costly short-term assignments would replace these, or international business travel would recover. Remote work continues to expand and is likely to replace global mobility partly.

On the other hand, global leaders in the consumer goods sector argue that remote working came to stay for departments such as HR, IT and Marketing. However, functions such as the manufacturing facilities of business lines envision an almost complete recovery to their typical degree of mobility from before the pandemic. This is because the type of work demands more face-to-face interaction.

How to manage global mobility after the pandemic.

Given the above, what do we know? The global environment is:

  • Volatile
  • Complex
  • Uncertain

Therefore, this creates an urgent need to develop and leverage more innovative and flexible forms of global mobility to support organisations to adapt to this unstable global environment.

Many initiatives to implement flexible work arrangements fail because they do not strategically link global mobility and/or HR functions when applying them.

The SAFE Model of Global Mobility

In a recent publication, Professor Michael Dickmann and Rodrigo Mello use the SAFE (Smart, Agile, Flawless and Efficient) Model of Global Mobility (see Dickmann, 2018) to create an alternative way of managing global mobility in a post-pandemic world.

The model supports the organisation in re-establishing strategic links disrupted by the pandemic, like global leadership development, knowledge transfer and acquisition, competency gap filling and control and coordination.

13 questions to ask yourself when setting up a global mobility function:

  • Who is your global workforce?
  • Are you already maintaining an international workforce?
  • Does your company already have substantial production, service, or knowledge workers?
  • What is your company and HR strategy in terms of talent acquisition and employee retention?
  • What is your company culture like, and which values do you want to foster?
  • Do you comply with diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations?
  • How important is flexibility for your employees?
  • What is the mindset of your workforce?
  • What leadership style do you want to implement in your organization?
  • Is your corporation rather risk-averse or growth driven?
  • Do you have an employee-winning company brand?
  • Who applies for jobs in your organization?
  • What is the status of digitalization in your company?
Which employees are in scope of the Global Mobility function

MInterested in learning more about setting up a state-of-the-art global mobility function for managing your workforce efficiently and employee-centric?

Get in touch with Daniel Zinner, Associate Partner at CLEVIS Consult.

Daniel Zinner

Author Daniel Zinner

25. Januar 2023

Rodrigo Mello

Author Rodrigo Mello

25. Januar 2023