The Business Case for International Mobility Development Programmes
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Do you run an international mobility development programme in your organisation or are you thinking of establishing one? We were recently asked by a client to advise on this issue as they begin to think about the challenges involved. One of our consultants, Gareth Phillips, shares his practical experience of tackling this issue.
Why do you want an international mobility programme?
This strategic question must be answered before thinking about how such a programme is best designed. Is it to create a unified global culture that enables policy decisions to be made that roll out smoothly across cultures? To supply future leaders at the top who are culturally aware?
To supply leaders who can rapidly ramp up an operation in a new location based on solid knowledge of existing locations? To grow local centres of technical expertise, so that countries can make excellent technical decisions with the added advantage of local knowledge?
In this age of dual career couples, not everyone wants or can afford to be internationally mobile. In the past, international mobility often relied on a family moving abroad for several years; now it may involve individuals working abroad with home leave every month, or commuting from local locations to attend block training. In either case there is considerable expense involved in an international mobility programme, and it is important to quantify the return from this investment.
In which direction do you want talent to flow?
In the past, it was typical to provide leaders from the Head Office company who would undertake a series of assignments abroad, either as part of a career or as a completely expatriate career. The clear preference in modern organisations is to home grow indigenous local talent to fill key positions. You may need your talent to flow both ways.
For example if the need is to rapidly ramp up an operation in a new company, you may need an experienced manager to move to that country, while also giving high flying local talent, at a more junior level, exposure to a mature operation in another country. The long-term objective being to achieve a solid hand-over to a local manager.
As organisations expand, the pressure point is often on technical expertise, which is not always available locally to meet new demand. International mobility enables this expertise to move where required. You may be able to establish a bench system of individuals able to move reasonably quickly to new locations, and who can provide technical expertise on short or long-term assignments. This helps to cover the immediate needs and may also assist in developing local employees to learn the new skills they require. This also provides an effective way to retain expertise with people staying in the organisation and moving to a new country rather than leaving for a competitor.
If you want to build local centres of expertise, however, then you will need to grow local expertise over the long-term. Locally-rooted managers may need to spend a year or two at Head Office. This allows intensive learning from top technical experts, and establishes the network that will enable them to seek advice as they make local decisions. Often there is a need to combine this with work alongside technical experts on a short-term assignment to their home country.
Making the case for international mobility
It is clear that sometimes, there is little choice but to take this option and to run a mobility programme for essential situations, as in the examples above. Where that is the case, persuasion clearly takes considerably less effort.
The more challenging question, particularly in times of austerity, is whether there is still a case for a non-essential, developmental international mobility programme with the objective of creating global leaders. Do the benefits of having such a programme justify the costs? Here you will need both buy-in from the senior leadership team (who will foot the bill) and the support of HR colleagues (who will need to manage the flow of talent). Without both of these elements, a programme that has the potential to be really useful, remains just potential.
What are the benefits of an international mobility scheme?
- Assisting with future business planning. Organisations often have clear ideas about what they want to achieve over the next few years. The mobility pool can be seen as one of the tools the business needs to ensure that the plans are implemented. Skills required to achieve the strategy can be planned in readiness and be available to deploy.
- Developing future business leaders. Experience of international assignments is a crucial element of creating multi-cultural organisations. The senior leaders in global organisations have often benefited themselves from moving around the world gaining deeper experience of other nations and nationalities. The more that focus on global thinking can be emphasised at the lower levels of leadership, the more people will begin to take opportunities to gain exposure to people in other areas of the world. Some experience can be gained by involvement in global development programmes (e.g. graduate programmes which bring people from different countries together for training), and remote working with people in different locations on corporate projects. However, for a genuinely global perspective, short and long term assignments within a different culture are essential.
- Creating tangible proof of an active ‘one organisation’ philosophy. Local decision-making is one part of this, but investment in local managers experiencing international assignments is a critical way of demonstrating a global perspective.
- Attracting diverse talent to the organisation. The prospect of international placements is attractive for some individuals. As the global economy recovers and it becomes harder to recruit more specialised or highly sought-after expertise, this could make the company more attractive than its competitors. This is difficult to quantify but is particularly important during recruitment for the graduate programmes with many applicants asking about the possibilities of working abroad. Note however that for local talent, global experience greatly enhances their value. You will need a long-term approach to ensure that people who have gained this expertise get opportunities to progress fast in their local environment, or they will be poached by competitors for a fraction of the cost it has taken to train them! It is critical to focus on long-term retention of people who have gained international expertise – for example, our clients use our internal career progression training Drive Your Career! as a tool to assist these individuals to find the right opportunities internally, and understand the value of progressing internally as demonstrated by our research.
- Developing the company brand. International mobility programmes enable the company to emphasise that it is not just a local player but demonstrates clear global reach. This can be a key element for success; for example in China, where there is a requirement to prove they you are hiring and growing local talent.