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Caitlin Pyett, Director of Account Management,Asia and Consulting Lead at Crown World Mobility 

“They understand the price of everything but the value of nothing.” So goes the old saying about people who can tell you, to the penny, how much an item has cost a business while ignoring the wider, more holistic picture of what benefits it brings to the organisation.

We’ve found this with relocation services. Too many companies are focused on the financial outlay involved in relocating an employee, which can be assessed to the smallest degree on a spreadsheet, rather than the rich value it will bring their organisation, which is much harder to pin down.

It is inevitable that when companies take the approach of scrutinising the financial cost of relocation, they will in fact end up having to spend more in the long run. They end up overspending because their initial, narrow budget does not account for unexpected, but often inevitable, issues to arise somewhere down the line.

A good example of this is the cost of accommodation. Some companies might give their relocated employees a cash allowance for their temporary accommodation rather than booking it on their behalf. The assignee then books somewhere cheap with the intention of taking the money saved for themselves, but then complains to their mobility manager when the accommodation turns out to be inadequate. The mobility team must then make alternative arrangements for the assignee, which ends up costing them more than it would to have simply sourced them somewhere appropriate in the first place. Here, the value of the process does not align with its financial cost.

Narrow approaches and limited budgets can therefore be counterproductive. No two relocations are the same, so it is extremely likely that extra money will need to be found to pay for the unexpected costs involved in relocating employees to different countries and supporting them as they settle in.

Digital tools, such as an end-to-end mobility management platform, can support mobility managers in forecasting the financial aspect of their assignments. With features such as integrated financial and immigration data tracking, these platforms can provide accurate insights on past projects and better budget management for upcoming ones, helping to avoid unwelcome surprises.

However, if the balance sheet is your only concern, you are likely to overlook any considerations about the employee’s overall experience of relocation. It’s important, when choosing a mobility management platform, to look for one that encompasses and allows for the measurement of all aspects of the assignee experience.

Help your employees truly experience their relocation

The more professional approach to relocations should really be the only approach, with the financial cost of the relocation never being examined in total isolation. When the person is put at the centre of the relocation process – as covered in the ‘human centricity’ section of our ‘2024 Global mobility trends’ report – the concept of what is valuable in relocation changes, for both employers and their employees who move to another country on an assignment.

Relocation needs to be viewed not only from a financial point of view, but also through the lens of wellbeing and mental health. With this comes more attention to how an assignee is communicated with, how they react to these communications and how the services they are offered make them feel. Pushing out pulse surveys to assignees, to gauge how they are feeling during their move, or offering a supportive, instant chat feature via your mobility management platform, can add value for both parties here.

It is simply no longer a tick box exercise to provide these services; the value to the assignee is judged much more on the emotional impact of these services rather than the procedural, operational completion of offering them.

The concept of value is therefore beginning to crossover into the concept of wellbeing. Rather than value being a finite figure on a spreadsheet, this means that return on investment is now assessed by the value of an assignment and how this stacks up versus the cost, which is much harder to define.

The value is now no longer assessed by performance results or goals attainment. Instead, it can be defined by enhanced intercultural abilities and understandings, a workforce with a higher global IQ, or a happier workforce which might even result in it being more productive.

As the concept of what’s valuable changes, companies must change their relocation processes with it – for the benefit of everyone involved.