Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Mobility magazine. Interviewee titles and organizations were current at the time of writing but may have since changed.
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided the mobility industry with plenty of challenges—everything from the Great Resignation to changes in workplace needs and increased employee expectations.
“I was talking to one of my recruiting colleagues a couple of weeks ago,” says Andrew Walker, GMS-T, global total reward leader for EY and 2021 board chair of WERC. “And though we’re always in a war for talent, she said we’re currently in a nuclear war for talent.”
A robust mobility program can be a significant asset in that war. Perhaps more so than ever before, the strength of a mobility program can be measured by the consumer experience it delivers. Today, that experience relies heavily on the seamless integration of powerful technologies.
“Technology is definitely the great enabler,” Walker says.
Using Meaningful Data
One of the key but often overlooked benefits of technology is that it grows more sophisticated through use. The more you use it, the more data you collect, allowing you to leverage it in more meaningful ways.
One example in which the relationship between data and the successful implementation of a mobility program is particularly evident is when it comes to where relocated employees choose to live, says Walker, who has seen this evolution over his 30 years’ experience in the mobility field.
“[Now,] with one product, not only can you find out what neighborhood options exist in a particular city, but you can find out where all of your previous assignees decided to live in that city,” he says. “So, it’s not just these are the great neighborhoods, but 30 people from my company previously decided to live in this part of the city, which is really, really powerful.”
According to Walker, this ability to build communities is particularly important for young professionals coming out of the secure social network that college provides. “Now there’s an app where you can get plugged in to people with shared interests and instantaneously—before you even get there—meet people and get started on making that new home your community,” he says.
Putting that kind of information into the hands of employees, he says, goes a long way toward building a solid foundation that supports employee retention.
Closing the Loop on the Amazon Experience
However, the key to the modern customer experience is not just scope but ease of use. “There’s no training for Netflix,” says Nitzan Yudan, CEO and founder of Benivo. “Why is there training for HR tools?” As everyday life has become more technology-based and choice-enabled since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increased expectation that the same levels of flexibility and choice will apply to other environments, including mobility.
Technology, Yudan says, allows individuals to make their own choices at their own pace without the need for a middleman who might be operating on a different schedule. It also allows companies to zoom out from the process, examine the data accumulated by automation, and then make better decisions that ultimately build better programs.
He points to the consumer experience provided by Uber Eats, through which a hungry customer can monitor the ordered meal every step of the way. “Why not take that same concept and put it in mobility?” he asks.
Mobility is often complex and challenging, but that’s what makes it a prime candidate for technology-based solutions, he says. Relocating can be overwhelming. The employee knows there are regulations and taxes to be handled, shipping and housing choices to be made. There are lots of moving pieces, and it can seem like an impossible amount of information to track.
“What we’ve seen is that the employee can actually get the Uber Eats experience and see what’s happening at every stage,” he says. For example, Benivo developed a customizable platform with this kind of experience in mind, with easy personalization, interactive housing tools, and integrated systems to handle tax and immigration issues.
Because every step is monitored, the collected data empowers mobility managers to hold their vendors accountable for their service-level agreements. Rather than having vendors self-report, mobility managers can bring them in and have more control over the conversation. Instead of quarterly meetings at which vendors share information about how they met the service-level agreement (SLA), managers are now empowered by data to say, “On average, you’ve met the SLA in 85% of cases; what do we need to do to get it to 95%?”
That step-by-step monitoring also helps mobility managers address bottlenecks and prevent excessive delays. If, say, the SLA says the response time for an immigration issue is three days, and after three days the mobility manager sees that the issue remains outstanding, the manager can proactively work with the employee to address the issue instead of letting it linger.
By doing the repetitive tasks that once required manual input, the technology frees the mobility manager to provide the human touch when needed. “It’s closing the loop on the Amazon experience,” Yudan says. “When we use Amazon, we don’t need to talk to anyone unless something goes wrong, but when we need to talk to someone, they’re top-level.”
Enabling funds is an important part of the mobility process, so the expectation that technology will provide a consumer-like experience is understandably strong wherever money is concerned. Benivo’s PayLater and Lump Sum payment features, for example, allow employees to access interest-free cash to pay for immediate expenses such as rent and deposit.
At the same time, the integrated approach to funds distribution uses an artificial intelligence solution that allows employees to have money in their bank accounts within five minutes of being initiated to a service. They sign their repayment agreement—it’s all e-signatures, so it can be done on mobile—enter their bank account information and click “submit.” An algorithm automatically checks the application, so even if employees make a mistake in the bank details and enter the wrong bank account, the technology automatically notifies them to fix it. Finally, they get a text message from their financial institution that the money is in the bank. “That’s the consumer experience,” Yudan says. “That’s what people expect.”
Enabling the Connection
According to Ellie Sullivan, senior vice president of advisory services for Weichert Workforce Mobility, technology clears the way for mobility professionals to do what they do best—solve problems.
“Technology is the solution that can really provide a more seamless experience, manage the administrative burden, and inform people ahead of time so they know what to expect,” she says. “That provides more capacity for the people who are coaching the employees and counseling them to identify hurdles that might trip them up and help them understand how to avoid them.”
As much as employees today look to technology to give them that seamless experience, Sullivan notes that the complexity of a relocation can make them feel vulnerable. Trust is an essential component of a successful move and can be the foundation of a positive long-term relationship with the company. “We are dealing with one of the more stressful events in a person’s life,” she says. “Trust is important, and any technology solution that can enhance that trust is important.”
Technology provides opportunities for transparency, she says, which fosters that trust. If, for example, an employee wants to know how a cost-of-living adjustment is calculated, it should be visible along with an explainer video or chatbot to ensure that questions are answered as they are likely to occur, rather than allowing them to raise doubts or confusion.
“When I consult with client organizations, that’s what I emphasize—that you can’t have a premier technology solution without having the right policies or the right administration of your program,” Sullivan says. “I like to think of it as the ecosystem [linking] your policies, your processes, and the systems that support your program.”
While all the moving pieces can be overwhelming, technology is doing more than adding efficiencies by automating what used to be done by hand; it’s taking the mystery out of the complex processes and guiding employees. At its best, it can be a road map.
Relocation usually requires a dozen or more supplier partners who each have their distinct role, says Stewart McCardle, CRP, GMS-T, Weichert’s senior vice president for technology. Examples would be a household goods company, a real estate agent, a cultural trainer, and an immigration attorney. Mobility companies have typically been the middleman in this process, gathering information from the customer, using that information to make decisions, and then letting the supply chain partner know the customer’s needs.
“What we’re doing—and where I see things going—is that we become less of a middleman and more of a facilitator,” says McCardle. “We’re using technology to know when to ask the right questions and pass the information directly to the supplier partner. This means customers can do their moves on their own time, digitally. The technology prompts them to the right next step and connects them directly to the supply chain partner who will deliver that service in a seamless way. Technology is allowing us to move toward a place where there’s that direct connection.”
The COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges, but also opportunities to quickly adapt existing technologies to meet the conditions. “We had most of the parts in place, so we looked at how to leverage the assets we had both from a technology perspective and also the relationships we’d developed,” he says.
For example, when it comes to selling houses, Weichert was able to leverage technology to know precisely where the customer was in the process—which documents had been signed, which offers had been submitted—so that they were able to creatively tackle the in-person challenges that technology couldn’t solve, such as signing the final documents. In one instance, they put a table between two cars in a parking lot so the client could sign the papers in a safe, socially distanced way.
“So, you had this combination of technology understanding where people were and what was happening, but also the physical things that were happening, which you have to do in this relocation world,” McCardle says. “Because ultimately, it’s a physical service we provide.”
McCardle’s team was also able to enhance an existing product to track employees during the pandemic. Known as SMARTRIP, the app manages mobile employees, business travelers, and remote workers, assessing each trip against the latest travel, tax, and immigration regulations worldwide, then flagging potential compliance risks so that Weichert’s global mobility specialists can address them before they become issues.
“We’ve actually made those changes right in the app,” says McCardle. “So now we’re not just focused on immigration or tax, but we’re looking at the COVID situation. We take the same concept, which was made for global tax reporting because this one rule came out, and now we’re reapplying it to the U.S., where you can use it within the U.S. to know where your people are living and working and then properly report from a compliance perspective.”
Looking to the future, McCardle sees using AI for more intuitive automation, something that will help the relocating employees as well as the corporate clients.
With AI, the information generated from moving tens of thousands of customers every year helps provide recommendations to enhance the consumer experience. The system knows you did this part of the process, so now you should do the next part. “Being able to set tasks based on a ‘perfect’ move timeline doesn’t work, so instead, it’s the system automatically guiding them toward what they need to be doing,” he says.
Another way he says that AI can help better serve customers is through chatbots or voice recognition that can take existing information and answer customer questions in a 24/7 environment. For example, technology can integrate with other AI assistants from Apple, Google, or Amazon to allow customers to ask Alexa when their household goods shipment is due to arrive, or ask Siri what their closing date is.
On the corporate side, AI takes the descriptive analytics that exist now, which show you where things are today and where they were in the past and expands them so you can anticipate a future informed by past actions.
It can also help a company tailor its response to market conditions. If a company is trying to bring on a lot of new talent, leaders can see which benefits in their relocation program are most attractive and then emphasize them; if they’re focused on retaining employees, they can see what factors are actually keeping people in the company and expand them. “There are so many factors, but the data and the AI models will help us to actually find those needles in the haystack,” McCardle says.
A Tool Within Reach
In the end, technology doesn’t just allow companies to do more—it also allows more companies to do more. As the great enabler, it removes barriers and opens doors for some who previously might not have been able to support mobility in such a considered way.
“Innovation doesn’t always come in the form that we would expect,” says Sébastien Deschamps, CEO and co-founder of ReloTalent, whose global mobility management system and salary calculators streamline the complex mobility processes for multiple audiences. “For example, having a technology that is accessible to a broader HR community thanks to a more affordable pay-per-use business model is making those global mobility compliance tools and best practices within the reach of those who wouldn’t necessarily have them in the past.”
And by automating many of the repetitive functions of the different processes, technology has allowed organizations to focus resources and eliminate excess. “Cost containment has been a growing requirement, thus [we are] relying more on technology to lower the program’s overall financial impact,” he says—all of which positions companies to better respond to whatever new trends or challenges come their way.
“The need for information updates in fast-changing pandemic responses has put the role of the expert destination service provider in focus,” Deschamps says. “By delivering regular updates to moving candidates and employers, they have been central in keeping the world moving.”
And at the end of the day, keeping the world moving is what mobility is all about.