Evolving from a Transactional to a Strategic Mobility Function

Transcription

1 2015 Interview Evolving from a Transactional to a Strategic Mobility Function by Kay Hall

2 Evolving from a Transactional to a Strategic Mobility Function by Michael Joyce Kay Hall, Managing Director EMEA of AIRINC, spoke with Lucinda Davis, Global Mobility Manager at Pearson, to discuss how Pearson s Global Mobility program has evolved over the years. AIRINC is pleased to collaborate with Pearson, providing data and tools to support its new mobility program. How has your Global Mobility function evolved over the last four years? Over the past four years we ve shifted our focus from operational effectiveness to becoming a strategic partner to the business. Global Mobility is now a Centre of Excellence (COE) reporting to Talent. How did you go about this? The first step in moving from operational effectiveness to operational excellence was to ensure that we had a robust and fully functional global service delivery model. This step included creating process maps, templates, and guidance documents to encourage global consistency. Simultaneously, we improved the quality of the data underpinning our program and optimized our use of technology, freeing up our Advisors time to spend with our stakeholders within HR and most importantly the wider business. The second step of our journey was to focus on being more strategic and aligning mobility with the needs of the business. Since we needed a better understanding of what was driving mobility, we began capturing business rationales and objectives for all relocations from the moment of initiation. Because of this simple step, our Advisors found themselves much more engaged with the business and better able to understand its needs. Inadvertently, we started on our journey to gain trust and credibility from our business partners. We made significant efforts to involve key stakeholders in the redesign process, a decision that proved critical for endorsement and buy-in. This level of ongoing communication with the business and with HR as a whole remains a key priority. Lucinda Davis Global Mobility Manager at Pearson 2 2

3 This sounds like a thorough overhaul of your program, Luci. How does your policy framework differ today? We now have a tiered policy approach that offers greater flexibility for the business. If a flex can be justified and will not create any issues for employee relations, certain policy elements can be adjusted within defined parameters. How have you been able to connect Global Mobility with Talent? This was the third important step in our journey. Our new global career framework was an essential building block that gave us a clear and consistent measure of talent across the globe. We worked closely with Reward to understand the career framework and corresponding salary scales. Our aim was to understand the role of international assignments within the career development cycle. This knowledge, in turn, helped us develop a rationale for our tiered policy suite. At Pearson there is an expectation of co-investment by the employee. The greater the learning experience, the more we expect an employee to invest his or her energies in the assignment. From a reward perspective, this expectation translates to leaner support packages for career-boosting assignments. Aligning our tiered policies to our career framework in this way ensures that employees are treated in a consistent way across the globe and makes the policy much harder to dispute. The company benefits by being more efficient and the employee is treated more fairly and with more transparency. Today, we make sure that the assignment intent is clear from the outset, and we work with Talent Management to plug gaps in our data so that we can have a better understanding of assignee performance. 3

4 What are the main benefits of these changes to your organization? I would say that we are much closer to and have more credibility with the business today, largely due to better conversations and a better understanding of business drivers. I believe they sense the shift in our role from the enforcer of a policy to an enabler of mobility, and in light of that shift we have become a trusted partner. We are also better prepared when entering new markets, so we can ensure a more proactive due diligence and offer more flexibility when it is needed. An example of this shift of our mindset towards customerdriven service was our decision to incorporate a Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking Advisor to support our extensive mobility into Latin America. We want to ensure that we are considering cultural nuances and not restricting mobility to or from more diverse and emerging markets. Communication between HR, the business, and the assignee has fundamentally changed for the better, but it is a work in progress, supporting Pearson s organizational objective Always learning. Another benefit to Talent is that we now take a more proactive approach towards diversity and inclusion. 4

5 This is a lot of change. How has your team coped? Many colleagues have risen to the challenge by embracing change. Of course, people cope with change in different ways, but we have a supportive and established team with good morale. I would say that our team is much stronger today. The two senior Advisors who have been added help the team overcome obstacles and clear the path to make it easier for people to perform everyday tasks. They provide the oil to the machinery, so to speak. Working with guidelines and creating processes provides reassurance and clarity for everyone. An important goal of the transformation project from our perspective was the need for simplification, and we are benefiting from that today. How has technology helped your department? Our business partners need far more technical advice at speed now than in the past. Automating processes wherever possible was an obvious decision to help minimize manual tasks and create efficiencies. As I mentioned before, this free time allows our Advisors the time to spend with our key stakeholders. Automation has the further benefit of reducing manual errors, therefore helping us with global compliance. informed choices at the press of a button. We now run cost estimates, de facto, for all assignments. Another example is AIRINC s Affinity Matrix calculator, which evaluates the viability of host pay versus tax-equalized home pay. The calculator has helped demystify this common dilemma by providing a pay recommendation based on economic data according to our defined criteria. This information helps support our compensation recommendation to the business. Finally, technology enables us to be accountable and to have clear measures, both of our objectives and of the effectiveness of our Global Mobility program. We rolled out two main activities to achieve this accountability: 1. Formalized employee surveys 2. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and quarterly metric scorecards The scorecards allow us to track key information relating to talent, financial, operations, and demographics and to measure these values against defined KPIs. Some tangible examples of reports are diversity stats, employee satisfaction levels, and cost or speed of deployment. In addition to driving efficiencies and compliance, technology also helps us make 5

6 What were your biggest challenges along the way? Some of the biggest challenges included handling historical perception. Cost mitigation is also an ongoing concern. Driving the changes throughout the organization required effort and time, but it is essential to break down the roadblocks to prevent your plans from stalling. What does the future look like? A few examples of new initiatives are: Addressing new cultures and generational needs to be prepared for the future. With a successful U.S. domestic mobility policy in place, we are now working closely with our Asian offices on China domestic mobility. Providing better support to our expats. We will soon roll out a buddy program that aims to encourage Pearson s corporate culture across the globe in support of our organizational objective of becoming one Pearson. Seeking endorsement of policies from the Senior Leadership Group and working towards a more formalized governance model. It is an ongoing journey to adapt to market changes and business decisions. We would like to become even more transparent and maintain a dialogue with our key stakeholders, so that we all keep learning from one another. Kay Hall Managing Director EMEA Khall@air-inc.com 6