Strategic
Talent Mobility
Advisory
Award-winning Talent Mobility Thought Leader and frequent speaker on the future of HR and International HR;  providing Strategic Global Mobility Advisory and Coaching Services.
Chris Debner has more than 20 years of experience in international HR advisory and worked in over 35 countries across all industries. Chris runs his own consultancy for Strategic Global Mobility Advisory out of Zurich, Switzerland.
For further info or to contact Chris
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Chris Debner




Challenges & Dilemmas;
Talent Mobility CRISIS
Originally published April 6, 2020; LinkedIn


















We currently have a black swan moment that comes with a massive loss of predictability and control.
No surprise that travel restrictions and social distancing measures have especially impacted Talent Mobility programmes around the world.
They do not only face challenges to which answers need to be found, but also some new dilemmas that are not easy to resolve.
My constant interaction and recent discussions with players in the Talent Mobility market, but especially a virtual networking session with the Heads of Mobility of the Swiss SMI (Swiss Market Index) companies on April 3rd 2020, gave my some valuable insights worth sharing, that might help you to prepare yourself for decisions to be made and give you more confidence and comfort on decisions you already took.
You will also learn about some new perspectives around some current dilemmas for Talent Mobility.
Finally we will look on what the current crisis likely means in the long run, when it comes hopefully soon to an end.
There are basically no differences between industries (all are effected in the same way) with the exception of the so-called system-relevant industries, such as pharma, medical supplies, food and supply chain etc.. While for them some exceptions from the travel restrictions are available, they are also far from business as usual.
Different mobile employee groups at different stages of their travel or relocations were impacted by the wide-spread travel bans and immigration restrictions.
The issues arose mainly in the following cases:

Repatriations
Postponed or cancelled assignments
Foreign local hires
Stranded Business travelers
Cross-border workforce / daily commuters
Home office abroad employees

It is interesting to see, that currently Talent Mobility is getting involved in situations that they did not necessarily deal with before, such as home office situations of local employees, daily commuters and business travelers.
HR is turning to Mobility to find answers to their questions in this situation.




Talent Mobility challenges
Let’s look at some of the challenges encountered with these employee groups:

Compliance: taxation, social security, immigration (border closures), permanent establishment risk and medical support and insurance (duty of care)


The early repatriation of assignees, while there are travel restrictions and lack of flights pose a challenge. Though one that most have already accomplished by now.
Especially in Europe you will face situations where the employees choose to work from a home office in another country, maybe their home country, but sometimes also from their holiday homes abroad. The first task is to identify these cases, because when they simply work online it is not apparent for their employer where they work from. The awareness for the accompanying compliance issues (see list above) of such virtual work fro...