Christopher Bloedel and I held a webinar last week to delve into the top challenges in Domestic Relocation. These challenges included delivering flexibility, relocating talent to high cost areas, and redefining your program for operational excellence. During this session, we spent time reviewing five case studies from market-leading domestic relocation programs to understand how they have successfully adapted their programs to address these challenges. We thought it might be interesting to share some of the themes as these may be helpful to you in adapting your program.
Theme 1: New Ways to Do Old Things
So often, relocation professionals inherit legacy practices -- be they spreadsheets, policies or other practices that do not rise to the top of the priority list. While it’s hard to find time to fix everything, companies were able to adapt old processes to be more efficient and market aligned by engaging their partners. Partners often have an intimate view of your process and they have visibility to other peers. By challenging your partners to support you on this journey, you may find creative ways to solve an old problem or a new way to become more competitive and effective in your delivery.
Theme 2: Know Your Audience
Invest the time to understand your stakeholders and what they need. This can mean surveying employees or interviewing stakeholders. Getting up close and personal with the problem at hand allows you to take things from micro to macro and to have a well-rounded understanding of where you are and where you need to be to successfully support the business. This step should not be overlooked.
Theme 3: Communicate
Communicate to your stakeholders early and often. Communication was the clearest and most pronounced theme we saw throughout these five successful projects. Communication often starts with interviews and can lead to thoughtful, comprehensive education plans after the new approach has been defined. One of the most critical aspects of communication that we saw was education of the teams: often the RMC would be administering the new approaches. For the success of the project, it was critical that the business invest the time to ensure that the RMC could act as advisors to the employee and help them thoughtfully select the approach that worked best for their personal situation.
Reach out today to learn more about how you can adapt your domestic relocation program to be more strategic and effective in your delivery.