AIRINC (Associates for International Research, Inc.)

We are living in a challenging environment. Many companies are taking the opportunity to review their mobility policies to ensure their provisions are still aligned with market practice and/or are looking to reduce costs.

Martin is a dislocated assignee, working for the German government on sustainable agriculture projects onsite in Addis Ababa. In late March, fearing civil unrest and a medical system unable to cope with COVID-19, he returned to his home in Kent two days before the U.K. lock-down went into effect. Now, three months later, he is preparing for his return to Ethiopia.

We get a lot of inquiries about how to localize expats that have been on assignment for several years. We define localizing as the process of moving an employee from an assignment package to local pay, terms, and conditions. Ideally, the localized employee’s package matches what local employees receive.

With the prospect of “working from anywhere” increasingly becoming a reality, a key question to answer for many people will be: “If I can do my job from anywhere in the world, where is the best place for me to live?”

When I joined AIRINC in December 2018, I started in our London office and had been living in the U.K. for 15 years at the time. I’m half German, half Indian, but grew up in Germany and went to school and university there with an Erasmus year in Paris, which to this day remains my favourite city in the world.

We are excited to announce the upcoming launch of our newly designed client facing site “AIRLinc”. We have been hard at work designing a new interface that is faster and easier to use with new features that are directly tied to our valued client feedback.

In these challenging times, companies are being faced with exceptional circumstances. One of these exceptional circumstances is when the assignee is packed to go on assignment but the assignment is cancelled last minute. Companies will typically pay for the costs directly linked to the relocation, such as shipment and medical expenses, but what about incidental costs?

This past Wednesday, AIRINC hosted a webinar with Kerwin Guillermo, Global Head of Employee Mobility at Hewlett Packard Enterprises, and Inez Nomidis, Director of Advisory Services in America for AIRINC, in a show and tell of the innovative approaches to mobility at HPE. The discussion focused on differentiated investments, “Pay for Performance”, and Making Good Mobility Decisions.

Remote work is a hot topic. In my last post, I wrote about how industry, risk aversion, and culture impact a company’s approach and receptiveness to employee remote work requests. Here, I’d like to share some insights into how companies make the call on whether or not to approve requests.

After eight weeks without any domestically transmitted coronavirus cases, Beijing now faces more than 180 new COVID-19 cases over the last five days. Authorities believe this recent outbreak originated at the Xinfadi wholesale farmer’s market in Fengtai District.