Welcome to the latest issue of Mobility Minute, a newsletter created by Worldwide ERC®. Once a week, this newsletter will land in your inbox to keep you up-to-date on the news from and about the global workforce mobility industry.
What's happening?
Here's a quick glimpse of what you'll find in this week's Mobility Minute:
Top Three Issues Dominating impacting Global Mobility
Remote Work Policies Are Changing Leisure Travel
Study Examines Gender Diversity on Private Company Boards
Environmental Sustainability a Top Priority for Multinational Firms
More than 90% of multinational firms have adopted a sustainability strategy, and 89% have committed resources and funding to achieve their environmental goals according to Worldwide ERC®s newly released Road to Sustainability. The new data is based on a survey of 900 CHROs and senior Human Resources leaders at multinational firms —representing a wide variety of industries, world regions, and company sizes – about how they plan to achieve their organization’s sustainability goals.
Get the facts:
Pressure Is on Service Providers. Corporations leverage their supplier networks to devise and deliver on sustainability goals, with fifty-six percent encouraging or requiring suppliers and business partners to meet specific sustainability criteria.
Mobility is Here to Stay. Reducing employee relocations was cited as the lowest priority in meeting sustainability goals. A full sixty-four percent of respondents are not considering reductions as part of their strategy.
Having a Public Policy Strategy Is Key: Adopting public policy positions is the second most utilized strategy for managing corporate sustainability goals.
Digitalization Is a Top Priority. CHROs and HR executives report that organizations are betting big on the promise of digitalization to deliver on sustainability goals.
Why is this important:
More and more organizations view sustainability as playing a significant role in their mission statements. Such initiatives can make their companies attractive to talent and encourage individuals to think long-term and build a career with the organization, enhancing the organization’s public image. Human Resources is a significant player in sustainability efforts—supporting leadership, encouraging employees, and providing the right policies and practices that match the company’s objectives.
Three Topics Dominating the Global Mobility Industry
While Ukraine looms large for our industry, creating much uncertainty, it is among many issues dominating conversations among professionals in the global mobility industry. At March events in New York, San Francisco, and Florida, Lynn Shotwell, Worldwide ERC® CEO, described conversations as falling into three buckets: The Workforce, The Supply Chain, and The Rules of the Road.
The Workforce
As companies return to the office while struggling with labor shortages, the question is, what impact will this have on mobility? That depends. It depends on whether the job can be done remotely (less than half currently can), the industry, the geographic location, the company culture, and how badly the company needs the particular worker.
Worldwide ERC®'s Workforce Mobility Benchmarking Database provides real-time information on 1,300 policies supporting 250,000+ employees across ten common policy types. Help us help you and your peers by sharing your data today.
The Supply Chain
At GWS last October, there were hopes that the housing shortages, shipping bottlenecks, and skyrocketing prices would normalize by sometime in 2023. But that was before Ukraine. Now experts are predicting supply chain uncertainty – and inflation – will continue into 2024. When it finally normalizes, the new normal may look different from the old.
The Rules of the Road
The Rules of the Road are the laws, regulations, and assumptions about how our world works that shape our business policies and processes. These include such varied topics as tax and immigration laws, data privacy and security, and environmental, social, and governance responsibilities. Many of these significant issues require government, business, and civil society to work together to rewrite the rules for today's world.
The Worldwide ERC policy forums – focused on domestic real estate and mortgage, global immigration, global tax, and global compliance – are tackling the issues that impede your way. We invite you to share your expertise by joining a forum today.
More than a million containers due to travel to Europe from China by train—on a route that goes through Russia—must now make their journey by sea. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also severed key supply lines for nickel, aluminum, wheat, and sunflower oil, causing commodity prices to skyrocket. If the pandemic, which triggered a surge in purchasing of goods, caused the global supply chain to buckle, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's continuing zero-Covid policy risk breaking it completely. — Wired
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data, women younger than 30, on average, earn at least as much as or more than men in D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and 19 other major metro areas ― places where strong job markets attract educated young people looking to build careers. Nationwide, women 30 and younger earn 93 cents for every dollar made by a comparable man. — The Washington Post
The world may be less dependent on oil now than it was during the energy shocks of the 1970s, but the Ukraine conflict is stark evidence of a stubborn craving that can still disrupt economies, confound policymakers, and spark political strife. — Reuters
After a period of generally sustained economic optimism, CFOs are entering 2022 with a diminishing view of the economy and business prospects, according to Deloitte's newly released Signals survey for 1Q22. In the face of looming geopolitical tensions and rising inflation, CFOs indicated declining expectations across several key business indicators. The survey closed on February 25, 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. — Tech Republic
Remote Work Policies Are Changing Leisure Travel
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many of the world's biggest industries, but the travel industry has inarguably been one of the hardest hit. Travel priorities have changed for both leisure and business trips, significantly impacting airlines and hospitality businesses.
Travel industry insiders call this idea of mixing work and travel "bleisure," a combination of business and leisure travel. Travel trade publication Skift believes that the continuation of remote work and the rise of bleisure travel are the greatest change-makers in travel for 2022.
Get the facts:
Flexible work arrangements have made it easier for people to travel more frequently and for more extended periods.
Airbnb shared that in the third quarter of 2021, almost half of the nights booked on its platform were for stays of longer than seven days.
14-plus-day bookings grew 33% in 2021, with a cumulative increase of 121% since 2019.
Why Is This Important?
According to Deloitte's 2022 travel industry outlook, people on working vacations plan to travel twice as often in 2022 as travelers who planned to unplug while on vacation (called "disconnectors" by Deloitte). Deloitte calls bleisure travelers "laptop luggers" and says they will take two or four trips in a year, compared to the one or two trips planned by the disconnectors.
Blended travel benefits the travel industry, and it makes travel more flexible for workers, but there is one possible downside: fewer opportunities to unplug and unwind while on vacation. Despite this, laptop luggers should not count on getting a reservation. Pent-up demand for traveling freely again, or as freely as can be under COVID restrictions, has increased "revenge travel."
U.S. to issue gender-neutral passports, offering X gender marker in addition to M and F. Read more in Reuters.
How this supply-chain unicorn parlayed global chaos into growth. Read more in Fortune.
The worst part of remote work is haunting reopened offices. Read more on Slate.
HR leaders aren't aware of employees' financial stress. Read more on HCAMag.com.
Remote work has changed how workers perceive their workplaces. Read more in Inc.
NFL requires teams to hire women or minorities as coaches. Read more on NPR.
Building a remote work time management culture. Read more in Entrepreneur.
Study Examines Gender Diversity on Private Company Boards
When it comes to board diversity, public companies attract the most scrutiny. How do high-growth private companies—those often credited with driving technical innovation and disrupting established industries—fare in terms of diversity in the boardroom?
Him For Her and Crunchbase produced this study which included 500 companies, which represent nearly $140 billion in funding and more than 180,000 employees, and their combined 3,437 board members (3,042 unique people).
Get the facts:
Women hold 14 percent of board seats among the companies studied, up from 11 percent in 2020 and 7 percent in 2019.
Nearly 40 percent of companies don't have any women on their board, an improvement from roughly half of the companies in our 2020 study and 60 percent in 2019.
Only 3 percent of all directors are women of color, reflecting no significant change from the prior year.
Why is this important?
In recognition of the mounting evidence connecting corporate performance with board diversity, investors such as State Street and Goldman Sachs, along with state legislatures in California and Washington, are calling on businesses to include more women and people of other underrepresented groups in corporate governance. For companies and their stakeholders to realize the myriad benefits associated with board diversity— including increased innovation, greater financial returns, and improved ESG performance—CEOs and board directors must make a commitment to sourcing diverse candidates unconstrained by the limited reach of their personal networks.
Building diverse boards requires a novel approach to board recruitment. Boards look the way they do today because new directors are typically tapped from the personal networks of those already in the boardroom. Because our personal networks tend to look like we do, this practice creates a self-reinforcing cycle that inadvertently excludes women and people of color. As a result, business leaders literally cannot see the wealth of talent that lies beyond the peripheral vision of their existing relationships.
Spring Virtual Conference, May 17-19, 2022. This conference was created for relocation professionals interested in current issues affecting the relocation industry. We will focus on sustainability, compliance, growth strategy, remote work, and more. Click here to register.
Webinar: Green Card Process for Nurses, Physical Therapists, and Med Techs, April 28, 2022. By 2025 the U.S. will face a shortage of 29,400 nurse practitioners among many shortages throughout the healthcare industry. In this webinar, WR Immigration attorneys will illuminate a path to reversing this trend. We will run through techniques that can be used to meet this shortage, showing the process for how HR/Global Mobility professionals can bring nurses, physical therapists, and med techs into their U.S. company from around the world via a Green Card. Click here to register.
Registration is Open for the 2022 CRP® exam; the deadline is April 29, 2022. The deadline to apply to sit for the CRP® is April 29, 2022. This will be the ONLY opportunity to sit for the CRP® exam this year. The Worldwide ERC® Certified Relocation Professional (CRP®) designation is the only credential dedicated to identifying professionals that demonstrate a broad understanding of managing employee mobility within the United States. Learn more on Worldwide ERC®.
Affluent nomads are stationing themselves to work remotely in Mexico City, where living costs are significantly lower than in most American cities. (Based on an analysis of 586 global cities, Mexico City ranks 450th on the cost-of-living index.) Since Americans can stay up to 180 days in the country without a visa, many are biding their time until the six-month deadline to leave.
Many residents believe that the rate of gentrification and displacement in Mexico City is accelerating — and that the pandemic-era travel boom is partly to blame. Over the past year, the city has hosted more and more remote workers, attracting those in higher-paying jobs and fields that were previously not virtual.
Mexico City and the pitfalls of becoming a remote work destination: This isn't a phenomenon specific to Mexico City. Remote workers, who typically earn higher wages than in-person employees, are altering the urban geography of the United States. Many are relocating from dense hubs like San Francisco and New York to more spacious cities like Austin, Miami, or Honolulu. Some Americans are eyeing more temperate, tourist-friendly destinations abroad in Indonesia, Portugal, Thailand, and Spain for short-term stays.
Here are the three most popular countries for Americans working remotely:
Thailand Special tourist visas now allow non-residents to stay anywhere from 30 to 270 days (just under nine months).
Spain Spain's self-employment work visa is ideal for freelancers and entrepreneurs.
Estonia The recently launched Digital Nomad Visa lets you stay in Estonia for up to 12 months. Estonia is welcoming the Ukrainian diaspora through its Work Estonia initiative.
Read more about how remote workers are changing Mexico City on Vox.com.
Worldwide ERC®, P.O. Box 41990, Arlington, VA 22204, United States, 1-703-842-3400
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