For global mobility leaders of multinational organizations, benchmarking your global mobility policies and practices against those of other global organizations and industry peers can be a powerful tool for reflecting on your current approach and planning how to prepare your talent mobility program for the future. To help, KPMG International conducts an ongoing annual survey of global mobility policies and practices of multinational organizations. While the number of participants continues to grow, the resulting database is already believed to be one of the most robust of its kind on a global scale, with input from over 375 multinational organizations in more than 25 countries and/or territories.
The data offers insights into global mobility programs and how they are evolving in terms of mobility, tax and immigration policies, structure, governance, priorities, performance measures, using technology and automation, and more.
Download the 2021 KPMG Global Assignment Policies and Practices Survey summary report and scroll down for more on this year's key findings.
2021 KPMG Global Assignment Policies and Practices Survey Report
A look into how global mobility programs are evolving based on the survey results from over 375 multinational organizations in more than 25 jurisdictions worldwide.
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What do the latest results tell us?
The results of this year’s Global Assignment Policies and Practices (GAPP) survey shed light on how global mobility programs are evolving. In addition to compliance and global risk management, supporting the organization’s business objectives, controlling program costs and being adaptable to changing business requirements are clearly the top priorities for today’s global mobility leaders. The global talent mobility function's contribution to strategic value also now seems to be taking priority; being recognized as a trusted advisor and partner to the business playing a critical role in attracting, mobilizing, engaging, developing, and retaining global talent.
Organizations continue to offer greater flexibility in their talent mobility policy approaches — developing policy frameworks that are aligned to overarching talent and business development objectives. Fifty percent of survey participants cite including core versus flexible provisions, with nearly a quarter (23 percent) of participants adopting a cafeteria approach expanding the range of choices for either the assignee or the business. Enabling choice for mobile employees to develop assignment and transfer packages best suited to their personal needs is on the rise. Enhancing overall employee experience is a critical factor for attracting, developing, and retaining key talent globally.
Organizations continue to adopt more purposeful approaches to mobilizing talent globally by strengthening the connections between talent management and global mobility functions. Even during 2021, 93 percent of survey participants still ranked supporting overall business and talent development objectives as a top program goal for their international assignments.
Global talent mobility is too complex and important to employees and the organization to leave up to chance. In particular, survey participants are particularly interested in solutions for producing assignment cost projections, automating assignment initiation, and creating assignment documents. More and more organizations are looking to have a fully integrated, ‘single source of data truth’ technology solution that spans the whole spectrum of mobility and provides self-service to employees via online portals and mobile technology solutions integrated with mobility processes.
Fast-moving organizations do not want to be bogged down in transactions and typically outsource high-volume complex transactions like individual tax compliance. Survey participants outsource tax consulting (88 percent), tax return preparation (90 percent), immigration (92 percent) and relocation management services (84 percent), so they can focus on providing a superb employee experience, participate in talent planning and workforce shaping with HR, and demonstrate an return on investment for their organizations on employee mobility spend.
It’s widely predicted that many workers, especially those in professional services, will still favor working remotely at least part of the time as local restrictions ease and businesses are opening their doors again. According to KPMG’s 2021 Global CEO Outlook survey, CEOs are focused on providing increased flexibility for their workforce. Global executives are looking to implement a hybrid working model for their staff with 51 percent of CEOs investing in shared workspaces and 37 percent looking to have most employees working remotely at least two or more days a week.
Benchmark your organization today!
KPMG’s Global Mobility Services practice members can provide a personalized benchmarking report allowing you to compare your organization across key areas of interest. Participants find this useful in evaluating their organizational policies against a specific set of parameters. In addition to key organizational demographics and global mobility policy overview, the survey questions follow an overarching framework of the key phases of an international assignment and transfer life cycle with additional relevant topical categories covering immigration compliance, assignment management technology leverage, automation and robotics and program data and analytics insights.
If you would like to participate in the KPMG GAPP Survey and receive a personalized benchmarking report, please click here. To learn more about how KPMG’s Mobility Consulting Services can help you build an operating model that serves and delivers for your organization, please send an email to us-taxgmssurvey@kpmg.com.
