How can workforce mobility be a critical bridge to solve talent gaps?

The confluence of challenges for working across borders in a volatile operating environment requires a mobility and talent strategy that is impactful enough to justify investment, and agile enough to pivot quickly.

Demographic shifts have created an age imbalance in a global labor market that has more people in the workforce now than will be for the foreseeable future. This trend is emerging just as geopolitical tensions have complicated immigration processes, highlighting the importance of safe travel and relocation for employees. Economic volatility has put uneven pressure on market segments, just as technologies like GenAI are spurring broadscale changes to the status quo of work. At the same time, a third of employees surveyed in the EY Work Reimagined Survey do not believe they have the confidence to keep up with the hard and soft skills predicted to be most needed in the future, including a penchant for creative thinking, resilience and agility.

To face these challenges and bridge talent gaps, respondents to the EY Mobility Reimagined Survey identified three priorities: GenAI, upskilling and reskilling current employees, and using workforce mobility to facilitate employee movements and relocation.

Evolving mobility for greater influence

Mobility’s role in helping to solve the talent equation is seen in supply and demand. Of employers, only 52% say that it is easy for their organization to find global talent needed to meet their business needs, and a further 74% say it is taking more than a year to fill senior roles. Mobility has a role here to move talent to where it is needed most, to accelerate organizational growth, and as an influence on talent attraction and retention.

But all mobility programs aren’t created equal. Their influence on an organization’s talent goals depends on a higher level of integration, executive sponsorship and sophistication across functions.

Most (90%) employers agree that there are benefits for aligning mobility to wider organizational and talent goals, but a staggering 70% of that group still can’t achieve it. They are most affected by isolation from other functions, a lack of continuous data exchange, and inefficiencies from a decentralized operating model.

The most effective approach to addressing these obstacles is demonstrated by more evolved mobility functions, exhibiting focus in five key areas:

• Strategic alignment: connecting workforce mobility strategy with broader organizational objectives
• Talent linkage: using mobility for talent attraction, retention and development
• Digital focus: extent of automation and digitization of mobility processes, including and beyond GenAI
• Flexibility: agility in the customization of mobility experiences, including options of program types and benefits
• External expertise: co-sourcing or outsourcing of select mobility processes

Risks of not getting this right

Maturing capabilities while managing costs

Nearly all mobility professionals (96%) indicated they are looking to reduce costs, and reported metrics to track return on investment reflects that focus on cost and efficiency. But more evolved functions are more likely to track performance ratings, revenue impact to the business, promotion of employees after an assignment, and speed to fill vacancies. A more robust catalog of metrics helps to show the fuller value of the mobility program.

Just as there is a more comprehensive look at value, evolved functions are, on average, also seeking twice as many cost-reduction measures than the merely effective functions. They also have more than twice as many fully automated and outsourced processes. 

The top two cost-reduction initiatives cited by employers are closely linked — greater use of outsourcing and vendor consolidation — which can offer much needed streamlining for complex tasks. Using a vendor to manage multi-jurisdictional payroll and taxes, or immigration, for example, can help manage risks while providing more personalized support for employees. Mobility functions say they are outsourcing an average of four such activities, with the main triggers being a desire to enhance the employee experience, seeking greater value from vendor consolidation, and achieving better operational efficiency.

This push to enhance user experiences makes sense as programs increasingly offer multiple service levels for assignment types, both self-service and concierge services. Mobility professionals list the main benefits of outsourcing as access to specialist knowledge and skills, improved business experience and the ability to leverage technology beyond their own capabilities.

As market volatility and cost pressures will likely affect mobility functions in the foreseeable future, professionals expect more transformation and outsourcing to come. Nearly 90% of employers expect to change their operating model in the next year or two. Technology is of particular interest for the new cost-capability calculus: 66% of employers expect to increase investment in mobility technology and digitization, with cost savings and efficiency gains being primary benefits.

While GenAI, upskilling and reskilling can help solve enterprise-level talent shortages, they are also keys to evolving the mobility function. With a critical mass of users ready for GenAI solutions, mobility needs to be ready to thrive in the transition.

The number of mobility professionals routinely using GenAI jumped from 22% last year to 35% this year. More than three in four employers say they are using GenAI in three or more ways to deliver their mobility program. But “GenAI” can mean many things, with a broad range of applications, including fairly low-impact uses like helping to compose emails and proposals to what some practitioners may — mistakenly — call automation.

The true value of GenAI for mobility is well beyond traditional automation, as deep-learning models can generate high-quality outputs based on the data they were trained on and are connected to. On average, 70% of mobility professionals believe GenAI will have a positive impact on the function and will influence ways of working flexibly, employee productivity, and helping to manage risk.

Evolved mobility functions are moving faster toward GenAI and making investments for the next steps. They are 3.6 times more likely to use GenAI routinely, and 1.6 times more likely to use it to facilitate better talent mobility. They are a further 2.7 times more likely to be planning on substantially increasing mobility technology and digitalization investments in the next two years.

These investments could help create deeper connectivity and integration of mobility across functions, paving the way for new use cases and value for the people at the center of this transformation. For example, independent GenAI agents (agentic AI) could monitor employee assignments and flag potential immigration or compliance risks based on an employee’s profile. These agents could initiate paperwork and notify HR, vendors and the assignee to help begin to coordinate a remedy.

But the technology is only as good as the people using it, requiring mobility professionals to upskill and reskill themselves while supporting broader learning initiatives in the organization.

Organizations need to see the function’s core knowledge as a pathway to broader talent goals to fully realize mobility’s potential. This includes awareness of various global tax, immigration cybersecurity and compliance risks, paired with purposeful linkages to career pathways and total rewards.

Just as evolved functions are more likely to identify a heightened risk level for cross-border work, they also show more focus on mobile employee safety and security during cross-border assignments.

Greater awareness can lead to better anticipation of challenges, and fewer obstacles in the way of an exceptional employee experience while on assignment. Of employees, 85% say mobility assignments can be life changing, with nearly half recognizing the mobile experience increases the likelihood they’ll stay with their employer.

Employees see mobility experiences as opportunities for personal growth, skills development, and career advancement. They want flexibility in mobility offerings, and personalization in its delivery.

Of employers, 74% say they currently include mobility experiences as part of their total rewards framework, with most looking to update offerings to boost pay and promote pay equity. Still, evolved mobility functions are 3.4 times more likely to be prioritizing changes and updates to their total rewards framework for mobile employees to respond to this desire for customization.

As mobility functions look to chart their own evolution, there are three main areas of focus:

1. Redefining strategy and operations: Economic and geopolitical volatility have put a focus on cost-efficiency, productivity, and risk. Organizations with the best outcomes in this climate are those who challenge traditional operating models. They find the right vendors to take on the most resource-intensive tasks and consolidate the number of external vendors to simplify processes and improve user experience. There is also a constant orientation toward improvement, and an understanding that transformation is continuous. Evolved mobility functions work hard to find multiple efficiency initiatives, build ROI metrics that show a fuller value from strategic mobility programs, and create deep connections across functions.
   
   
2. Prioritizing skillsets and capabilities: The future skills of mobility professionals, and mobile employees, are vastly different than those prized in the past. Skills for creative uses of tools like GenAI are paired with soft skills like curiosity, agility and resilience. This new constellation of skills charts the new possibilities for an organization’s capabilities. Leveraging new technologies, external vendors and new operating models, mobility professionals don’t need to spend as much time on more routine tasks. They are instead able to focus attention on the function’s influence on being aware of and prepared for risks, and building a talent strategy that builds the most value for the organization.
   
   
3. Purposeful GenAI adoption: Both for the mobility function and mobile employees more broadly, organizations should consider the purposeful implementation of GenAI as an important step toward greater capabilities and managing costs. As mobility professionals build use cases for GenAI helping to manage and reimagine processes, specific deliverables or create data linkages between functions, there is an opportunity to go farther. Organizations should design a data strategy to gather and organize clean data needed for GenAI to function effectively with accurate and relevant outputs. Pilot and iterate GenAI in controlled environments to refine its application and demonstrate its value before scaling it across the organization. GenAI isn’t transformative on its own, but it is a powerful tool to help evolve mobility and organizations.

Summary

The EY Mobility Reimagined Survey shows mobility as a key element to solving talent shortages, along with purposeful GenAI adoption and skills initiatives. There is a widening gap for critical outcomes between functions that are merely effective and those that have evolved.