In our previous article, we made the case for moving people in why should employers send employees overseas anymore anyway. Now comes the trickier part for those of you in Mobility/HR: showing the money was well spent before finance sharpen their pencils again.
We’ve spoken to some of our internal experts about the most successful overseas assignments we’ve seen, and tried to create a way of “proofing” proposals to the rest of your organization.
The “one-sentence promise”
Like we mentioned in our previous article, this is the key. Jot it on the approval form before anyone hunts for flights. Something like: “By placing Aisha in Singapore for twelve months we will cut regional churn by four points and create two local successors ready for the 2026 launch.”
Now every later decision gets easier. If someone wants an extra home-leave ticket, you simply ask whether the spend moves the succession plan. If it doesn’t, it waits. The same line helps Aisha; she can repeat it to her new team so everyone knows why she flew in.
Lock in the salvage value
Ask the controller to add the cash cost of the assignment and the salary of the vacant home role. The total becomes the salvage value that must come back. Publish that figure in the same workbook the sales team uses for quarterly forecasts.
Salvage value also gives you a ready reply if H1 costs suddenly get scrutinized more. You can point to the signed sheet and say, “We agreed this amount is recoverable. If we stop now, we still have to cover the gap.”
Run three short audits
Day three: the assignee lists the five customers, three distributors, or two regulators whose behaviour will move the agreed lever.
Day thirty: review the first quick-win backlog.
Day ninety: score the leading indicator tied to the business lever.
You can adjust this depending on the assignee and their role of course. The point is to create a paper trail that shows the assignment was managed, not just watched.
Create countable events
What we mean by this is turning what are sometimes seen as “soft benefits” into something more tangible: So, leadership development becomes the number of succession-plan slots filled by returning assignees within two years. Knowledge transfer becomes the count of local engineers who sign a skill checklist. Market entry becomes the date the first locally closed deal occurs without expat support and so on.
You can keep the tally in the same spreadsheet you use for open head-count. Each quarter, HR simply updates the running total. Over two cycles you will start to see which destinations produce the most signatures and which roles never quite transfer know-how. That insight lets you pick the next traveller with better odds (no extra survey required).
Interestingly, PwC found that organisations which set a fixed assignment duration and tie pay to local market levels run the same performance scores as those that shower employees with allowances, but at a third of the cost. In other words, clarity beats generosity. The full study is here (it’s worth reading in full).
Log the dip and the rebound
Accept that week-one output falls. Record task-completion velocity inside the project tool the team already uses. Sharing this timeline with line managers prevents panic and protects the budget from premature cancellation.
If you track the dip honestly, you also build a case for support services that speed up the rebound. Maybe the family needs a local bank introduction on day one, or maybe a part-time language tutor saves three weeks of fumbling through meetings. Small spends that shave days off the dip pay for themselves in recovered salary cost. We’ve already established how key these elements are in our 2024 Expat Survey for Crown Relocations.
Track what happens after the plane home
Keep a simple log of every extension or early return and run a check against the original hypothesis. Over time you will see which destinations, roles, and family profiles predict success, letting you refine selection criteria without extra surveys.
As an example, one manufacturing firm found that engineers sent to plants where a local successor had already been named stayed the full-term ninety percent of the time, while those sent to greenfield sites came home early a third of the time. The pattern only appeared once they started writing the reason for every change in the same shared sheet. Now they delay the assignment until a local deputy is in place, and early returns have dropped to one in ten.
Close with a one-page report
Restate your original intention, show the audited numbers, and list any intangible assets such as cultural insights. Attach a screenshot of the dashboard and file it beside capital-expenditure retrospectives. When finance sees mobility reports next to factory upgrades, you’re less likely to be seen as a cost-center!
The report also becomes a template for the next business case. New managers can open the file, swap in their own numbers, and see exactly what evidence they will need twelve months later. Over two or three cycles the whole organisation stops asking whether assignments pay off and starts arguing about how many the pipeline can handle.
The steps above do not require new expensive enterprise software, just three things: a written promise, a signed target, and a public scoreboard. Provide those and the next time someone asks if the assignment was worth it, the answer will already be on the screen, backed by numbers everyone trusts.
Want to get started with rebooting your mobility program with this in mind? Get in touch with one our expert consultants (the same ones who provided these insights in fact) today!
