The event at the Hong Kong Chapter of the Forum for Expatriate Management was entitled “Is your mobility policy considered basic, standard or premium?” and was intended to help companies understand the main issues and how other companies were reacting to them.

Steve Lewis of UniGroup is the President of the Hong Kong Chapter of FEM.  He kicked off proceedings by introducing Katherine Wong from AIRINC (Associates for International Research, Inc). Katherine spoke on the trends of global mobility and policy allocation in Asia based on AIRINC’s mobility outlook survey.

Her presentation looked at: the participants of AIRINC’s Mobility Outlook Survey, the demographics of global mobility programmes, the trends of global mobility programmes, policy allocation, the challenges, and how global mobility programmes and policy cope with these challenges. Employees from various organisations of different industries such as oil and gas, financial services and manufacturing participated.

Over the next 12 months, 47% of the surveyed organisations anticipate an increase of international assignees, 39% predict no change leaving 14% expecting a decrease. Katherine said that the three main factors that affect the mobility the programmes of Asian companies are: the need to expand business overseas, growth in developing countries and cost reduction efforts.  She added that the main challenges that affect global mobility programmes are recruiting, retaining and repatriating international assignees, cost management, tax and compliance, internal process and talent management.

Photo: from left to right: Ross Pun from AON Hong Kong Limited, Iyla MacIntyre from the Forum for Expatriate Management (FEM) and Steve Lewis, President of the HK Chapter.