No, this column is not about arthritis pain in people my age. It is about the decline in corporate relocation and the fact, in my opinion, that we will have less competent executives and global leaders in years to come because of it.
I was recently at a social function and mentioned to a group of people that I had recently been to London as part of a two-week trip. I have visited London more than 60 times on business over the course of my career and I lived there, for all intents and purposes, for about two years. (I came home for a weekend or so every 30 days to avoid being subject to relocation/tax complications.) One of the twentysomethings at this social affair questioned a comment I had made about London feeling different since the pandemic and that I was not sure I liked some of the changes. The young man explained to me some differences between the U.S. and U.K. cultures and how, as an American, I may not be able to grasp the nuances. In a welcome moment of irony, I asked him how many times he had been there, and he responded, never. He did add that he had been assigned to a team of remote workers and some were British so he had asked about the U.K. on ChatGPT. I told him virtually every perception he had was, in fact, wrong.
Now this is not an indictment of ChatGPT or AI accuracy. It’s an attack on the belief that reading something on the internet can be substituted for actual lived experience. That will never be true.
Prior to 2020, Teams, Zoom, and Slack did exist and companies had remote workers. However, in the wake of the pandemic, it has become nearly an article of faith that remote work is “as productive” and “as good” and generates the same loyalty as in-person offices. The data for the most part does not support that. In addition, if an employee was interested in being a senior executive and worked for a global company such as PepsiCo, IBM, GE, or a host of others, they were expected to relocate numerous times during their career and spend at least one rotation outside the country of their birth. This was considered a necessary part of training and deploying executive talent. Nothing teaches how little you know about other cultures as trying to work within them. Nothing teaches what you need to know about other cultures as much as working within them.
Somehow in the wake of the pandemic, this bit of HR wisdom has been lost and the global rates of corporate relocation are dropping. Many of the relocation providers on our Baker’s Dozen Customer Satisfaction Ratings list are struggling within this new reality. Their pleas for companies to renew these programs are not wrong.
From the employee perspective, many young people see relocation as an opportunity or benefit of working for a larger company. A 2024 LinkedIn report by Mastodon Moving found that 62% of respondents were willing to relocate for career advancement or better salary. The actual percentage in 2022 who had relocated was 1.6%. While there has been some uptick in the rate of relocation since 2022, the level is far below where it was because of a few factors, including the aforementioned new religious fervor about the wonders of remote work.
What does this mean? It means that in the future, global executives will either have to relocate themselves to gain this experience by changing jobs (how much do you love that, HR?) or they will be less skilled at managing in multi-country environments and less sensitive to cultural issues (do you love that more, HR?).
Let’s get moving again. It really will prevent future problems and provide valuable perspectives and experiences to global executives.
Elliot Clark
CEO
