7

Creating Policies to Manage Talent Mobility

In 2013, I was sitting at a client meeting discussing how to transform the business’s policies for increasing talent mobility. The company has a large amount of employee mobility, driven by a headquarters in a second-tier city, and a corporate culture that values diversity, customer experience, and employee career empowerment. Additionally, the company was growing quickly. Employees moved to start new jobs at the HQ, open offices in new locations, and provide maternity cover, among other reasons. We were looking at how to govern all of this employee movement—that is, how to create a framework that simultaneously enabled it and managed the company’s costs and compliance, while supporting families with a great relocation experience.

Our client was steps ahead of many other companies at the time. It’s leaders had already centralized their budget for geographic movement (global mobility) and started to think about an expanded talent mobility definition and alignment with the broader talent and business strategy. But they were struggling to make it all happen, and that’s what we were discussing—specifically how to innovate in policies and frameworks.

I have had the “policy redesign conversation” with countless companies around the world since then. It generally starts with looking at how to transform traditional corporate relocation from a back-office, reactive part of HR to a core part of talent development strategy. It almost always touches on selection (how to select the right employees for the right opportunities), tracking success (how to ensure goals are clearly met before an employee moves on to another opportunity), compliance (how to support increasingly frequent mobility in line with current tax, immigration, and geopolitical frameworks), and cost (how to manage budgets and approvals). In more recent years as the Talent Mobility Revolution has taken off, the conversations have almost always moved on to then discuss the policies for job, location, and employment movement, and how to bring this all together under one talent mobility definition and leader (see Chapters 1 and 2 for further discussion).

Companies today know that their talent mobility is rapidly expanding—both in volume and breadth—and that their policies must evolve to enable and manage it. The Chief Talent Mobility Officer should own and design these policies as a part of the transformation, but they must be adopted as a core part of overall business operations and strategy. As we discussed in Chapter 1 in our expanded definition of talent mobility, enabling employee movement—across geographies, jobs, locations, and employment—is the foundation of an F3 Company. But supporting continuous movement of workers inside and outside of a company can be easier said than done. Your policies are the framework to make this happen. Any company or business leader that wants to make talent mobility work must reinvent its policies for the talent mobility era. Those that do will reap the rewards in employee engagement, innovation, and growth. Those that do not will lose out to their more forward-thinking competitors.

In the last two sections, we looked how to set up your F3 Company and redesign work to be dynamic. We now turn to look at the nuts and bolts of operating an F3 Company. We start by looking at policies—the governing framework for employee movement. We will then look at how to innovate in benefits, systems, and operations to enable your F3 Company to drive employee engagement, accelerate innovation, and unleash growth.

Designing Policies for Geographic Movement

Traditional Corporate Relocation Policies

In Chapter 1, we looked at how today’s geographic movement originated from the traditional corporate relocation of past years. In past years, corporate relocation was, for the most part, business-directed—that is offered (sometimes strongly suggested) to an employee by the company and manager. It was governed by a set of robust policies that helped to convince the employee and his (almost always, his!) family to accept a relocation or expatriate assignment in a different location. Over time, employees grew to expect that if they took opportunities abroad, they would have the opportunity to enjoy more compensation and benefits.

Corporate relocation had two types (which still exist today):

•   Relocations. A permanent move to a new location where the employee becomes employed by the new (“host”) location

•   Expatriate assignment. A fixed-term move to a new location (often abroad) where the employee remains employed by the original (“home”) location and is expected to return at the end of the assignment

Typically, the policies for these included a set of relocation benefits (shipping, temporary stay at arrival, support in finding housing and schools, language and cultural training, local destination support like a car and driver or a housecleaning service), tax advice, and ongoing salary and employment adjustments, such as a housing, hardship, or cost of living adjustments. For expatriates, taxes, social security, and other pensions were almost always “equalized,” that is adjusted to ensure employees could be in no way worse off than they may have been in their home market. In fact, in most instances they were better off.

Because almost all geographic movement was at the request of the company, there was no need to think about how people were selected for moves or whether there should be a shared responsibility between the experiences and skills the employee developed and the contribution the company got from the employee’s work. Rather, the corporate relocation function focused on how to get the employees to accept the opportunity and fill the business need.

This was the setup for people who accepted expatriate assignments at Lehman Brothers in 2006, like my colleagues Victoria and Darren. After a few years working in New York, they had both taken the opportunity to spend the third year of their analyst program working in Hong Kong and helping to expand the investment banking team there. They came to Asia as traditional expatriates: employees of the US entity with the explicit expectations that they would return to New York after their year of services in Hong Kong. They had a traditional set of corporate relocation benefits: end-to-end relocation support, corporate housing, tax advice, immigration support, cost-of-living adjustments, and Chinese language and cultural classes.

My experience, however, was different. After many interviews in English and Mandarin during my senior year of college (I don’t think Lehman Brothers actually believed a blond American could speak business-level Mandarin!), I had been hired directly to Hong Kong. This was rare; normally employees worked in their home country and office for a number of years before earning a transfer to an office abroad. I would not follow the traditional pattern of working two years in New York and then accepting an expatriate assignment for my third year. Instead, I graduated from college, completed a monthlong training program in New York, and then got on a plane directly to Hong Kong. This without precedent, or policies.

I remember sitting in training in New York when a colleague who had interned in Hong Kong asked me if I’d “sorted my serviced apartment yet.” I had no idea what a serviced apartment was or what she meant. I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do, but at that moment, it suddenly dawned on me that I was moving across the world and had no plan for where I was going to live when I arrived. I also remember learning that real estate brokers in Hong Kong were paid by the renter, and that a very large security deposit was expected. Without a paycheck yet, I had no idea how to pay for it. I also remember getting a letter saying that I had a housing allowance—a welcome surprise after having been hired as a Hong Kong local employee. With my mobility experience outside of the company norms, Lehman Brothers apparently hadn’t quite figured out what to do.

As with many of my experiences at Lehman Brothers, I was seeing the future Talent Mobility Revolution emerge—a world where employees would move continuously with shared responsibility between company and employee. As we discussed in prior chapters, many employees today move for tours of duty across offices and jobs at all stages of their career. But in 2006, very few did. Corporate relocation worked within a transactional framework and clear set of policies. I challenged this when I moved outside of the bounds of the traditional corporate relocation policies. Today, this is increasingly the norm—and companies are transforming their frameworks and policies to enable it.

“I see a big shift in employee expectations and mobility demands,” says Susanna Warner, VP International Mobility at Schneider Electric, a Fortune 500 global power company that is 182 years old and generates revenue of $25 billion annually. “Employees are much more mobile today in many more ways; in particular, we see much more voluntary mobility than we ever have in the past. Right now, I am in the midst of transforming our processes, policies, systems, and employee experiences to ensure we are set up to achieve our talent and business goals for tomorrow.”^*

New Policies for Geographic Movement

As talent mobility has ballooned, so too have the frequency and configurations of geographic movement. As we discussed in Chapter 1, F3 Companies expand their definition of geographic movement to include relocations, expatriate assignments, frequent travel, long-distance commuting, project-based moves, and rotational or training programs. Within each of these, there are a near infinite number of permutations for employee and business needs. And in addition to this, companies often have to consider job, location, and employment movement as a part of these—an employee may relocate for a new job in a new project team in a new business area in a new geography, or a freelance worker may take new a tour of duty across the country with a need to both long-distance commute and work-from-home some days, to name just a few setups.

At the same time, geographic mobility has shifted from almost exclusively company-driven to being in much more demand from employees who value the experience, learning, and lifestyle balance (one spouse may ask for a relocation to align with another spouse’s move) that comes with these tours of duty. This means that, in certain instances, employees are willing to fund part or all of their mobility—in the way I funded part of mine at Lehman Brothers, valuing the opportunity to work in Asia and learn about the economies of other countries. Increasingly policies for geographic mobility are shifting from a patriarchal model of companies funding everything to a model of “shared responsibility” between company and worker (again, like my experience at Lehman Brothers).

Managing this near continuous movement across locations and configurations can be a nightmare for a traditional company, but using an evolved policy framework, F3 Companies make it happen seamlessly and unlock benefits in employee attraction, retention, and engagement and rapid innovation and business growth.

Susanna Warner joined Schneider Electric in January of 2017 to transform the traditional corporate relocation program (today called “International Mobility”). She had previously worked in global mobility at LafargeHolcim, a Fortune 500 cement and construction company, and AXA, a Fortune 500 insurance company, but also had tours of duty in talent acquisition and employee development. This gave her a unique perspective on the emerging Talent Mobility Revolution that she brought to her new role at Schneider Electric.^*

Schneider Electric itself had already started transforming for the talent mobility era and the preferences of today’s employees. The first time I visited its offices in suburban Paris, I expected the venerable global power company to have a traditional office design with cubicles and offices. As soon as I entered, I was struck by the bright colors, open plan designs, and modern imagery on the walls. It was clear that Schneider Electric already had a forward-looking view of work.

“Because I’ve been in various walks of life, my third taste of global mobility was very different than the others,” says Warner. “I could make the connection between mobility and sourcing talent, developing leaders, retaining employees, staffing client projects to drive revenue, and building local and regional hubs.”

Schneider Electric’s HR leadership team had already initiated an ambitious HR transformation program focusing on building a globally inclusive but locally empowered company, gravitating and attracting talent around three main geographic hubs. Instead of operating under the leadership of an HQ-centric organization, this approach enabled people to have equal opportunities for growth, build locally empowered teams for customers, and drive a more diverse environment to foster innovation and creativity. Over a three-year period, Warner and her team focused on policies, digitization, and experience to support this HR transformation. Their goal was to “really position employee mobility as a key enabler of talent strategy and the HR transformation,” enabling opportunities for mobile employees but also ensuring that mobility was purposeful and aligned with the overall talent and diversity strategy. The project started by tackling the policies and frameworks for geographic movement.

“It was initially a traditional relocation and expatriate program,” says Warner. “The mobilities tracked and facilitated by the global mobility team were focused on traditional expatriate assignments, mainly of senior leaders or experts, driven by the business.

“We started by rolling out new policies for employee mobility aligned to our business and talent needs,” continues Warner. “Policies framed each purpose of global mobility—from expatriate assignments to one-way relocations to short-term projects—and structured them within a framework of three mobility drivers: development, leadership and transformation, and knowledge transfers. We also included a specific category for self-driven mobility—designed for those who put their hand up for a tour of duty in another location or team. Self-driven mobility is today our biggest segment and the fastest growing.

“We ensured that selection for global mobility was closely linked to our talent management approach. For example, when selecting a candidate, we needed to ask ourselves: is this someone who we have identified as a high potential and needs to have a development opportunity? Or, is this someone with specific skills that are required for a particular project team?” says Warner. “This gives us a rigorous framework across selecting and managing our growing geographic mobility.”

Nick Pond, Mobility Leader EY People Advisory Services, has seen Fortune 500 companies undertaking similar approaches. “Companies are increasingly linking talent strategy and tours of duty across geographies and designing strategic workforce planning around how to build [locally], buy [gig economy], or move [geographic movement] talent to match business needs they have. On the demand side, you have employees increasingly asking for these opportunities,” says Pond. “To do this, companies are increasingly redesigning their roles to be dynamic, project-based jobs, rewriting their mobility policies to encompass more scenarios, and aligning global mobility opportunities to a nine-box model. All of this creates a clear link between talent and business strategy.”^*

Four Steps for Success with Geographic Movement

In the prior section, we looked at how F3 Companies, like Schneider Electric, are transforming their frameworks for the Talent Mobility Revolution. I’ve summarized the four steps for geographic mobility success below:

Set an overarching policy framework. Your talent mobility policy framework should first recognize that today, there is an expanded set of geographic movement. It should include a clear definition for each of our six core configurations: relocations, expatriate assignments, short-term project moves, extended travel, commuting, and rotational or training programs. For each of these, you should design a core set of benefits, including the employment model, and relocation, tax, immigration, cost of living, and ongoing destination benefits (such as language training and on-the-ground support). Typically, this framework will include a set of benefits demarcated by location (usually three bands based on distance), family size (single, married, or married with children) and driver (self vs. business directed). Your final policy framework will look something like this:

This framework, including the definition of each move type, decision tree for drivers, and core benefits, is your blueprint for geographic movement. Designing it is the first step in transforming your policies.

Build flexibility by shifting from a fixed benefit to a points model. Traditional policies typically structured their benefits in a “use-it-or-lose it” model—that is, each employee received a set of benefits that must be used on a specific thing (e.g., shipping, serviced apartment, or destination support). With growing amounts of geographic movement and diverse configurations to address company and individual needs, your new global mobility policy model should swap fixed benefits for points that can be applied to any benefits in a pool. After designing the core benefits for each of your geographic mobility policies in step 1 above, you should translate these benefits into a number of points tied to each benefit. Then calculate a number of points for each geographic mobility policy. Then leave it up to the employees to decide how they want to use them across the pool of benefit options (for example, an employee may want to swap shipping benefits for a longer stay in a serviced apartment). Today’s employees traffic in autonomy and flexibility—and they likely know better than any manager does what they need!

Align tours of duty to a nine-box talent grid. Like Schneider Electric did, tie employee tours of duty to a “nine-box model” in your talent review discussion (see below for further details on this). Ensure that employees are being offered the correct geographic movement opportunities (tours of duty) for where they fall in the nine-box. Tie a learning agenda required in their tour of duty to the nine-box (for example, if an employee is moving to a Honolulu for a three-month project in a new business area, give him or her a learning agenda both about that new business area and the local culture). Use your talent management system to keep clear track of the nine-box and tours of duty the employee has had and how that contributes to the employee’s skills development and career growth. Here’s what your nine-box should look like aligned to mobility opportunities:

Adopt a set of mobility drivers. Like Schneider Electric did, overlay a set of “mobility drivers” to your policy framework and nine-box model to ensure each geographic mobility tour of duty can be classified against business and talent goals. We suggest using four classifications, each defined below: Project, Corporate, Development, and Retention.

•   Project. Geographic movement as a part of a project team where skills are matched, often with job movement included

•   Corporate. Geographic movement as part of a broader corporate goal such as opening an office or supporting training or expansion

•   Development. Geographic movement to support employee development, generally leveraging the output from the nine-box during the talent review discussions

•   Retention. Geographic movement to support employee retention, generally as part of an employee-requested move to fulfill her own flexibility, growth, or experience goals

Creating Policies for Job Movement

Traditional Policies for Job Movement

Job movement is a relatively new concept amid the Talent Mobility Revolution. As we’ve discussed in prior chapters, traditional companies like Lehman Brothers and Mead Paper Company hired full-time employees into fixed roles in a given organizational department and team led by a traditional manager. The expectation was that—with time and contribution—employees would progress through positions of increasing seniority (the career ladder) toward an end goal of retirement. In this setup, movement laterally between departments and teams was rare. In fact, as I built Topia, I heard countless stories at HR conferences about business units blocking lateral moves and internal hiring as they sought to “hold on to” existing talent in their teams.

If an employee wanted to learn new skills or try a different career area, she was often on her own going against organizational bureaucracy and expectations to advocate for an internal transfer. Sometimes this worked; sometimes it didn’t. If it didn’t, an employee might resign from the company and try to execute this switch by going to another company. Most often the way to navigate to a new job in a new business area was by going back to school to learn new skills, and then going through a formal recruiting program in another business area. There really were no policies or precedents for enabling job movement at traditional companies.

When I did my MBA at London Business School, there were countless people from around the world using business school to make this switch. My class included hospitality professionals who switched to marketing, accountants who switched to investment banking, procurement specialists who switched to management consulting, and public relations managers who transitioned to technology firms, among many other scenarios. Like many employees at traditional companies, the only way to switch between industry segments and jobs was to take a break and reset at business school. Developing skills and transferring them to another team or department was almost unheard of.

My friend Anna encountered these organizational roadblocks when she advocated for a change of job and geography at one of the world’s largest PR and marketing firms. Anna was a top performer in New York, recognized across the firm for her high leadership potential and contributions. However, after a number of years in healthcare public relations in New York, she was ready for a change—like many millennials, she wanted the opportunity to learn new skills in a new business area and do a tour of duty in a different office. Put into the language of the Talent Mobility Revolution, she wanted job and geographic movement. Her company, however, struggled to make this happen. Anna was bounced around the firm to speak to many different people in different departments and human resources. She visited offices around the world, met with people, and pleaded her case. She loved the firm and wanted to stay—but she wanted to do something new. Ultimately—due to organizational bureaucracy and friction—the company couldn’t make any job or geographic movement happen for Anna. Instead, they asked her to sit tight, keep doing her regular job, and wait and see if anything came about in the future. Anna, like many ambitious millennial workers, did not wait. Instead she resigned and joined a nonprofit that gave her the opportunity to work across diverse areas and countries, accelerating her skills development. The company lost both significant institutional knowledge and a rising star because they couldn’t make job and geographic mobility happen. They were seeing firsthand how strong the forces of the Talent Mobility Revolution are.

“Historically, things like headcount, visas, compensation, and compliance were challenges to mobility,” says Rachael King, Topia’s first VP People. “In addition to this, there was often a lack of visibility and talent planning across managers and teams, especially outside of the leadership levels. With traditional siloed organizational designs, rather than taking a global approach to talent and business goals, opportunities for talent mobility were often not identified, or when they were, there was often not the talent planning to successfully repatriate someone back to their next opportunity. The irony is that companies would often lose people overall amid this siloed approach.”

New Policies for Job Movement

Schneider Electric is going beyond its global mobility transformation to further facilitate job movement. “The ultimate goal is to create an internal jobs market and application process. We want to make this reactive (where employees apply) and proactive where we can map employee skills against open jobs and algorithmically recommend them for them. This additional step will help provide more agile and global talent solutions (part-time projects as well as full time roles, cross-functional as well as cross-border opportunities); it is currently in pilot phase,” says Susanna Warner.

As we’ve discussed in the prior section, Susanna’s vision is the goal for F3 Companies. Implementing it allows them to harness the Talent Mobility Revolution to drive employee engagement, accelerate innovation, and drive growth. According to Deloitte, 76 percent of “high-performing companies” regularly tap into internal talent pools.^* This starts with setting the right policies for job movement.

After deconstructing work into projects and segmenting project jobs into core jobs (performed by employees), context jobs (performed by freelancers) and repetitive jobs (automated), companies design policies to govern how workers apply to jobs, how workers are selected for jobs, and how company leaders support job movement.

•   How workers apply for jobs. Workers (both employees and freelancers) should be encouraged to look for new jobs (or projects) regularly via the talent marketplaces. For employees, this requires a cultural shift to thinking about work as project tours of duty—and must become a part of your standard employee onboarding program and ongoing cultural norms. The jobs graph in the talent marketplace should clearly indicate which jobs are core jobs and therefore best for employees, and which jobs are context jobs and therefore best for freelancers. Additionally, the algorithms in the jobs marketplace should continuously recommend employees—based on the skills they have—to project leaders as they kick off new projects. Employees should only be allowed to apply for or be recommended to new jobs when they are coming to the end of a given project.

•   How workers are selected for jobs. The project leader for each team should be responsible for reviewing the skills and competencies of each worker who has applied or been matched to a given job. Policies should ensure that employees can only be considered for new project teams as they complete a prior project—to ensure structure and reliability for project teams. When employees are not staffed on a project (traditionally called “on the bench” at management consulting firms), they should have preference in staffing considerations, provided their skills and competencies are a match. For freelancers, selection should be based on skills, availability, and cost, which is generally listed in the freelance marketplace.

•   How leaders support job movement. You should set expectations and policies to ensure company leaders support and enable job movement. Company leaders should have training to think about their contribution to the overall company objectives as their first priority and to embrace the project-driven work structure, shifting away from the traditional org design and department-first mentality of the past. Leaders should get confidence in completing their projects well, with clear policies in place that job movement cannot be done midproject, but when employees have completed a project.

“Improving internal mobility in an organization starts with a change in mindset and culture,” says Deloitte in the 2018 article “Talent on the Move! Inspiring a Better Employee Experience through Internal Mobility.” “Today’s talent no longer views mobility as a privilege, but as an expectation. To compete for and develop top talent, companies should find a way to integrate employee mobility into the range of the employee experience,” Deloitte concludes.^*

Structuring Policies for Location Movement

Traditional Policies for Location Movement

As we discussed in Chapter 3, traditional companies operated with the expectations that employees came to the office each day to work for a set number of hours. If they had personal or family needs to balance, they had to happen outside of working hours. There were no policies for location movement (work-from-home or work-from-anywhere); rather the policy was that if you needed to take time off to be home or to pursue a personal travel experience, you took defined PTO (personal time off) and logged it in the internal HR system. If you wanted to live in a rural location and work for a company in a city, you had to commute there; there was no concept of extending work opportunities to skilled professionals outside of local urban markets. Companies even made it difficult to work during business travel. In many cases, access to company networks and systems was limited to when you were physically in the office, and USB ports (for easily transporting files to access) were blocked—like at Lehman Brothers and Standard Chartered Bank.

In 2009, while I was working at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore, my father was nearing the end of his life. After a 10-year battle with stage 4 colon cancer, the doctors had called to say that he didn’t have much longer to live and I should return to the United States to see him. I quickly called my boss, Rai, told him what was happening, and asked to work remotely for a few weeks. Without flinching, he looked me in the eye and said one word: “Go.” While I was in Boston with my father, I worked remotely—joining conference calls, completing financial models, and more. For my boss and me, it worked fine (and Standard Chartered made it easier than Lehman Brothers to access files and connect). I was deeply grateful for this flexibility and for Rai’s support.

When I got back to Singapore, however, I got a call from the COO of our fund. I had gone over my holiday allotment and she was requesting that they deduct it from my pay. Incensed by both the fixed, traditional policy and the fact that I had been penalized for working remotely while my father died, Rai worked on my behalf to get a policy exemption granted. Standard Chartered did ultimately grant the exemption, but it took months, hours of Rai’s time, and countless amounts of emotion and anger from me. Standard Chartered, like Lehman Brothers, was a traditional company with traditional location expectations: you were in the office or you were taking structured vacation days. Nothing in between. After this experience, I became completely disengaged with Standard Chartered—and its archaic view of work—and vowed to go to business school and design a different future in what would become Topia.

“Offices used to be necessary because of the way companies thought about work, but also because of the cost of equipment in the industrial age,” says Sten Tamkivi, Chief Product Officer at Topia and Founder of Teleport, which developed with a remote working culture. “Imagine a world when desktop computers cost a ton of money and were in one stationary location. People needed to come to the office to use hardware like this and access binders and papers where things might be written down. But in the information technology era, equipment has become much cheaper—people have laptops, mobile phones, and iPads. Now we are even living in a world where I don’t even have to take a computer out of my bag at home to access files, check e-mail, or communicate with colleagues, I can do it all from my phone. In this world, work ‘place’ disappears. Knowledge processing or creative economy jobs can be done from anywhere.”

New Policies for Location Movement

With growing talent mobility and reduced office space footprints, videoconferencing has grown rapidly to a $16 billion market today. The market is predicted to grow 20 percent each year through 2022 as location movement expands, making it a $41 billion market by 2022. With the growth in location movement, Krish Ramakrishnan designed videoconferencing platform BlueJeans specifically for remote work—with noise canceling technology (“so you don’t hear the dog barking or lattes being made”), easy troubleshooting (“so you don’t need corporate IT support in the office”) and a format for large meetings (“not a bunch of tiny screens only”). As talent mobility and remote working grows, Ramakrishnan has set a new mission for the company—“better than being there.”

“We don’t look at ourselves as a videoconferencing provider anymore,” says Ramakrishnan. “We look at ourselves as a platform for modern meetings. We’re trying to build a product that improves upon meetings—like watching sports on TV in your living room can be better than from the bleachers.”^*

Today’s F3 Companies know that location movement is core to their talent and business strategies. More broadly, enabling greater location movement and distributed jobs is important for spreading job opportunities to skilled professionals living outside of traditional urban hubs. Companies must enable more distributed and remote work with clear policies for the way that teams work and the systems they use. Policies for location movement should have four pillars: in-person time, working hours overlap, systems adoption, and meeting etiquette.

•   In-person time. Companies with significant location movement should set policies for when and how teams get together. The best practices for policies is likely one annual, in-person company meeting, paired with quarterly team meetings.

•   Working hours overlap. One of the most difficult things about significant location movement is that employees may be working across many time zones without much overlapping worktime. The best practice for policies is to mandate that, regardless of where an employee is working from, he needs to have a minimum number of hours of overlap of working time. If an employee decides to move to Maine when the rest of the team is in Seattle, he should expect to work later in the evening.

•   Systems adoption. Companies should set clear expectations for the systems they use to enable remote work, typically a videoconferencing system (like BlueJeans), a messaging system (like Slack) and a collaboration system (like Box or Google Docs). (We discuss how to set up systems for talent mobility in Chapter 9.) Policies should set use expectations to adjust traditional employee norms and ensure everyone is included—e.g., videoconferencing before phone calls or watercooler discussions, and messaging before e-mail before sporadic brainstorms. This helps to foster collaboration, communication, and inclusion amid location movement.

•   Meeting etiquette. With lots of location movement, meetings will generally have some employees in the office, some at home, and some “on the road” (in transit or traveling). To make meetings effective and ensure no one feels like a “second-class citizen,” companies should adopt policies that require meetings to be done by videoconference and that all employees dial in from a location where they are alone and quiet—from a desk, not a conference room, and a home office not a noisy café. It is very challenging when part of the team is in a conference room and others are alone, so you should smooth this with clear policies to ensure that everyone is operating in the same way. Policies should also clarify that meeting notes are documented immediately and circulated via the messaging platform and stored centrally.

Sten Tamkivi articulates his own framework that he used at Teleport: “Write liberally, meet regularly, and congregate occasionally.” He champions documentation of meeting notes and a companywide shift from in-person meetings to messaging software, meeting in offices sometimes for collaboration, and congregating in annual and quarterly meetings.

*  *  *

In Section 1, we discussed Automattic, which owns content management system WordPress.com and operates a fully distributed team. Automattic has clear policies that touch on the above four pillars: the entire company meets for a week annually, teams meet regularly in person, messaging platforms are used widely, and notes from calls and meetings are immediately documented on its proprietary internal system. All of this makes a significant amount of location movement and flexibility work well.

Stella and Dot, which was founded to create flexible economic opportunity for women, operates a distributed engineering team, where the vast majority of the 100-person strong team work remotely. CEO Jessica Herrin says that distributed work is “a muscle that needs to be developed.”

“People need to learn the skill of being at home and working remotely,” says Herrin. “You must be very clear from the top about expectations and norms. We insist on people using a video camera for meetings and sending out pre-reads because we found that this radically enhances presence and preparation. We also insist that people join meetings from a quiet location. Working from home does not mean you’re working while driving or eating or something else. It means you’re present and working from home. As a company, you must develop the right communication tools, culture, and policies around that.”

Policies for Employment Movement

The rise of the freelance economy is an important—and new—part of the Talent Mobility Revolution. F3 Companies design frameworks to leverage skills from both their employees and freelancer workers as a part of their dynamic project teams (see Section 2 for further discussion on dynamic projects). They do this by first deconstructing work into projects that fall in three tiers: core, context, and automate. Core is work that is critical and differentiated to the business success, and therefore should remain done by employees. Context is work that is noncore but specialized and can be completed with skills from the freelance economy (and done from anywhere, including parts of the country that might not normally access jobs at companies in urban locations). Automate is work that is repetitive and gets done by artificial intelligence over time. This is the framework that companies should apply to their expanded definition of the workforce and adopt to govern employment movement.

Companies should centralize management of all of these workers under their total talent management umbrella. When hiring freelancers, companies should agree on a base compensation for their work up front and have a variable compensation component for completing project objectives successfully within a given time frame and quality.

Stephane Kasriel, CEO of Upwork, works with many companies to help them adopt freelancers as a part of their teams. He says that the hardest part of companies in setting up the framework of “core, context, and automate work” is taking the time to deconstruct existing work into small enough chunks that they become projects with clear jobs that fall in that framework. Upwork itself has done this work and successfully staffs its work along this framework.

This is the Talent Mobility Revolution that I have seen sweep across many companies and parts of our economy over more than a decade. To harness it, companies must comprehensively transform their policies for geographic, job, location, and employment movement. These frameworks provide structure for this changing world and help companies drive employee engagement, drive innovation, and unleash growth. Increasing movement—and the policies that enable it—also extends jobs beyond the local markets where companies operate, creating economic opportunities in new areas of our country.

Creating policies to manage talent mobility is the seventh step to success in the future of jobs. Companies that succeed in the Talent Mobility Revolution create clear policies to support increasing employee movement. Those that do not risk losing out to more agile and more rigorously managed competitors.

_____________________________

^* Interview with Susanna Warner, VP International Mobility, Schneider Electric, December 19, 2018.

^* Interview with Susanna Warner, VP International Mobility, Schneider Electric, December 19, 2018.

^* Interview with Nick Pond, Partner, EY People Advisory, December 17, 2018.

^* Deloitte, Denise Moulton, “Talent on the Move! Inspiring Better Employee Experience Through Internal Mobility,” July 17, 2018, https://capitalhblog.deloitte.com/2018/07/17/talent-on-the-move-inspiring-a-better-employee-experience-through-internal-mobility/.

^* Deloitte, Denise Moulton, “Talent on the Move! Inspiring Better Employee Experience Through Internal Mobility,” July 17, 2018, https://capitalhblog.deloitte.com/2018/07/17/talent-on-the-move-inspiring-a-better-employee-experience-through-internal-mobility/.

^* Interview with Krish Ramakrishnan, Founder, BlueJeans, December 3, 2018.