How to Set Yourself Up for Success in Managing Relocation for Your Global Talent

May 01, 2025

If you’ve recently taken on the responsibility of supporting the successful relocation of your company’s global talent, you’ve stepped into a role that directly impacts employee success and retention as well as value creation for your business.

Over the last 20 years, supporting hundreds of thousands of customers on their global mobility journeys, Dwellworks has seen just how critical the role of talent mobility leadership is to businesses and relocation management companies alike. Whether you are moving employees across the country or around the world, the structure and support of your relocation benefits and services can mean the difference between a successful transition or a failed assignment. To make an impact, you don’t need to be an expert on day one -- but with the right questions, partners, and approach, you can become the results-oriented owner who defines a successful relocation management program.

Let’s Start with Defining “Relocation Assistance”

Relocation assistance is any support a company provides to help employees move for work. This can include providing services and covering expenses related to:

Immigration, visa, tax and compensation support
Temporary housing
Household goods shipping
Travel and transportation
Destination services, including home finding
Cultural awareness and orientation
Spousal/partner or extended family support

Depending on your company’s policies and who is being moved -- a new hire, internal transfer, or executive relocation -- the scope of benefits and support can vary widely. The goal is to successfully move talent that the company has identified as essential to its business needs and help them to quickly become productive on their new assignments.

Define Your Business Objectives, then Support with Policy and Benefits

To prepare yourself to support the complexities of global talent mobility, take time to understand your company’s strategic objectives and how the business deploys talent to achieve its goals. Typical reasons for employee relocation include expanding the business , staffing open positions, developing talent identified as high potential for the business, and transferring knowledge from one group of employees/subject matter experts to another.

Relocation can be for individuals or groups, and policies are developed to provide fair and equitable guidelines for managing moves at the most effective cost for the organization.

If your organization does not have a written relocation policy, your role may include documenting and standardizing those processes.

Key questions to ask:

How will benefits be provided and in what structure? (By tiers, business need, etc?)
Will benefits be managed by the business or will employees receive cash lump sums to manage their own moves?
- Pro tip: Lump Sums are popular for their simple administration but can cost the company in the long run if employees do not get the help they need. Review the pros and cons carefully.
What services should be provided and on what basis?
How will flexibility and choice be built into the program?
Who reviews and approves policies and guidelines?
Who is responsible for relocation expenses and what information do they need to make decisions?

In many organizations relocation benefits may apply to less than 5% of the total population, but the strategic impact of relocation and the cost of benefits often draw the attention of senior leadership, human resources, and finance, tax, and legal and compliance departments. Effective global mobility management requires working within a complex ecosystem. The more clarity you can provide, the more you will be perceived as a subject matter expert and the more you can advocate for effective programs that support the business mission and positive experiences for relocating employees.

Dwellworks recommends accessing the policy design and benchmarking resources available to members of Worldwide ERC (WERC) at worldwideerc.org.

Align With Internal Stakeholders

Relocation touches multiple departments: HR, talent acquisition, payroll, finance, compliance, risk management, information services, tax and legal, as well as the individual business units who fund and require global talent mobility for their operational success. Each of these stakeholders plays a role in relocation success. As the person responsible for managing or coordinating the process, directly or through a relocation management company partner, you’ll need to collaborate effectively across teams.

Pro tip: Set up a working session and review process with key stakeholders early in your role to align on expectations, approvals, and touchpoints.

Know the Employee’s Perspective

Global mobility management professionals are at the hub of a benefits and services ecosystem. Benefits are paid for by the employer and often delivered through outsourced service specialists, but your key stakeholder is the employee who will make the relocation journey, evaluate the relocation experience, and deliver on value for the business.

Professionals managing relocation should develop an understanding of mobility benefits and services from the employee’s perspective and factor those expectations into policy design, budget development, supply chain/service partner selection, and relocation assessment tools.

Employees may be excited, anxious, overwhelmed—or all three. Even the most career-driven relocation is a deeply personal experience for most employees and often impacts their personal networks. A solid understanding of the employee experience in relocation is critical to program success. Your service partners, including Dwellworks, who have worked with and responded to the questions and concerns of thousands of relocating employees, are an excellent resource to gain an understanding of the variety of needs, expectations, and concerns raised by employees, and how they have been responded to.

By developing expertise in both the employee’s expectations and the company’s benefit offering and talent mobility strategy, you will contribute to the success of your high value talent as well as the goals of the business overall.

There are many research and consulting experts, beyond your service delivery partners, who can advise on trends in employee benefits and expectations. One such recognized expert is air-inc.com. Following is a list of common employee expectations:

What relocating employees want:

Recognition of their unique requirements
Clear communication on what’s covered and what’s not
Flexible benefits administration that responds to their needs
Timely updates on next steps
Access to tools and technology that simplify/streamline the experience
Expert help with housing and logistics
Resources to settle into their new community
Support for their partner, family, and pets

This is where working with a trusted relocation services provider like Dwellworks makes a real difference. In addition to the global insights we can provide based on the depth of our service experience, we can support your employees’ needs through 2500 local destination consultants based in major cities as well as remote or small volume locations. Each Consultant brings experience guiding employees through timelines and dependencies, local requirements and regulations, housing markets, and services and support for successful settling in. Assisted by the research results available through myDwellworks^® and Dwellton, our AI-powered relocation assistant, our Consultants bring a one-to-one, human-centered and personalized approach to every relocation. Their performance has earned Dwellworks 98.8% customer satisfaction scores for the employee destination services experience.

Prioritize Destination Services

Once the decision to move and fund a relocation has been made, most employees immediately go online to start searching for communities, housing, schools (as needed), and services. There is a plethora of information available to employees, but the goal of professional mobility management is to ensure not just logistical execution, but a move that results in a quick and value-added return to productivity for the employee.

In every survey source available from our industry, the #1 cause of relocation failure is lack of support in helping employees and those who move with them to settle in and thrive in their new communities. To prevent the unfortunately high rate of failed global assignments (40% by most industry indicators), companies provide destination services benefits. These benefits, which account for approximately 2% of the total direct costs of relocation, and are typically provided in a blend of digital and in–person service delivery, can include

Area orientation and familiarization
Commute and transportation overview
Coordination of the move from temporary living to long-term rentals
Customized rental home search and property vetting
Visits to properties
Assistance with lease application and lease review
School guidance
Assistance securing national identity/social services cards
Driver’s license application
Banking set-up services
Support services for the personal priorities of employees and their families

In addition to services directly related to home search and settling in, many employees benefit from cultural awareness training, especially in a fast-changing world. Understanding cultures helps employees find common ground with their new teams and successfully adapt to work and life in their new location.

Pro tip: Don’t: Don’t assume that ‘same language means same culture’. Many employees report an unexpected degree of adjustment difficulty in moving between the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

We know the technology exists for employees to search for homes and support services. The risk is that they make uninformed decisions that are difficult to reverse (such as signing a lease for a non-previewed property or unintentionally sharing credit or banking information with a bad actor). Working in partnership with a professional destination services partner, like Dwellworks, with their own systems of control and compliance, reduces risk for the employee and the business.

Stay Organized, Communicate Often and Use Fit-for-Purpose Technology

Relocation is a business process and a series of service experiences, not a single event. To be efficient and productive as a mobility manager, you will want to track timelines, milestones, touchpoints, compliance, and service performance throughout the relocation journey.

Relocation management companies, as well as relocation SaaS providers, can provide you with options for tracking your program performance, including the employee experience.

Pro Tip: The relocation journey often includes interaction with multiple suppliers, so you will want a software solution that minimizes repetitive data gathering, which can be frustrating for employees and risky from a data privacy and security perspective.

Dwellworks prefers to connect with clients through secured APIs to their internal HRIS /mobility management systems. Our myMove interface ensures a single, systemic upload of your employee’s destination services requirements in a secure environment. Access to myMove immediately connects your employee to myDwellworks^®, our proprietary content library covering destination and housing information in hundreds of cities worldwide.

Best practices for program management and communication include:

Using a software platform that aligns with your program needs and internal systems
Establishing KPIs and performance expectations with your service partners
Coordinating regular check-ins with your employees and service partners
Communicating timelines and proactive notification of changes
Capturing feedback on the process to improve future relocations
Capturing post-move feedback to track employee retention and relocation success
Global Mobility is Complex, Count on Your Experts for Support

Global mobility management is a challenging job that will draw upon your organizational and strategic skills, and most of all your ability to act in alignment with the needs of the business and its talent. Developing a policy, executing a strategy, and keeping the organization, your global talent, and your partners briefed on risks and opportunities, challenges and successes are core requirements of the job.

This role is not about transactional expertise. The individual verticals in mobility services -- from immigration to household goods shipment to rental search and real estate -- are each uniquely complex and best delivered by experts in the service. Count on them for the support and outcome you need to reach your program goals.

More Than a Coordinator, You’re a Champion

Relocation support is a key contributor to your company’s ability to attract and retain top talent. When you help an employee and those who move with them to feel supported and valued through a major life transition, you’re not just fulfilling a task, you’re delivering strategic impact and building value for your business.

Count on partners like Dwellworks to deliver specialized services at competitive costs for your global mobility programs, for moves in-country or around the world. We provide destination services, temporary living support, intercultural training, and detailed market trend and program analysis to help with policy design and talent mobility planning. Your success is our success. Reach out any time.

About Dwellworks

Dwellworks is the world’s leading provider of accommodation and acclimation support services for the mobile workforce and business travelers. We specialize in global destination services, corporate housing, and intercultural training, as well as property management and real estate services in key US markets.

Our clients trust us to deliver personalized high-quality service experiences, powered by innovative technology and supported by our extensive local presence in hundreds of locations worldwide. Through our brands Dwellworks, Dwellworks Living, and Station Cities, we offer a comprehensive range of service options, global reach, local expertise, and passion for the customer service experience.

Driven by a commitment to excellence, we continuously pursue innovation and operational efficiency and invest in meeting rigorous global compliance standards for data security, financial management, and sustainability. Whether supporting corporate travel or relocation, domestically or around the world, we work in partnership with our clients to ensure talented employees and their families transition smoothly and thrive in their new locations.

For more information, please visit our company brands at Dwellworks.com, DwellworksLiving.com, and StationCities.com.