Understanding the key repatriation issues
Having lived abroad for a professional assignment, your employees understand that the repatriation process back to their home country presents unique challenges. Employee repatriation assistance should be considered as best practice for global mobility programs and is essential to your company’s employee retention strategy.
Relocities repatriation services help your employees prepare for the transition so they can quickly settle back into work and life in their home country after completing their overseas assignment. These programs provide them with the indispensable support and resources they need during what is frequently a difficult time.
A well-designed program capitalizes your corporation's return on global mobility investments. Additionally, it ensures compliance with legal obligations in both locations throughout the process, diminishing liability risk for both you and the employee.
The returning employee’s corporate future is likely to rely on a positive return experience, so it is crucial that you assist them by providing all-embracing repatriation support.
As a minimum, seven key elements to any repatriation should be considered:
1. Pre-Departure visits home
Ensuring a visit home prior to the actual move is an excellent way to help your employee and their family prepare for the transition, particularly following an extended overseas or remote assignment.
During the home visit, your employee should be able to visit old haunts, meet with new coworkers, and friends as well as their extended family, to start to acclimatize to how life will be upon repatriation.
2. Career and family assistance
Additional support and training might be needed to ease the transition if your employee’s return is to a different role or location. Their repatriation package would benefit from regular business trips back home (if valid) to ensure they become connected with their new team, avoiding potential alienation.
For employees with families, providing resources and support to help them all readjust to life in their home country is indispensable. Remember, finding new schools for the children is never a simple process, particularly if they've spent a number of years living in a foreign culture. For example, we repatriated a family to the UK after back-to-back assignments in Spain and Japan, all three children were tri-lingual and needed careful support to integrate them into the English culture. Similarly, helping the trailing partner find suitable employment was a challenge after a number of yours of unemployment.
3. Managing the move
Transferring internationally can be a major challenge. Corporate move management policies should offer your employees assistance with all aspects of their move back to their home country, including:
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Ensuring their own home is vacant and ready for them if it has been rented out
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Coordinating the packing, shipping, and unpacking of their household goods
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Arranging temporary housing in their home country if they are not returning to their own home
4. Departure services
Amongst the numerous tasks at the end of an employee’s assignment, some of the most significant that need to be addressed at least one month in advance include:
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Giving the correctly formatted notice to end a property rental agreement, and ensuring any tenant liabilities are discussed and agreed, and the security/dilapidations deposit is refunded
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Help organizing the packing and shipping of the tenant's personal possessions
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Organizing mail forwarding
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Booking transport to the departure airport
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Cancelling the utility services, broadband, phone service, cell phone contract if country specific
There are many more areas to consider, Relocities can manage them all, and ensure a stress free repatriation.
5. Personal taxation liabilities
We recommend that all employees meet with qualified tax advisors who can ensure they will be compliant with applicable laws and regulations in both locations.. A structured and well-designed repatriation program should arm your employees with the necessary resources to ensure a trouble-free transition.
Your employees may have to repay part of any equalization payments they received while on assignment, Your program needs to include provisions and procedures that record any such payments, following which, liaising with the employees to make sure any payments are recorded and made within any time limits required under the relevant legislation.
6. Cultural training
Employees that have been on an overseas assignment for five or more years will have probably adapted to the way of life and culture in their host country. This is likely to pose challenges when they start living and working back in their home country.
Cultural reorienting will help your personnel prepare for the culture changes that may be stumbling blocks may experience upon repatriation. The goal is to help them feel more comfortable and prepared for work and life in their home country.
7. Expense reimbursement
Having a clear and comprehensive corporate relocation policy is paramount to ensuring your employees understand which relocation and repatriation expenses they can claim reimbursement for.
At Relocities our corporate and employee expense management system ensures all legitimate expense outlays are catalogued and analyzed, have supporting documentary evidence, and a full audit trail. Following which we can either report to the employer who reimburses the employee, or even manage the reimbursement internally if preferred.
Talk to us today about developing your Corporate Repatriation program.