Businesses and employees worldwide are being impacted by the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and how it is limiting employee travel on an international scale. Many countries have implemented restrictions on entry/exit, visas, work permits, ports, and quarantines. As an employer, it is important that you stay informed of the ever-changing restrictions as they may affect your employees’ business travel and or assignments. One of WHR’s immigration providers, Newland Chase, is monitoring international travel and immigration restrictions. You can stay abreast of this situation on a country-by-country basis by reviewing Newland Chase updates here.

According to an article by Ogletree Deakins (labor and employment attorneys), in addition to monitoring the situation there are proactive steps employers might consider:

• Permitting more remote work: If remote work is feasible for your business, consider allowing it. Employers should remind employees about guidelines regarding the confidentiality and security of client and company information.
• Handling sick leave: If you do not have a sick leave policy, consider creating one. If you already have a sick leave policy, consider circulating a reminder about it to employees.
• Manage Business Travel: Consider minimizing business travel, especially in/out of China. If travel to higher risk areas is needed, consider offering a higher service class to minimize employee contact with other travelers.
• Managing expatriate assignments in China: If your company employs expats in China, consider offering temporary or longer-term relocation outside of China. Additionally, review employee’s assignment documentation for early assignment termination and relocation expenses.
• Internal implementation of China’s public holiday extension: Although it is not actually stated, the Spring Festival holiday might be viewed as a public holiday. If this happens, employees would not be required to work or use their annual leave. Employees who travel during the Spring Festival may not be able to return to work so employers may receive requests from employees to work remotely or extend their leave. Employers might consider placing some employees on unpaid leave in some situations.

The coronavirus, that first started in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) in January 2020. According to a factsheet from WHO, the virus spreads when someone coughs or exhales and releases droplets of infected fluid. These droplets fall on any nearby surfaces (desks, tables, telephones, etc.). As a result, people can catch the coronavirus by touching these contaminated surfaces – and then touching their eyes, nose, or mouth. Also, standing within 3 feet of someone already infected with COVID-19, can allow transmission by breathing in droplets coughed out or exhaled by the infected person. According to WHO, there are best practices to follow that can prevent the spread of the virus in your workplace:

• Ensure surfaces are clean and hygienic (desks, tablets, telephones, keyboards) by wiping with disinfectant regularly.
• Encourage employees to wash their hands:
  
  
  • Place sanitizing dispensers in prominent places throughout your workplace.
  • Display posters promoting hand washing. Look for posters at WHO.int.
  • Make sure everyone (employees, contractors, customers) has access to hand washing facilities.
• Promote good workplace respiratory hygiene (i.e., covering nose and mouth when coughing and/or sneezing, disposing of used tissues, etc.).
• Advise your employees to review travel restrictions before embarking on a business trip.
• Ask sick employees to stay home.
• Create a plan for what your organization will do if an employee becomes ill with suspected coronavirus.
• Develop a contingency and business continuity plan if an outbreak occurs where your business operates.

According to a March 8 article by John Hopkins Medicine, the coronavirus has infected approximately 107,644 people worldwide (437 cases in the U.S.). The flu virus, on the other hand, has infected an estimated 1 billion cases worldwide, 9.3 million to 45 million cases in the U.S. per year.  There have been approximately 3,653 deaths worldwide (17 deaths in the U.S.) from the corona virus, while the flu has caused between 291,00 to 646,00 deaths worldwide (12,000 to 61,000 deaths in the U.S. per year). Regardless of the current number comparisons between the coronavirus and the flu, it still makes sense to keep your organization and your employees prepared and protected from COVID-19.

Per a March 7, 2020, article by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), “The risk to the general public from these outbreaks depends on characteristics of the virus, including how well it spreads between people; the severity of resulting illness; and the medical or other measures available to control the impact of the virus (for example, vaccines or medications that can treat the illness). For most people, the immediate risk of being exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19 is thought to be low. This virus is not currently widespread in the United States.” The CDC does say that this is a “rapidly evolving situation and the risk assessment will be updated as needed.”

Staying informed and being proactive is your organization’s best defense.

Customer Service – To some, those words might refer to your work role or your department name. But for others, the words customer service might remind them of long hours wasting time on phone calls, endlessly repeating the same information to representatives but never receiving the information or help needed.

If you think about all the negative customer service experiences you’ve endured, many might just boil down to a very simple concept – a lack of customer focus. That’s because some customer service teams aren’t really working to solve their customers’ problems. Rather, they’re treating their customers like numbers, not people.

Great customer service requires a deep understanding of people and the realization that loyalty is built on cultivating meaningful relationships.

According to WHR Group President, Paul DeBoer, “To truly provide service excellence requires a company to be flexible in its service delivery. That means being available whenever, wherever and however your customer needs you.”

Some larger companies use call centers that operate in an environment that’s not always customer centric. Consider for example, a company that dictates quotas to its call center employees requiring them to answer a certain amount of calls per hour or a certain number of calls per day. These types of environments can lose sight of the personal touch, white-glove service required to provide exceptional excellence.  

What does great customer service really look like?

A proven example of great customer service is demonstrated by well-known service provider, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC. In a Forbes article, Ritz-Carlton President, Herve Humler said that he tells his employees, “You are not servants, because unlike a servant, I want you to be engaged with the customer—you have a brain, you have a heart and I want you to use them.” Humler goes on to explain that employee engagement is crucial to his guest engagement. Ritz-Carlton employees are empowered to fix a guest’s problem and can spend the necessary money (up to a certain limit), without asking permission.

A philosophy of great customer service can be seen in Japan. A commonly known word in the Japanese culture, Omotenashi, refers to wholeheartedly looking after guests. It represents the mindset of hospitality that centers around care rather than expectation. It’s about fulfilling people’s needs. More recently, the term Omotenashi has been associated with customer experience.

Japanese car manufacturer Lexus embraces this philosophy. Dealership employees are empowered to treat customers as they would treat a guest in their home. LEXUS embraces Omotenashi by cultivating a customer-centric culture encouraging employees to “go to any lengths to solve their problems, mechanical or not,” according to an article from Lexus.

What these companies have in common is their dedication to putting the needs of their customers first and treating others as they would want to be treated. It’s about empowering employees with the tools needed to deliver service excellence, and it’s about cultivating a culture of employee engagement where employees care enough to want to be part of that gold star service delivery.  

At WHR Group, we view our role in employee relocation as a privilege. We understand that when our customers succeed, we succeed. We strive for Omotenashi to ensure our service is at its best so that our clients and their employees can focus on what matters most to them. Our service structure is designed for client flexibility and low file counts while our office dynamic fosters open communication between teams. This customer service structure facilitates a relocation experience that is smooth, pleasant and made simple for our clients’ employees and families. We make it our mission to simplify the relocation experience while bringing hard work, trustworthiness, empathy and proactiveness to every facet of what we do.

If you’d like to learn more about WHR’s approach to customer service, and how we can help your relocating employees feel great about their move, please contact us.

There’s a talent shortage. Of course, you already knew that! With competition so high for skilled workers, it’s even more important your talent management strategy includes a solid relocation program that helps attract and retain top talent. Some organizations view relocation simply as a cost center and do not incorporate it into their talent management strategy. This can be a big mistake!

You might be putting lots of effort and resources into attracting, engaging and retaining top talent, but if you’re not incorporating it into your relocation initiatives you may be missing out on a valuable talent pool. It’s important that your transferees relocate with the least amount of disruption to their work and personal lives. Whether they are new employees or existing, the right relocation policy will help transferees navigate this process and help you secure and retain your most important asset.

How a Comprehensive Relocation Program Helps Your Organization

It’s about relocation policies in the context of today’s workers, evaluating their family situations and customizing policies that will address their specific needs, all while providing the maximum benefit to your organization:

• Move transferees as quickly as possible
• Minimize disruption to transferees work roles and personal lives
• Maintain a smooth transition to ensure the least disruption to internal work productivity
• Save organizational expenses by managing the relocation process efficiently and effectively
• Facilitate a diverse workforce by expanding your geographic talent search parameters
• Minimize financial impact to transferees while maximizing benefits to your organization

Are you willing to embrace relocation and re-think mobility as a strategic solution to the talent crisis?

Our goal is to become your employee relocation guide and resource from creating and updating your policies, to matching current best practices, to full program development. Please contact us if you’d like to discuss your organizational relocation needs.

Workflows have become a bit of a buzzword in the business community, and no wonder why! With all the redundant tasks that can pop up in a process, workflows not only help your team perform at their best, they emphasize exactly what contributes to the success of a business. 

This, in turn, dramatically improves business operations by minimizing room for errors and increasing overall efficiency through streamlined and automated tasks. Account managers can make quicker, more effective decisions and employees can collaborate in a more productive and efficient way. 

WHR’s unique workflows create the framework of our technology allowing our team to stay proactive and work on a just in time basis. From our vendor management system that creates metric driven scorecards, to our 100% accurate and compliant invoicing processes—everything is completely integrated so clients and their transferees have a positive relocation experience.

Introducing “myWork One”

Designed to keep the high-touch aspect intertwined throughout every relocation process, “myWork One” monitors every transferee experience for key events and critical dates. This allows our staff to remain aware of all relocation dates/deliverables and consolidate key documents/correspondences into our document repository.

Because our system is fully integrated with DocuSign®, we can use the repository to pull together all file details into a single electronic representation that remains available for easy reference. We want your transferee’s relocation process to be as simple as possible, which is why our workflows offer complete transparency, adaptability, and compliance for every national and international move.

Complex compliance issues can create daily challenges for those managing relocation programs, and the consequences of being non-compliant holds large implications for companies. For this reason, we literally build your policy parameters into our technology. Every expense limit and cap lives within our system and is monitored, tracked, and reported to ensure compliance.

How Do Our Workflows Function?

The best thing about our workflows is they optimize key tasks for our employees to be proactive by seeing and addressing issues before your transferee is even affected. 

As every workflow task is completed, our system will monitor key dates and documents to ensure complete compliance to policy and allow maximum utilization of the relocation benefits.    

Service Partners

We take client and transferee satisfaction very seriously, which is exactly why we have spent years building a quality service partner network that can meet your needs with the highest level of quality service. Transferee satisfaction surveys are the backbone of our service partner’s performance measurements. We utilize the responses to quickly address any service issues, and our leadership and management teams receive immediate alerts if a survey is returned with a score lower than 4 out of 5.

We contribute our success to the commitment we have to provide our clients with the best possible service. The workflows we’ve developed facilitate this superior customer service by providing cost-effective and efficient relocation services. We invite you to learn more about our workflows and the high-quality service we provide to our clients. 

WHR Group is in the business of making the complex simple. However, when it comes to the economy, nothing is black and white. To take pulse of the current economy and the Federal Reserve’s sentiment in 2020, WHR attended an economics luncheon in Milwaukee on January 9th, 2020. The featured speaker was Charlie Evans who has been President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago since September of 2007. 

While Evans emphasized he cannot speak on behalf of his colleagues, he is currently happy with the state of the domestic economy and the current Federal Funds Rate of 1.75% (see Federal Funds Rate). In fact, the U.S. unemployment rate of 3.5% is at its lowest rate in the past 50 years, and the U.S. economy has been enjoying a mature 10 year expansion period, the longest on record in the post-WWII era (What is Unemployment?). 

Even in a decade of expansion, there is always room for economic improvement. Addressing the regional economic outlook, Evans stated that the Upper Midwest is dominated by heavy manufacturing which has struggled to attract workers due to the unusually low unemployment rate. Several business leaders in the Midwest have been held back from expansion plans due to the tight labor market. One way businesses are overcoming this labor challenge is by offering flexible work hours and more attractive work environments. 

On the national level, Evans is a member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) which influences federal monetary policy through the purchasing and selling of U.S. Treasury Securities (Open Market Operations). And while Evans may be happy with the current Federal Funds Rate, he would like to see an improvement in the U.S. inflation rate of 1.7%. The Federal Reserve has an explicit target of 2% symmetric inflation to insulate against zero lower bound risk (Why 2%?). The federal funds rate and inflation are negatively correlated (as interest rates are reduced, more consumers borrow and spend money which increases the inflation rate, and vice versa). Therefore, if the economy is in a downturn and the Federal Funds Rate is already at 0%, this may cause a liquidity trap and limit the capacity that the Federal Reserve has to stimulate economic growth by reducing the Federal Funds Rate.

Will the Federal Reserve consider negative interest rates? Per Evans, no, the U.S. is not seriously contemplating negative interest rates, even though there are multiple central banks across the globe with negative rates (e.g. Japan, Switzerland, and Sweden). Negative interest rates are an unconventional monetary policy tool, and drastic measure to prevent a country from falling into a deflationary spiral (Deflationary Spiral). In simple terms, if consumers want to keep their money in banks, the yield on those accounts would be negative which incentivizes consumers to spend instead of save, similar to a fee for keeping your money in the bank. Interestingly enough, if the Federal Reserve followed this policy during the Great Recession, interest rates would have been -4% to -5%.

If you have questions or insights about how the U.S. economy may impact your global mobility, let us know in the comments below.