Event details:
Recent ECA policy surveys have highlighted the continued high demand for talented mobile staff. This has contributed to increasingly cosmopolitan assignee workforces at different stages of their careers, originating from countries with varying living standards and expectations. These factors, along with the growing variety of business reasons for international assignments and diversity of assignment types, mean that there are now a greater number of variables and issues to be managed by international employers.
Consequently, although the home-based expatriate compensation approach remains dominant (ECA reports that 54% of international employers apply this method ), a growing proportion of companies are using different pay methodologies to support many different assignment objectives and mobility requirements, including the need for cost–effectiveness.
To explore this more fully, ECA’s has undertaken recent research to identify when, why and how four specific alternative compensation approaches (defined below) are applied by organisations.
- Local national plus: Local national salary, plus benefits typically provided for foreign assignees/expatriates.
- ·Local national: Local national salary, plus benefits typically provided for local nationals.
- Expatriate market rate: Both salary and benefits are based on an established expatriate market-rate.
- Third country salary structure: Salary structure is based on a third country (ie neither the employee’s home nor host location; eg a headquarters country or an offshore territory).
The presentation will include case studies of the application of each of these approaches, with pros and cons, and posing the questions:
- are these alternatives right for you?
- do they always result in cost-effective outcomes?
There will be specific reference to practice in Hong Kong, China, Singapore and the UAE, where there is growing interest in these pay methods.