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9 min read

Calculate Mobility Program ROI: Expert Tips to Ensure Success

Immigration

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Author

Jemima Owen-Jones

Published

October 18, 2024

Last Update

October 21, 2024

Table of Contents

How to calculate your initial investment

How to measure your indirect costs

How to quantify the benefits

Drive measurable results from your global mobility program with Deel

Key takeaways
  1. Tracking key metrics helps you demonstrate the strategic value of your global mobility program to business leaders and justify further investments.
  2. You must consider both direct and indirect costs when calculating your initial investment to understand your program’s ROI.
  3. Immigration services like Deel can streamline mobility processes to minimize costs, increase returns, and drive more positive ROI.

Anyone who’s ever managed a global mobility program knows they require significant investments to succeed. From securing visas to ensuring compliance, the costs quickly add up.

Many key stakeholders lack these insights. Unless they get clear visibility into your global mobility program’s impact, they might question its worth. You may struggle to convince them to approve budgets, invest in resources, or expand the program.

By tracking key metrics and calculating ROI, you can clearly demonstrate the program’s strategic value. You can use this data to build a strong case for sustained or bigger investments.

Our article shows you how to calculate the ROI of global mobility programs to make this case. Read on to discover which metrics to track, how to measure them, and what they mean for business outcomes.

How to calculate your initial investment

Global mobility programs come with a lot of upfront costs. While these vary between businesses, here are the typical expenses you can expect:

Entity setup

When employees move abroad for a long period, they usually need a sponsor. This means your company incurs costs when establishing an entity and procuring a sponsorship license.

These expenses vary widely between countries. However, the combined administrative and legal fees usually range between $50,000 and $100,000. Use our entity setup calculator to get an estimate for any countries you’re considering for your program.

If you’re unsure about the long-term viability of a location, it’s worth considering an Employer of Record (EOR) service like Deel. We hire and sponsor your workers through our entities. This allows you to pay a much lower, fixed rate instead of investing a significant amount of capital into registration.

Visa and immigration

Visa processes may be essential to your global mobility program, but they involve a lot of upfront costs. Even for simple overseas assignments, you’re looking at the following expenses:

  • Notarization and translation services
  • Application fees
  • Premium processing fees
  • Medical checks
  • Background checks
  • Biometric appointments

Permanent relocations usually drive the costs up further. For example, just filing forms for the US Green Card costs over $2000 and that’s not factoring in any dependents.

Partnering with a trusted service like Deel Immigration can help you keep costs manageable. Our team handles all the eligibility checks, paperwork, and appointments, ensuring you never have to resubmit applications. We also provide estimates for all the processes we cover, including work visas, digital nomad visas, and residency permits.

Travel expenses

International travel can be a major variable as airfares can range from as little as $50 to as much as $5000. If you’re including family members, these costs rise exponentially.

If you’re sending employees on a short-term assignment, it’s also standard practice to pay for their accommodation. Although this can vary widely between locations, rent for an inner-city apartment usually starts at around $500 per month.

Vendors

You’re likely to rely on third-party services, especially if you’re relocating employees for long periods. These typically handle:

  • Visa and immigration services
  • Tax advice
  • Storage and shipping
  • Temporary housing
  • Relocation and destination services

While these significantly add to your expenses, they’re often essential. Most businesses don’t have the resources or local knowledge to handle these operations effectively.

Compensation adjustments

Relocations often require you to raise your worker’s pay or offer them a stipend, especially when they’re moving to a country with a higher cost of living. You can track this via your payroll software. If you’re using a global payroll provider like Deel, you can easily adjust and track these payments.

Sometimes relocations can work in your favor. If the employee is moving to a country with a low cost of living, you can agree to localize their compensation. This offsets many of the other costs on this list and makes more of your mobility initiatives possible.

Deel Immigration
Get worldwide visas without the legwork
Hire and retain the best global talent, while smoothing out the usual visa hurdles. Deel’s in-house immigration support handles the entire visa process, enabling employees to work from 50+ countries—and counting.

How to measure your indirect costs

Many companies focus on the hard costs and miss the hidden expenses of a mobility program that add up over time. Be sure to factor these expenses into your calculations:

Productivity loss

Moving abroad is a stressful and time-consuming process that inevitably distracts employees from their work. They need a break for the initial travel and they’ll be less productive while they settle and acclimatize.

Quantify this lost productivity by looking at metrics like task completion rates and deadlines missed. You can also record the amount of PTO each employee needs.

You can minimize downtime by supporting workers through their first weeks. Assist them with activities like setting up a bank account or enrolling in local services. As they settle in, use team communication tools like Deel’s Slack plug-ins to stay connected and see what challenges they’re facing.

Administrative labor

Global mobility programs are labor intensive. They require input from various departments including HR, finance, and recruitment.

Ask teams to track the time spent on administration for mobility schemes. Leading global solutions like Deel usually include a time tracker tool they can use. This gives you the total amount spent on labor and a breakdown of how long different tasks take.

Training and development

If you’re sending employees abroad to develop their skills, are you recording the cost of any tools and resources involved? Consider expenses such as:

  • Training courses
  • Conferences and networking events
  • Online programs
  • Language lessons
  • Assessments and licensing

Teams might be relocating to gain hands-on experience. While there is no direct cost, there are still expenses involved. Estimate the time senior staff takes to train workers and the value of any materials or tools used.

Setbacks and complications

Even the best mobility strategy is likely to encounter issues. You can’t control factors like flight cancellations, housing shortages, and changes to immigration policy.

Track the costs that arise from these unexpected challenges and factor them into your calculations. Even if they’re infrequent, they can still affect your overall ROI.

Over half of companies say compliance is their biggest barrier to mobility. Any legal complications could lead to costly delays, penalties, or even lawsuits. However, they don’t have the resources to keep pace with all the changing regulations everywhere they want to hire.

Investing in compliance management can mitigate risks and keep costs more predictable. When you partner with a global solution like Deel, our team handles many of the complexities by:

  • Hiring employees through our entities to eliminate the possibility of permanent establishment
  • Classifying workers and generating compliant contracts
  • Updating you about local immigration, tax, and employment laws
  • Navigating the visa application process
  • Maintaining compliance during the employee’s stay
  • Adjusting payroll and benefits management
  • Keeping cross-border data transfers secure

For example, FEMSA has managed to hire and relocate workers in over nine countries with Deel’s support.

In our search for talent, especially in fields like the digital sector, we’ve found the right skills often lie in countries where we don’t operate. Fortunately, with Deel EOR, we can hire exceptional talent from anywhere, all while following the necessary legal and labor laws.

Deel's immigration experts guide us through critical decisions, especially in complex countries like the United States, always ensuring legal compliance in each applicable state.

David Holguín,

Benefits and Mobility Manager at FEMSA

How to quantify the benefits

Now you’ve calculated the initial investment, you can track the following metrics to see your return. They all show how your program contributes to business growth and employee satisfaction.

Aside from demonstrating the program’s value, these metrics can tell you whether to maintain, expand, or adjust your current approach.

Talent management

Skills gaps can cost your company almost a month per year in lost productivity. If you’re a medium-sized enterprise, that’s around $3,000,000 of your annual revenue. It’s become imperative to find ways to secure talent and reduce your time to hire.

Global mobility programs can help you plug skills gaps by giving you access to a wider candidate pool and letting you move workers more easily. In fact, half of organizations say talent shortages are one of the main reasons they launched their program.

Track the following HR metrics to understand the impact of your program on talent management:

  • Headcount
  • Number of open positions
  • Skills gap analysis
  • Time-to-hire
  • Cost-per-hire

Retention rates

Recent research has linked global mobility to lower turnover. Employees say they’re more likely to commit to a business if they have more location flexibility and career development opportunities.

High retention can help you deliver a significant ROI on your mobility program. You allocate less of your budget toward hiring and onboarding replacement workers. As you have fewer skills gaps, you’re also likely to see improved performance and increases in revenue.

Track the number of voluntary resignations before and after you launch mobility schemes. You should see a significant decrease. Link these metrics back to your program by getting feedback from participating employees.

Employee engagement

Engagement levels are a strong indicator of how well your mobility program supports your workforce. After you’ve launched initiatives, your Net Promoter Score (eNPS) should increase.

The key is to ensure mobility schemes meet employee needs as well as help your business achieve objectives. If your team wants more location flexibility, you could introduce work from anywhere policies. Whereas they’re more likely to benefit from permanent relocations if they’re struggling with their country’s high cost of living.

Conduct pulse surveys to gauge employee sentiment. Deel’s feature lets you ask for a mix of ratings and comments on your mobility program. This gives you quantitative data you can analyze and in-depth insights into what’s working and what’s not.

Productivity and performance

Relocating employees should lead to improved employee performance, especially if the move aligns with your strategic business objectives.

Teams have more access to development opportunities. They can gain valuable skills through international assignments, cross-functional projects, and exposure to new markets. This helps them perform better at their jobs and make progress towards goals.

Measuring performance can be challenging from afar. That’s why it’s important to conduct regular performance reviews using global solutions like Deel. You can track each worker’s feedback scores over time to see how much they’ve improved after relocating.

Business growth

Mobility programs support business expansion into new markets. You can leverage the schemes to quickly relocate workers overseas and capitalize on opportunities.

Business expansion involves many factors beyond talent mobility, such as market conditions and local regulations. However, it’s still possible to measure the impact of your program. Look at metrics like your time-to-enter and market penetration rate to see how quickly your mobility processes let you execute strategies.

EOR services like Deel can support fast market entry. Instead of spending weeks establishing a local entity, you can hire workers in the country within days. Deel also ensures you’ve got compliant contracts and payroll set up as soon as your teams land.

Deel customer Lloyd’s List is a great example of what you can achieve. The maritime intelligence company reduced its time-to-launch by 75% and expanded into seven new countries.

Drive measurable results from your global mobility program with Deel

Tracking your global mobility program’s performance is critical to its success. Without demonstrable ROI, you can’t justify the high initial costs and secure stakeholder buy-in.

What’s more, measuring ROI helps you see where to optimize processes and which schemes deliver the best results. You can continuously refine your strategy and lower the costs to boost your ROI. As other companies launch their own programs, this helps you maintain a competitive advantage.

Deel can support you as you plan and implement your global mobility program. We have features to foresee complications, improve operations, and measure your performance, including:

  • Relocation cost estimates
  • Robust data analytics
  • White-glove entity setup services
  • EOR sponsored visas
  • Expert visa and immigration support
  • Regulatory news from our Compliance Hub
  • Status updates via a centralized dashboard
  • Discounts on relocation packages
  • Equipment provisioning
  • Real-time compliance notifications
  • Workforce management tools for global teams

Want to assess and optimize your own global mobility program? Book a 30-minute call with Deel to see how we can streamline the entire relocation process.

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About the author

Jemima is a nomadic writer, journalist, and digital marketer with a decade of experience crafting compelling B2B content for a global audience. She is a strong advocate for equal opportunities and is dedicated to shaping the future of work. At Deel, she specializes in thought-leadership content covering global mobility, cross-border compliance, and workplace culture topics.

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