News on Global Mobility

Please click on the headlines below to view.

Talent Management in Professional Football - Lessons for the Corporate World?

By Chris Debner, independent advisor for Strategic Global Mobility and Michael Mio Nielsen, former player and General Manager of the F.C. Copenhagen School of Excellence.

Football is about talent.

The talent that a professional football club attracts, recruits, develops, engages and retains is their key ingredient to success. While professional football clubs realized that long ago, the corporate world claims to understand the importance of effective talent management, with CEO’s regularly stating it to be their key priority. In reality a lot of companies seem to be struggling with it, when you look at the news that regularly report on widespread low employee engagement at the workplace.

So what can the corporate world learn about talent management from professional football?

Professional football and the corporate world share a similar set of objectives when it comes to their players, respectively employees. Both want to attract and hire the best of them, keep them sufficiently happy to make them deliver high performance, develop them to get better and last but not least to retain them. And it is proven in numerous surveys that effective talent management, which works towards these objectives, is a major contribution to business success.

Talent Management is an end-to-end process that encompasses the entire employee life cycle which translates business objectives and strategy into how an organisation manages its employees.

1) Developing talent from the beginning: Football clubs attract, recruit and develop talent from a very young age and make use of talent management for the individual and the team from the beginning. Corporate talent management is often not aware who their talent is. They find talents often only late in their career and then develop these individual talents – often ignoring younger employees. And it should be them as well, who should be told what it takes to become a future talent to be noticed by management.

2) Engaging with the right people to attain team goals: Often the best players on a team are receiving the most support by the team despite the fact, that they often have certain attitudes and passions which can be difficult to handle. You often hear of difficulties to incorporate superstar divas into the team without affecting their performance. What counts for a football club is their performance in the team. A structured integration where each talent understands how they can grow and benefit from playing on the same team as a super star diva usually addresses issues that could arise. The lack of a structured integration often leads to similar problems in companies. It is necessary that also all other talents know how they can grow and benefit of playing on the same team as a super star diva. This is valid in football as much as in the cooperate world.

In the corporate world people with attitudes and passions are unfortunately often excluded and the saying “it is cold on the top” is unfortunately often true. Imagine the possibilities if this were to change in the corporate world on a larger scale.

3) Identifying with the brand and adding value: In attracting the best players it is important to have a good brand image in the football world. More so, it is important to realise that your players form part of that image. FC Copenhagen had during the 2008 and 2009 season two Czech National team players under contract and the European football world was wondering, how a club from the relative small Danish Superliga managed to attract them. The first Czech player who was hired and relocated with his family to Denmark was fully supported with the relocation and integration of him and his family into the new country. There was also a structured approach to jointly define the objectives and his role in the team. It was vital that the player could identify with the club´s image, had the individual attention and was aware of his personal development opportunities. All through a structured approach to jointly define objectives. He became an Ambassador for FC Copenhagen who loved his job, the environment and the clubs structured relocation approach. So when his national team mate, looking for a new club, asked him, he was telling his good integration story and he made his choice.

The two talented Czech players raised the performance of the whole team and the organization not only with the help of their own performance but also by placing high demands on the environment and their teammates’ performance. Their attitude also encouraged other talented players and the youth players at the academy to perform better.

Talent looks to join companies with values that are representing their own. In the corporate world your employer brand image is becoming ever more important with social media and websites like glassdoor.com creating an unprecedented transparency about how work and life is inside a company. The majority of people looking for qualified jobs use nowadays the internet and friends and contacts to research a future potential employer before making their choice to apply for a job. More focus on how you manage your talent, its happiness, engagement, development, performance and retention is what is needed to create the employer image that you want to attract the talent that you want to hire.

4) Feedback, at the right time: Performance management in the corporate world is typically based on annually or bi-annually formal performance reviews, where past performance is discussed and objectives for the following year are set. In football these performance assessments take place several times a week during training and on match days. Besides constant informal feedback, you receive weekly evaluations and every three months reviews of your development and objectives. As a football player your performance is constantly monitored and fed back to you. And once or twice a week, you get the crucial verdict if you are in the starting line-up or sit on the bench. In addition to the performance feedback that the coach and team management give, it’s the media who evaluate your performance and share it even on TV, the web and in print.

Is it impossible for the corporate world – with not just one but many teams – to give the same attention to their individual employees? Could the middle managers and team leaders play a role in the informal feedback on the job throughout the year?

A culture that encourages informal feedback helps employees to stay focussed and makes the annual performance reviews less of an unwelcome surprise. In addition the regular performance reviews should focus more on the individual talent of the employee and identifying ways how the company can support them to develop their full potential on the job. In such a high performance culture as in football clubs it is important to give attention to the individual needs of your players, all your players. The super star diva will have different needs than a young player or a foreign player that just joined and last but not least the players in the squad who do not get to play regularly. A talent wants to contribute and wants to make a difference. Therefore the individual goal-setting process in football takes into account the players, their individual needs and shortcomings into their detailed development plans. All those are aligned and support the ultimate objectives of the club, e.g. develop talents, winning trophies or play European cup football. Setting a talent development plan together with the talent and sticking to it is of utmost importance and something many companies tend to fail with.

5) Value of relocation support: Employee Mobility is an integral part of talent management, often used to develop competencies and skills of employees. In football Mobility plays a role, when hiring a foreign player or a player from a domestic club elsewhere. It is often a long and challenging process to assign a player and includes often three parties that agree such a deal, the two clubs involved and the player. But after the financial discussions are done, it means that a player has to move with his family to a new city, often on very short notice. With the increasing internationalisation corporate talent management also has to include international transfers. If you are aiming your international talent to be able to not only lead and handle negotiations involving other cultures or negotiations but also people management, both experience and research shows that the chances of success of your talent are diminishing if you do not provide a proper cultural training and relocation support for international transfers.

Else Christensen, Managing Director of Relocare Group, Denmark states that “An attraction and relocation plan should always be based on the expected output from your newly transferred talent. The three key questions in this context are “How long is the employee expected to stay?” “How quickly should he or she be able to perform?”; “What are their goals and how will they achieve them?” A good relocation plan will include those elements.” Experience from Denmark shows, that assistance with the personal matters such as leisure activities in the relocation plan is crucial for retention and that cultural training really matters for sharing knowledge. For years relocation has been about providing a fast start – Talents go where they can grow to shi Christensen says that “Scientific research shows that job content and professional development are the most important aspects of accepting a job abroad, but right after that comes a good personal life. The job content is the main reason to attract – but the lack of a good personal life including their families is often the reason why people leave sooner than expected. Unhappy people can’t focus on the job.”

Companies sending employees across borders need to pay attention on improving the lives of international assignees and their families, to enable them to be able to focus on their jobs and to retain them. It is therefore necessary to make the satisfaction of your assignees a top priority while developing mobility strategies that define policies, processes and structures which manage the multiple challenges of international assignments.

6) Retaining high performers: In football as in the corporate world it is important to retain your high-performing players, respectively employees. At the same time, these are the ones who have the best chances to score a job in another club, respectively company. Life-long employment with the same company is a thing of the past and patch-work careers have become the norm. The same holds true for the comparatively short careers of active football players. FC Copenhagen managed with their structured talent management, where defined individual development plans and caring attention to all their players lead over time to success to retain several local and foreign players, who ended up being with the club for 5-6 years. They even managed to recruit several Danish players, who after several years abroad returned home successfully.

The bottom line is that if employees love their work and the environment you have created for them, they will perform better and continuously help you to achieve the results you wish for. Despite obvious differences between a football club and the corporate world, the lessons to care more for the wellbeing of your employees by the use of jointly defined objectives and a structured talent management approach, are worth being studied, to see how they can improve the success of a company.

Malene Stausholm-Perkins has joined Relocare

Invitation Hjemstationeret - Hjemvendt fra udstationering. Hvad gør man?

Kursus om rekruttering og tiltrækkelse af udenlandsk arbejdskraft

Tiltrækkelse og rekruttering af udenlandsk arbejdskraft

Kurset dækker branding, lovgivning, screening og rekruttering internationalt og afholdes tirsdag d. 7. maj fra 9.00 til 16.00 i Skive.

Mangler du arbejdskraft, og synes du at hele verden, er et forholdsvis stort sted at lede efter den?

I ved godt selv, hvor den udenlandske arbejdskraft befinder sig, og det er slet ikke så svært at tiltrække dem til Skive kommune, som I tror. I har selv redskaberne, og Relocare giver jeg metoderne til at finde dem frem.

Relocare vil på dette modul hjælpe jer med at finde frem til de steder hvor jeres ønskede arbejdskraft befinder sig. De vil give jer redskaber, som bedre kan hjælpe jer med tiltræknings og interviewprocessen. I vil få reflekteret over jeres egne processer og metoder, og I vil få redskaber som hjælper jer med at overtale den udenlandske arbejdskraft til at tage jobbet.

Desuden vil I samtidig få et godt overblik over de lovgivnings administrative processer som I skal overholde, når de kommer hertil, samt det ansvar som I har i virksomhederne.

Relocare kan således give jer redskaberne til jobinterviewet og sørger for, at den nye, udenlandske medarbejder føler sig velkommen, anerkendt og tryg under sin indstationering. Det vil spare jer både tid og penge, når I kan komme problemerne i forkøbet under en indstationering. En god start er guld værd – også for familien.

Deltagerne vil komme til at arbejde med realistiske og relevante cases, baseret både på egne og andre faktiske udfordringer i rekrutteringen og mødet med de udenlandske medarbejdere.

Vi tager virksomheder ind, efter først til mølle princippet.

Pris for workshop deltagelse

2.000,- kr. ex. moms pr. deltager og workshoppen afholdes med minimum 12 deltagere.

Prisen inkludere:

En dags workshop med forberedelse relevant for deltagerne
Materiale og artikler
Worksheets som skal hjælpe dig med at kortlægge dine muligheder
Forplejning på dagen

For mere information og agenda for Workshop se gerne her i PDF

Frederik Juel Andersen has joined Relocare

Aleksandra Galewska has joined Relocare

Nedsættelse af lønkravet

From Relocare’s sister company, Relocare Taxation International ApS, we have good news:

The Danish Parliament has passed a bill establishing a salary requirement in taxation law KSL § 48E-F that reduces salary requirement by DKK 10,000 i.e. from DKK 70,600 to DKK 61,600 in monthly salary in 2015 for those who are not covered by the Danish social security, and to DKK 61,690 per month for those who are covered by the Danish social security.

The Act entered into force per 1st January 2015 and will have effect as from the same date.

The salary requirement applies as before, after deduction of own private contribution to a possible pension fund administrated by the company.

The initiative is made to provide Danish companies with better opportunities to attract highly skilled foreign employees.

Denmark is not the only country that has special schemes to attract foreign employees. We need not go further away than Sweden and Finland, but also countries like the Netherlands and Belgium have particularly favorable arrangements in order to attract highly skilled foreign workers.

In most countries, the criteria to be approved include educational qualifications etc. in order to ensure that it is really the specialists who get attracted, and once you are approved, the result is a lower tax than for the country’s own citizens in the same way as the Danish scheme KSL § 48E-F. Often the companies / employers will benefit from this in the form of lower wages, depending on the conditions of the employment etc.

While in most other countries subjective factors are crucial, it is in Denmark a more objective evaluation in the form of a minimum wage. To get the scheme in Denmark it is a must that the new employee has no financial interest in the company that hires the employee.

The point is that if a company is willing to hire an employee for a salary of DKK 61,690 per month, the employee is surely someone special. In addition, Denmark also approves scientists who can benefit from the low tax after KLS Tax Act 48E- F. This applies for researchers who have the skills to obtain approval from the Research Council, and if they are approved, the demand for minimum wages does not apply.

The scheme is approved by the EU. Returning Danes can also make use of the KLS Tax Act 48E-F, but only if there has been no tax liability to Denmark in the preceding 10 years from the time of employment.

Patrick Vestergaard has joined Relocare

Immigration Law Change

An important change in the law on immigration has been adopted. The Fast-track scheme enables certified companies to hire – with a few exceptions – highly qualified foreign nationals on short notice without having to wait for an application to be processed by the Danish Agency for Labour Market and Recruitment. At the same time, the scheme offers employees the possibility to work alternately in and outside Denmark.

The Fast-track scheme means that if certain conditions are met, new employees can begin working in Denmark immediately after an application for a residence and work permit has been submitted. There are 4 different tracks:

The pay limit scheme
Researchers
The stay in Denmark is in order to receive highly qualified training within the certified company, or to train, at a highly qualified level, other employees of the certified company
The employment is for a short term stay, and the salary and terms of employment correspond to Danish standards

The employee must arrange for legal entry into Denmark. If you are an EU/EEA citizen or do not need a visa, you may just enter. If you need a visa, you must go through the normal formalities, but a visa takes so much shorter time to obtain.

Before starting to work the employee must appear in person at the Danish Agency for Labour Market and Recruitment and be subjected to a number of checks, including i.a. a check that you have entered into a contract with a certified company. But then the employee can start working without waiting for the application to be processed.

A permit under this scheme may have a duration of up to 4 years.

The Danish companies must fulfill certain conditions in order to be certified. The company must have at least 20 full-time employees. In general, salary and employment conditions at the Danish company must correspond to Danish standards. The company must participate in a meeting at the Danish Agency for Labour Market and Recruitment where the rules will be explained in detail. There is a fee of 3.250 kr.

The new rules take effect from April 1, 2015. But companies may already now apply for certification.

Relocare can help you obtain the Fast-track approval. We can handle much of the paperwork on the basis of a power of attorney, but an authorized representative of the company must participate in the meeting with the Danish Agency for Labour Market and Recruitment. Please contact our Head of Immigration Ole Brix Andersen to hear further.

Eliteleverandør til det offentlige

Relocation to Denmark Video

Succes med udenlandske medarbejdere i jyske virksomheder

Relocare expands to Jutland

From our Newsletter – Spring

Indisk IT eventyr.. Er du klar?

Eksport af fødevarer og fødevareprocesudstyr til Indien

Invitation til talent ledelse, og tiltrækkelse af internationale talenter. Scor de bedste – d. 19. juni 2014

Hvordan får man fat på de bedste, og hvordan motiveres de?

HBKøge, Køge Erhvervsservice og Relocare invitere til event, med oplæg af:

Managing Director for FCK School of Excellence, Michael Mio Nielsen
Managing Director for Relocare, Else Christensen
HR konsulent i Region Sjælland, Camilla Trane Magnussen
HR konsulent for Nykøbing Falster Sygehus, Mette Jørgensen-Højgaard

På vores event, vil vi forsøge at fusionere ledelsesteknikkerne fra erhvervslivet og sportsindustrien, hvor sportsindustrien er meget langt i forhold til differentieret talentledelse og ser et talent helt anderledes end erhvervslivet, og hvor erhvervslivet er længere med at se, og gøre noget ved de mere bløde værdier for medarbejderne og ikke mindst familierne.

Kan vi ved at fusionere de teknikker, sætte Danmark øverst på landkortet i kampen om talenterne?

Sportsindustrien har

Differentieret talentledelse
De finder og satser på talenter når de er helt unge og ikke har vist hvad de kan
De hjælper deres talenter til at finde deres egen motivation og hjælper med at skubbe på den. Forskelligheden foretrækkes på et hold

Erhvervslivet har:

Mange virksomhedsarrangementer for det brede fællesskab og stor fokus på familien
Overenskomster og en danske model gør, at alle stort set har ens vilkår og løn
En leder eller en specialist skal først have vist hvad de kan, før de får de store udviklingsprogrammer tilbudt
Virksomhederne har ofte 4 værdier, og de finder medarbejdere som matcher til virksomhedens værdier og medarbejdere som matcher teamet

Succesen afhænger også af dig! Du får et worksheet hvor du kan arbejde med din og virksomhedens egen vej fremadrettet, og får vi stor differentiering imellem deltagerne, arrangere vil lave en lille workshop til sidst, hvor I får til opgave at debattere godt og skidt og dermed få endnu flere redskaber med hjem.

Du kan tilmelde dig på info@relocare.dk eller ved at følge informationen i invitationen som du finder her

Talent_ledelse_og_tiltrkning_af_internationale_talenter._Invitation_til_d._19._juni_2014.pdf

Vi håber at vi ses

De bedste hilsner

Sally Rosendahl:

Bent-Ole Kristensen has joined the Relocare team and will be primarily based in Glyngøre.

Eksportworkshop om Indien

Business i Frankrig

Relocation

Training & Consulting

Mentor Mentee

Relocare

News from Relocare

Relocation

Training & Consulting

Mentor Mentee

Relocare