This year's GWS 2024 was one of the most successful Global Workforce Symposiums (GWS) ever, with over 1450 attendees and 430+ corporate members participating in the flagship conference sponsored by WERC. Our industry association’s motto is “Talent Everywhere” and the conference theme of “Empowering Talent" resonated throughout the week.
Mobilizing talent means creating business opportunity, achieving growth targets, attracting investment, and spurring innovation. Our industry’s contribution to enterprise value creation is to make the critical point that hiring the right talent and then supporting them with appropriate, meaningful benefits, for relocation and throughout their careers, is the best way to attract and retain the people who build the value of the business. We’re excited to champion this core and essential purpose of the talent mobility profession.
Dwellworks and Dwellworks Living were well represented at GWS, as sponsors, panelists, and subject matter experts in destination services, temporary living, and global compliance. We were also fortunate to host a dynamic session on the closing day. “Got Talent? Refocusing on Getting the Right People to the Right Places at the Right Time” was a call to action to our industry to claim our essential value in professfionally mobilizing talent and, more importantly, in forging connections between talent, mobility, and building business value.
I was honored to moderate a panel that included Emerson Ross, Senior Mobility Manager at Walmart, Sophy King, President at Envoy Global, Ron Dunlap, CEO of The Graebel Companies, and Anupam Singhal, CEO of WERC. Together we talked through the opportunity for everyone in our industry ecosystem to position themselves as essential in enabling the core mission of talent mobility, which is to provide business value. Together, as experts in our respective roles, we can provide the benefits and support that top talent is asking for and ensure these key difference makers arrive on assignments fully enabled to add value from day one. As multiple studies show, the investment in talent secures associate engagement as well as financial return.
As practitioners in our various areas of expertise, we all have proven track records of meeting core operating metrics like service satisfaction, customer responsiveness, and cost control. Our urgent mission is to pull the lens back from a focus exclusively on cost control and transactional metrics to a more elevated role in ensuring that top talent chooses to accept opportunities to relocate, and through that choice, to tangibly impact the success of their employer’s business. A successful mobility and assignment experience not only enables career advancement and business impact, but also the opportunity for high-potential, high-contribution talent to become advocates and influencers for the value of relocation inside their organizations.
In our session, we shared the basic math as follows: talent and payroll expenses are aproximately 50% of a company’s total annual operating expense, and relocation is a small sliver of that cost given that typically no more than 5% of a company’s staff relocate in a given year. Talent mobility is an expense that we estimate is one-half of one percent of a company's annual revenue but has an outsized impact on enterprise value creation. With a talent-led focus, we have the opportunity to reinforce that well-managed, strategic deployment of talent can take the best companies to the next level.
I am energized by the potential our industry brings to drive growth through strategic, professionally managed talent mobility. I invite you to connect with me and the Dwellworks team to learn more about refocusing our industry’s business purpose on value creation and growth by enabling successful talent everywhere.
Dwellworks is the world’s largest provider of destination-related services and temporary living solutions for the globally mobile workforce and business travelers. We provide business-to-business solutions for Fortune 1000 and emerging companies directly and through their relocation management partners. Whether a company needs to relocate its employees across the world or the country, we provide a range of support services to help employees and their families transition successfully from their home location to a new destination.
Dwellworks operates according to our core values of Integrity, Teamwork, Performance, Innovation, and Fun. These are the root of everything we do – from the Teamwork aspect of sourcing and supporting our helpful local Consultants to assist any relocating employee in hundreds of cities worldwide with their move, to the Integrity of our highly-trained Intercultural experts who are here to help transferees adjust to new cultures and confidently settle into their destination locations, to the Innovation of our myDwellworks technology platform that familiarizes employees on assignment with their destination and enables customized conversations on properties, schools, and situation-specific needs.
Dwellworks supports the diversity of our clients’ globally mobile workforce with personalized destination solutions in 16 countries, covering major relocation markets. Dwellworks has consistently responded to the mobility services and needs of our global clients. In 2020, Dwellworks launched Dwellworks Living to expand our original portfolio of corporate housing markets into a full-service corporate housing operation, offering alternative accommodations for relocation and business travel customers in 125 countries. Our full-service real estate brokerage, Station Cities, supports home rentals, sales, and purchases in the Tri-State New York area and Chicago. Visit our homepage, learn about our services, and read our blogs to learn how we can help with your relocation and business travel needs.