The Asia Pacific Talent Mobility Conference was held on 24-25 October 2013 by PEO Group. The event provided an opportunity for sharing among HR practitioners from Hong Kong and China but also show casing the quality of the HR leadership resources in this region through both the conference organizers – PEO – and the presenters.
Day 2:
The key themes of the conference were sharing of inspiring and innovative strategies and initiatives to attract, retain, develop and measure talent as essential to competing in a highly competitive talent recruitment environment.
The lead off speaker Winnie Chiu, Principal Consultant, Up and Grow focused on “Where to find talent and how to improve retention” presented against the background of challenges that CEOs in Asia indicate are key to their organizations. Topping all lists was the importance of human capital along with the need for operational excellence, innovation and a global mindset. One of the keys for success is a comprehensive talent acquisition and development system that addresses the key business challenges and leads to higher levels of engagement, performance and retention.
Winnie advocates good diagnosis and addressed concerns from the audience that some 360 degree surveys alienate managers more than they help. The advice she gives clients is to focus 360 surveys on development as a means to avoid managers and executives seeing these as performance evaluations.
Fred Schlomman, Managing Director for AIRINC Asia Pacific Limited presented some key findings of their Host Based Approaches Survey Report of over 50 global companies with large international assignee populations in late 2012. The report helps firms answer the question whether their moving staff are better or worse off with a host-based or a home-based package. The report identifies the benefits and challenges to using host-based schemes and when these schemes work well and when they don’t. The host-based scheme can be a lower cost way than the full Home Based Balance Sheet approach as well as ensure equity with host location peers. The challenges include wage disparities between sending and receiving locations as well as benefits portability and costs and complexities in tax, social security and pensions. The bottom line is that successful host-based solutions are dependent on a firm’s resources, industry, locations, mobility philosophy and business needs. The report is available through their website.
Eva Lo, Director of Knowledge Management for Langham Place Hotel shared her personal experience working across Asia and North America and her own group’s experience in Developing Effective Cross Cultural Teams. Eva took the audience through a participatory exercise that identified what is culture and what are some key cultural differences in how we communicate and interact as well as shared how their hotel is engaging their employees in developing better skills and understanding of different cultures. As well as demonstrating using the audience response to cultural issues Eva showed how inclusive she is by involving staff from the hotel in the session.
Tony Jasper, Tax Principal, Global Employer Services, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu spoke on “Asia’s evolving compliance environment: Top 5 tax issues for mobility to get in front of.” One of the key issues is the real and emerging need for a comprehensive compliance program for a firm’s Frequent Business Travelers as this is an identified top 5 tax issue. Among other issues is the handling of tax related to equities as well immigration and social security and home country filing. Recent changes in the PRC such as Bulletin 19 are bringing increased focus on immigration such that this is a key priority tax issue facing firms with employees moving in and out of China. Other regimes such as in Singapore are making changes also. The speaker recommends that firms need a fully developed risk profile that balances risk and reward based on sound policy analysis and determined thresholds before your firm gets caught out with people with serious tax or immigration problems based on ignorance of changing regulations.
The conference ended with a lively and engaging panel discussion on Trends and Future Outlook in Global Mobility with panelists and audience members sharing issues and experiences. Panelists included Katherine Wong, Client Solutions Manager, AIRINC, Winnie Chiu, Up and Grow, Paula Waler, Manager Global Mobility Solutions, Crown Relocation and Allan So, Event Manager and conference host/convenor of PEO (HK) Co. Ltd. who facilitated and moderated.
