At a recent conference, I attended a session on Measuring ROI in Global Mobility. The title promised substance. Instead, I got a parade of phrases built to impress an executive’s ear: revenue risk, million-dollar launches, speed to market.
They sound strategic. But global mobility has no visibility into them.
We don’t know whether moving a software engineer captured market share. We don’t have access to R&D timelines to prove a patent landed faster. We don’t sit in Salesforce to verify that relocating a sales leader closed a deal.
Then came a big moment — a slide with an “ROI equation”:
Mobility ROI = Talent Outcomes + Experience Scores + Business Enablement ÷ Cost per Assignment
It looks convincing on a projector. But peel it back and the math disintegrates:
- “Talent outcomes” is code for career progression. Mobility can’t measure that without HR performance data on both assignees and non-assignees in similar roles
- “Business enablement” is essentially speed to market — a buzzword we can’t substantiate.
- Even “cost per assignment” isn’t straightforward. Compensation, tax equalization, and payroll allocations often sit beyond mobility’s reporting lines. Now, it is good to debate whether global mobility should have eyes on all of these costs, but frequently they do not see the whole compensation and tax picture.
Yes, equations like this look sexy. But they collapse the second you try to operationalize them.
Another gem: “Global mobility strengthens employer brand.”
It sounds awesome. No company’s reputation has ever shifted in the market because one assignee’s relocation went smoothly. That’s magical math — elegant in theory, missing in data.
To be clear, not all measurement talk belongs in the recycling bin.
Employee experience scores matter. Retention sometimes can be measured — though if you relocate eight people a year, you don’t have a dataset; you have anecdotes. But the rest? It’s KPI without weight.
And the lack of weight doesn’t persuade CFOs.
The people on stage were right: Mobility has spent years defining itself by how well it could report on the cost of relocation. That naturally begat we can also help your cost control. And that made it easy for executives to view us as expense managers, not business enablers.
The answer isn’t to swing wildly toward PowerPoint economics.
The answer is to measure what we can prove — and translate it into the metrics executives already trust: risk avoidance, compliance assurance, and project readiness.
That’s the real conversation worth having.
And that’s where I’ll go next week.
