Perfecting Allianz’s HR Global Mobility with Design Thinking 

Imagine this: a Munich Allianz employee wants to work in Bangkok for a two-year assignment. What has to happen behind the scenes? What paperwork has to be approved? What are the processes? What about taxes and social security in the host country or a good place to live? How do we make sure the assignee’s family has a good start?

Questions like these arise regularly affecting the Allianz assignee experience supported by the HR Global Mobility team. The details associated with global mobility (GM) can be overwhelming and highly complex – especially concerning the number of people involved from starting the planning until welcoming back the assignee at home. And, you can imagine how difficult it is for assignees who face a great deal of uncertainty and stress, navigating through the process.

Complicated? Let’s start with an as-is picture

The project kicked off in Feb 2019, involving Jürgen Zwerger, Head of HR Global Mobility, Linda Schirmanski, Project Lead GM Transformation and the GDF team (Ramona Petzold, Micha Block).

Gathering feedback from Allianz assignees as well as all other stakeholders involved in the assignment process, the HR Global Mobility team and our team at the GDF created an holistic as-is overview on the assignee experience, roles and GM core processes. This enabled the team to quickly pin point moments of truth and pain points to focus optimization of the assignee experience as well as the efficiency of processes. Prioritization fell into place and allowed the team to plan accordingly. 

Utilizing Design Thinking Methodology

As core of the GDF approach, Design Thinking has been applied by the GDF team co-creatively in projects with many OE’s. To our joint delight, this approach does not only work perfectly for finding user-centered solution, but just as well for employee-centered experience optimization. 

Following the different phases of Design Thinking, the team uncovered information around needs, pain points, context and tools of various stakeholders (including assignees, families of assignees, Global Mobility consultants, Talent Management Team, HR Business Partners, GM payroll experts, Line managers of Host and Home countries, Controllers , 3^rd party vendors)  via user experience interviews. Adding to the complexity of perspectives due to the multiple stakeholders we are engaging with, the project team also analyzed all gathered data as well as all existing documentation from previous initiatives.

Condensing the information to workable formats, the GM team involved in addition to GDF additional experts (HRT experts, CoE experts, etc). and drafted high level an as-is state of

•  GM core processes
• GM end-to-end Experience (Map)
• Roles and responsibilities

Ideating upon possible solutions the team transformed the as-is documents into a high level  to-be format outlining a bigger target picture – while the GDF team always helped maintaining the assignee perspective.

What comes next?  

Wrapping up the planning efforts, the HR Global Mobility team further details out with relevant stakeholders the target picture and defines & staffs the work packages for the transition journey – involving the GDF team continually.