On any given weekday morning, we open our email inboxes with bated breath, waiting for the barrage of pings – a list of unopened company-wide notifications, daily newsletters, and notes from colleagues vying for your attention. Overwhelmed, you may take a brief break, instinctively reaching for your phone, swiping away the clutter of notifications from apps and message inboxes. You’re desperate to get to the meat – the good stuff – but you’re left having to weed through the clutter first. Welcome to the age of information overload!
As mobility professionals, we manage A LOT of information from multiple sources. Status updates, trends, news alerts, policy details…and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’re responsible for combing through this, compiling and presenting the data that matters the most to our mobile employees and stakeholders.
But being the gatekeeper of this information is no easy feat, particularly during this era of rapid change and disruption – to the mobility realm and the world of work. Companies and their employees are being bombarded with data and information daily, so much so that the important messages can quickly get buried until it’s too late to react.
This has emphasized the role and immense value of the RMC, and clients are leaning on their mobility partners to manage and filter the myriad of information from multiple sources. They’re not looking for general advice; they want the trends and knowledge that relate directly to their program, help to tell their story and allow them to make big decisions with confidence and clarity.
As an RMC, our supplier network’s strength allows us access to the up-to-the-minute updates we need in every corner of the world that our clients’ programs touch. But it’s not enough to make this information available to our clients – we need to limit the impact of information overload on our clients, taking care that what we are communicating to them is relevant and worthwhile.
A great example of leveraging our collaborative supplier partnership to support clients with the correct information was the conflict in Ukraine. Leading up to this, in the final months of 2021, there was a lot of conflicting information circulating about whether or not Russia would invade, and clients naturally felt anxious about their employee populations in Eastern Europe.
Shân Norman, Vice President, EMEA, describes our response:
“Many of our DSPs, temporary accommodations providers and local schools were instrumental at this point to help gather the information that we needed, compiling it in one place, and using it to provide clients with customized recommendations for proactively planning for their employees on the ground. Aside from the conflict in Ukraine, the past few years have been littered with so many evolving situations impacting how we could move talent from A to B. Coronavirus guidance was consistently changing globally, shipments were continually delayed…we had no choice other than to be nimble and agile with each relocation. Through this, our clients truly witnessed the value of coordination between a supply chain and an RMC to work as an extension of the GM team, ensuring the right people receive the information they really need, when they need it.”Shân Norman
Mary DeVeau, Weichert’s Global Supply Chain Director, has also been working closely with our supplier partners as we’ve supported our clients impacted by the Ukraine conflict. Mary echoes many of the same sentiments as Shân, namely that our Supply Chain has been critical to strengthening our role as trusted advisors to our clients:
“Our goal for establishing our Supply Chain was always to develop deep partnerships, never treating our suppliers as possible vendors – and this commitment has allowed us to build long-term relationships with an average supplier tenure of 12-15 years. We invest a great deal of time into nurturing these relationships, including involving, and engaging our partners in interactive panels, roundtables, and training opportunities…we want them to understand our business lifecycle and the critical role they play in it. Our supplier partners truly go above and beyond to support our clients, and their guidance has been instrumental, particularly during the Ukraine crisis. Our DSP partners throughout Poland, Hungary, Romania, and many other EU countries, have been providing us with consistent, on-the-ground updates that have allowed us to develop customized proposals and recommendations for our clients with populations within these regions. Relocation is so much more complicated now than it was even two years ago, and we’re so appreciative and grateful for the tireless support of our supplier partners in helping us make work happen.”Mary DeVeau
As an RMC, we depend upon strong lines of communication with our supply chain to help draw out the “meat”; the pertinent information that can directly impact our clients. But our clients depend on us to present it in a way that doesn’t add to their daily information overload, giving them what they need to know, and showing them how it fits into their mobility story. And, it is important to remember that this may look different for every client.
Integrated with our supplier partners, Weichert GO’s interactive and visual-rich dashboards allow us to easily customize how we present information to our clients, giving them a more transparent view of their data and processes, in whatever way they want their story to be told.
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