successfactors purge global assignment

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Global Assignment Best Practice

Anne morris.

• 3 October 2019

IN THIS SECTION

When planning and preparing for a global assignment, there are numerous factors that have the potential to contribute to its overall success, with benefits both for your business and for the assignee. The following guide looks at best practice for employers when deploying personnel overseas, from the employee experience to the flexibility of different types of global assignment.

The employee experience in global assignments

A good employer will recognise that at the heart of its business are its people. As such, ensuring a positive employee experience for overseas assignees can be crucial the success of a global assignment.

As an employer responsible for sending an employee overseas, you will have a legal duty of care, not to mention a moral responsibility and vested financial interest, to ensure the wellbeing of that individual. In particular, when planning a global assignment, caretaking the health and safety of the overseas assignee should be paramount.

Any assessment of travel risks must be tailored to the nature of the work to be undertaken, the attributes of the employee and any factors specific to the host destination. The importance of researching the country and region in which the assignee will be working, and keeping abreast of any imminent changes, cannot be underestimated here.

Even relatively safe destinations can quickly become high-risk regions due to health, safety, security, political or social reasons, not to mention the possibility of natural disasters, so it is important to stay fully informed of changing risks and to be able to relay such information to assignees working remotely.

It is also important to educate each overseas assignee in advance of their global assignment about the location in which they will be working, not least arranging security briefings and training on hostile environment awareness for those travelling to high-risk destinations, as well as educating all assignees on any legal and cultural differences, even for low-risk destinations.

Preparing assignees for cultural integration can often be key to ensuring not only the safety and security of these individuals, but also their overall wellbeing and happiness, on both a professional and personal basis. This could include, for example, the use of pre-deployment programs such as cross-cultural training and intensive language classes. Any training and classes could also be extended to family members accompanying the employee on their global assignment.

You may also want to consider putting in place a benefit and support program, both prior to departure and throughout the lifecycle of the assignment, from deployment through to repatriation.

As such, by creating a safe and supported working environment from the outset, this can significantly alleviate the risk of failure and help to avoid early repatriation, ensuring the global assignment is a success for everyone involved.

The use of technology in global assignments

When conducting business on an international scale, this can give rise to a number of challenges, not least in sourcing suitable data to make informed decisions, both in advance and during the lifecycle of a global assignment. Here, the use of technology can play a crucial role in guiding your global mobility policies and management decision-making.

In particular, where implemented effectively and used correctly, data and predictive analytics tools can prove to be invaluable in gaining insight into operational costs and overall return on investment, as well as employee placement and key performance indicators.

In particular, analytics tools can be used in the following ways:

• Cost analytics – to establish a cost model for your global assignment
• Workforce analytics – to connect the talent in your recruiting database to the skillset needed for your global assignments
• Assignee identification analytics – to focus on the cost drivers of sending the right assignees to the right location
• Employee retention analytics – to predict which overseas assignees are at risk of early repatriation or attrition and which candidates, and/or global assignments, are at a higher risk of failure
• Exposure analysis – to quantify the various levels of exposure to any penalties associated with non-compliance

In fact, with the benefit of these types of analytics tools, together with other forms of technology, global mobility is becoming far easier to achieve in the digital age, and to do so successfully.

It can significantly lessen many of the legal and administrative pressures when managing a mobile workforce, especially when it comes to tax and immigration compliance in a highly regulated environment. Furthermore, technology can also play an important role in enhancing the individual performance of overseas assignees.

When planning and preparing for a global assignment, although the focus will primarily be on selecting the right assignee for the particular assignment and location in question, including their individual qualifications and capabilities, by offering the employee the right tools to do their job to the best of their ability, technology can help to maximise the prospects of a successful outcome.

Indeed, by investing in technology, an employer can not only maximise the productivity of an overseas assignee, but also monitor their progress and even measure assignee experience.

Further, the use of technology through, for example, mobile devices and secured wireless networks, can be extremely effective in maintaining regular communication with overseas assignees, ensuring that they don’t feel disconnected from the company or work colleagues back home. This can be crucial in avoiding early repatriation and the potential failure of the global assignment overall.

Needless to say, however, it is vital that you keep abreast of technological advancements, from connectivity to up-to-date software, to ensure that your overseas assignees can carry out their work cost effectively and efficiently, and that the use of technology is aligned to your organisational objectives and overall mobility goals.

The importance of return investment in global assignments

For you as the employer, global assignments can equate to profitable expansion into both new and existing markets, significantly boosting the global revenue, as well as the reputation, of your business. Furthermore, by sending existing employees abroad, as opposed to recruiting overseas, this can help to streamline operations and expedite growth.

That said, cost control can play a key role in the commercial viability of a global assignment, not least when factoring in the potentially significant cost of both deployment and repatriation of the overseas assignee.

However, global assignment management is not only about number crunching. It is equally about the potential return on investment in various other ways. In fact, overseas assignments can be an excellent way of developing top talent within your organisation, by offering key individual employees a career pathway to more senior promotion.

In particular, the international experience can help train promising and ambitious individuals for leadership, managerial and executive roles, as well as giving them invaluable insight and new industry knowledge to help develop your business back in the UK.

Further, for the individual employee, on both a professional and personal basis, the benefits of working abroad can be significant, not least in terms of potential career progression, increased salary or compensation, as well as the possibility of an international travel experience for their whole family.

As such, given that the overall success of the global assignment will inevitably include the successful repatriation and retention of your top talent at the end of the assignment, you will need to consider what initiatives to implement to alleviate the risk of losing key employees.

In addition to the promise of career progression and a suitably senior role to come back to, useful initiatives could include the use of competitive relocation and repatriation packages, ensuring that your overseas assignees are happy to repatriate and return home. As previously indicated, this should also include the cost of suitable benefit and support initiatives to ensure the overall wellbeing and happiness of your employees.

Understandably, you may feel cautious about controlling the cost of a global assignment, but this must be balanced against the need to attract and retain talent to ensure the continuity and success of your business in the long-term.

Flexibility in global assignments

When determining the potential success of a global assignment, you will also need to consider the nature and duration of the task to be undertaken and the best way in which this can be achieved, from the use of frequent business travel and short-term assignments to long-term assignments and relocation. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Needless to say, each of these different types of global assignment has different benefits and risks, although business travel is likely to prove the most straightforward and cost effective choice in many cases. Here, individual employees can attend conferences and meetings, close a deal, sign new business and network. Indeed, networking can be one of the most lucrative ways to support business growth.

Senior executives and managers can also use extended business trips to undertake various different global assignments, including opening a new office or setting up a new division, without the costs associated with other types of global mobility, and without the same personal and practical challenges of relocating to another country.

In respect of short or long-term assignments, these can be a good way of gaining invaluable insight and industry knowledge to help progress your business back in the UK. The long-term global assignment, in particular, can also be extremely effective in establishing a foothold in strategic and emerging markets. This type of assignment can provide new sales opportunities, new customer bases and significantly increased revenue. It can even enhance your reputation and global influence as a corporate organisation.

However, where you are looking to fill skills gaps or to manage operations overseas, you may want to consider the possibility of permanent relocation, not least because this can often prove to be much more cost effective than the traditional long-term assignment with the associated costs of repatriation. That said, any relocation package will need to include sufficient incentive to attract a suitable candidate to move abroad on a permanent basis.

Key take-aways 

The management of global assignments can be one of the hardest areas for employers and HR experts to master, not least when trying to control costs whilst adapting to the shifting demands of the global business environment. As such, there is a very high failure rate for global assignments.

Further, the consequences of an unsuccessful global assignment can be far-reaching for your business, not only in terms of loss of revenue and wasted expenditure, but the potential loss of key personnel and top global talent from within your organisation.

It is, therefore, imperative that you understand and address the following key global assignment success factors:

• Make a full assessment of any travel risks, tailored to the individual assignee, the specific assignment and the host destination in question, keeping abreast of any changes that may impact on this.
• Educate each overseas assignee in advance of their global assignment about the locations in which they will be working, including but not limited to any safety and security issues, as well as any legal and cultural differences.
• Always ensure the overall wellbeing of your overseas assignees at all times, from deployment through to their return home, as such alleviating the risk of early repatriation. This could be through the provision of cross-cultural training, intensive language classes and/or an ongoing benefit and support program.
• Ensure that you adequately incentivise your overseas assignees so as to avoid losing key employees from within your workforce, for example, through attractive relocation and repatriation packages, as well as a suitably senior role to return home to.
• Utilise data and analytics tools to make informed management decisions in respect of global assignments, from cost control to non-compliance.
• Keep abreast of technological advances that may maximise the productivity of an overseas assignee, or otherwise enhance any profitable business growth.
• Consider the flexibility offered by different types of global assignment, from business trips to permanent relocation, not only with regard to the nature and duration of the task to be undertaken, but also with regard to the personal and professional needs of the prospective candidate who may be undertaking this assignment.

Needless to say, this list is not exhaustive, with a plethora of other factors that may come into play when planning and preparing for a global assignment.

Guidance for HR & employers

For advice and guidance on managing  global assignments,  or any aspect of global mobility programme strategy and implementation, contact us .

Founder and Managing Director Anne Morris is a fully qualified solicitor and trusted adviser to large corporates through to SMEs, providing strategic immigration and global mobility advice to support employers with UK operations to meet their workforce needs through corporate immigration.

She is a recognised by Legal 500 and Chambers as a legal expert and delivers Board-level advice on business migration and compliance risk management as well as overseeing the firm’s development of new client propositions and delivery of cost and time efficient processing of applications.

Anne is an active public speaker, immigration commentator , and immigration policy contributor and regularly hosts training sessions for employers and HR professionals

• Anne Morris https://www.davidsonmorris.com/author/anne/ Family Visa UK: Explore Ways to Apply
• Anne Morris https://www.davidsonmorris.com/author/anne/ Ukraine Refugee Aid in UK
• Anne Morris https://www.davidsonmorris.com/author/anne/ Understanding British Values
• Anne Morris https://www.davidsonmorris.com/author/anne/ Family Reunion and Immigration

About DavidsonMorris

As employer solutions lawyers, DavidsonMorris offers a complete and cost-effective capability to meet employers’ needs across UK immigration and employment law, HR and global mobility .

Led by Anne Morris, one of the UK’s preeminent immigration lawyers, and with rankings in The Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners , we’re a multi-disciplinary team helping organisations to meet their people objectives, while reducing legal risk and nurturing workforce relations.

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SAP SuccessFactors First Half 2024 Release: Make Every Employee a Success Story

Success can take many forms. It’s achieving AI-driven results faster and smarter. It’s unlocking more meaningful and aspirational career development experiences. It’s empowering employees and managers through simple HR-related tasks in the flow of work, freeing up more productive time across the organization.

And for you and your business, you can tell all those success stories – and more – with the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite and our first half 2024 release.

As your organization and employees begin to embrace AI, HR has the opportunity to drive new levels of employee productivity, engagement, and growth. SAP SuccessFactors HCM can give you everything you need – the global foundation, skills framework, people-first experiences, and purpose-built AI capabilities – to help take HR to the next level. With the SAP SuccessFactors first half 2024 release, we are delivering more than 250 innovative features and enhancements.

SAP Business AI

In 1H 2024, we are thrilled to introduce more than 25 new AI capabilities to enable better employee experiences and new levels of productivity.

Among these capabilities include the ability for applicants to provide skills during the application process. This can enable recruiters to see a skills compatibility for each applicant based on matching the applicant’s skills and the job requisition, helping improve applicant screening and time to hire. Furthermore, personalization in SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace is enhanced with new AI-driven recommendation categories, “Ignite Your Role” and “Reach Your Aspirations.” These guided experiences can enable employees to proactively take steps to reach their development goals.

Generative AI continues to be embedded across the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite, including new capabilities to help employees create ready-made performance and development goals and AI-assisted writing to help improve the quality, clarity, and conciseness of writing across a variety of areas within SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Further, with this release, insights based on an employee’s compensation and job history are available to help support managers in having effective and well-informed compensation discussions. 

We have also added more than 15 new Joule capabilities in this release to help both managers and employees get work done in a conversational way, such as creating or changing a position, creating spot awards, clocking in and out, and viewing pay statements as well as time capabilities like requesting time off, checking leave balances, and syncing holidays to Outlook calendars while managers can review and approve time off. Further, employees can now clock in and out using Joule, Microsoft Teams, or the SAP SuccessFactors Mobile app.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central

We are excited to unveil two new people profile experiences – the profile preview and the spotlight view. The profile preview can provide a snapshot of key areas of the employee profile, including job, manager, location, and contact details, to quickly view and connect with others. Additionally, the spotlight view can showcase employee skills and competencies, mentoring and target roles, and other relevant personal and organizational information.

We are also introducing a new org chart experience with a refreshed look and feel. Available on desktop and mobile, users can explore their organizational structure with improved expand and collapse capabilities, which helps provide full accessibility to an employee’s profile preview, with an option to open the new spotlight view.

Customers can now automatically process new hires from SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding into SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. This capability helps further reduce the time to hire, which is especially important with mass, seasonal, and high-volume hiring.

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Global Benefits

With this release, we are pleased to introduce a new benefits enrollment experience for insurance, savings, and pension benefit types. Available on both desktop and mobile, the guided experience for benefits elections can give employees increased convenience with improved navigation and increased confidence with side-by-side plan comparisons and embedded instructional text. Additionally, employees can update dependent information and manage beneficiaries directly from the benefits enrollment process, which helps further streamline the enrollment experience.  

SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking

We are thrilled to share the launch of a new time sheet experience that integrates the latest version of My Timesheet in SAP S/4HANA with SAP SuccessFactors. Employees can now record time for payroll, as well as against activities and cost objects, from a single time sheet across applications. This helps organizations leverage real-time connectivity between HR and finance operations to keep track of employee activity and labor costs and to pay employees accurately and on time.

Additionally, a new monthly calendar view for time sheets can give employees and managers a complete picture of recorded time over a month. Users can drill down into specific days and submit or approve time for pay periods beyond a week, such as biweekly or monthly.

For managers, a new time approval center helps simplify approvals with a centralized dashboard highlighting anomalies for swift resolution. Managers can monitor team working hours effectively, helping to ensure accurate and timely payroll processing.

SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding

With enhancements to the onboarding journey experience, new hires can now use the new Your Onboarding Checklist page to reference and complete all tasks – onboarding data collection, compliance tasks, additional onboarding tasks, and exploring the onboarding guide – from one place with a single view. Available for new hires, rehires, internal hires, and employees with global assignments, this improved experience can save time for onboarding participants while helping to ensure productivity from the start.

And that’s only a fraction of all the innovations we’re bringing to customers in 1H 2024. There’s much more in the release, including new and exciting updates in:

• Generative AI and Joule capabilities
• SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace
• SAP SuccessFactors Compensation
• SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development
• SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management
• SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone

Read the SAP SuccessFactors first half 2024 release highlights brochure and watch the 1H 2024 release highlights video to find out more.

Bianka Woelke is group vice president of Application Product Management at SAP.

SAP SuccessFactors Strategy for Building Future-Ready Workforces

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Grows to 6,000 Customers

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll Natively Supports 50 Locales

2788892 - Unable to Purge User / Employment Because it is a Main Assignment

Attempt to purge an employment fails and the Job result reads: 

"User X could not be purged because it is a Main Assignment. You have several options. You can change the person’s Main Assignment in Manage Data, or you can purge the Main Assignment along with all other users for the person, or you can purge all other users for this person before the Main Assignment."  

Image/data in this KBA is from SAP internal systems, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental.

Environment

• SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite
• SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central 

Reproducing the Issue

Example Scenario 1:

• A user has two assignment - a standard employment and a contingent one.
• The contingent record was created by mistake  with no employment details
• Attempt to purge the contingent worker failed. 

Example Scenario 2:

• Create a contingent worker
• Terminate contingent Worker
• Create standard employment
• Attempt to purge contingent employment failed. 

Example Scenario 3:

• How to Switch Employment Type?
• How to make one of the employment as the main (In case of Concurrent Employment)

Example Scenario 4:

• We mistakenly selected "Rehire with New Employment" instead of doing a normal rehire for an employee
• After this, a new employment was created which generated a new UserID
• We want to delete the incorrect employment, purge the new userID, and continue the employment of the user via the old userID
• However, when initiating a purge, we're getting an error indicating that the new generated userID cannot be deleted as it is tied to a Main Assignment / Employment

The "Main Assignment" or "Main Employment" is automatically set in cases of Concurrent Employment.

For cases of "Rehire with New Employment" or conversion of a Contingent Worker to Regular Worker and vice versa, the same principle applies as technically all of these processes result to separate and distinct employment for employees in the system.

As of the moment, there are certain limitations on determining which is the Main Assignment especially in scenarios where Concurrent Employment Management is not enabled in an instance. This is because the "Secondary Assignment" object in Manage Data, where you can set which should be the secondary employment, is not available when the feature is disabled.

This scenario requires a code enhancement, but in the meantime below is the documented workaround.

A. If you have "Concurrent Employment" enabled in your system.

Make the employment that is failing to purge a concurrent employment by adding it as secondary assignments:

• Navigate to Manage Data
• Create New --> Secondary Assignments.
• Enter Effective Start Date: The Hire/Rehire date of employment (the active one or that you want to be the main)
• Define Person Id external, this can be found in the biographical info, sometimes it is named personId on the UI (the active one or that you want to be the main)
• Define Externalcode, can be any unique string (Any text or/and number string that will make sense to your business scenario)
• Enter Employment/UserId, select employment (the inactive one or the one to become secondary)

Below are UI details:

Result: This transaction will convert current employment into a concurrent employment scenario and set the "Yes" employment as primary/main employment.

Purge KBA: 2088065  -  Data Retention Management - Purge Data - Platform

Having completed the above steps, The purge should work now and remove the Secondary Assignments object employment that was failed previously for scenario 1 and 2 above.

Contact support if need any help.

B. If Concurrent Employment Management is disabled, additional steps have to be performed

• Go to "Manage Employee Central Settings" in Admin Center
• Enable the "Concurrent Employment Management"
• Wait for a few minutes for the feature settings to refresh
• Apply the same steps in Option A
• Go to admin center
• Manage Employee Central Settings
• enable or disable: Concurrent Employment Management

Note:  If you have enabled Concurrent Employment Management and the "Secondary Assignment" is still not available in Manage Data after more than 10 minutes, please do the following:

• If you are a customer (No Provisioning Access)  - Please raise a support case and we will assist you with refreshing some backend settings
• If you are an Implementation Partner (w/ Provisioning Access)
• Go to Provisioning
• Perform the MDF Clear Cache
• Log into BizX > Admin Center
• Perform the OData Metadata API Refresh and Export
• Check if the object is now available in Manage Data

 Please refer to guide:  Implementing and Configuring Concurrent Employment in Employee Central

• 2479753 - Terminating Main Employment for Concurrent Employment
• 2088065 - Data Retention Management - Purge Data - Platform
• 2824594 - System does not sync Employee's concurrent employment with MDF Secondary assignments

Purge Contingent Employment, DRTM, Delete Contingent Worker, ECT-116569, Secondary employment, Main employment, could not be purged because it is a Main Assignment, User xxxxx could not be purged because it is a Main Assignment You have several options. You can change the person’s Main Assignment in Manage Data, or you can purge the Main Assignment along with all other users for the person, or you can purge all other users for this person before the Main Assignment, Manage Employee Central Settings, could not be purged because it is a Main Assignment You have several options. You can change the person’s Main Assignment in Manage Data, or you can purge the Main Assignment along with all other users for the person, or you can purge all other users for this person before the Main Assignment , KBA , LOD-SF-EC-EMP , Employment Information (Employment Details) , LOD-SF-EC-HIR , Hire & Rehire Wizards , LOD-SF-EC-CGA , DO NOT USE - Use EC-CON or EC-GA , LOD-SF-EC-CWF , Contingent Workforce , Problem

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