A Global Mobility Director of a Fortune 500 company – who would like to remain anonymous – sent us the following message:
“I am impressed with your research study regarding the effectiveness of partner support. Your report inspired me to conduct a poll among our expat partners. I wanted to measure their awareness of our generous budget for reimbursable support and the substantial sum of money for partner support that is paid out each month as part of the expat’s salary (aka ‘Gucci money’).
It turns out that only 50 per cent of our expat partners were aware of the reimbursable support and none of them were familiar with the details. Moreover, not one of them knew that financial partner support is included in the expat’s salary payments.
No wonder our expat partners are not very happy with the support we offer. They have no idea what they (can) get! We will be putting this right as soon as possible. Better communication is our first priority for now, because we have just renewed the ‘Gucci money’ policy, unfortunately.
Our second priority is to change as soon as possible our partner support policy by replacing ‘Gucci money’ with real support.”
