Graebel’s innovative solution lowers costs, enhances employee productivity in Singapore
The Client
Fortune 50 information technology company
- Employs 430,000 people worldwide
The Challenge
The client projected that it would place approximately 150 highly-skilled people in Singapore over a 12-month period. Cost control and employee satisfaction were the company’s top priorities.
As with most cities and countries in the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region, the housing market is tight in Singapore—the average cost of a two-bedroom temporary living arrangement is roughly $8,000 per month. Properties move on and off the market quickly, and it takes 20 days on average to secure a property.
We create win-wins for our clients and their assignees
Project Summary
Relocate highly-skilled employees to Singapore in a way that maximized cost savings and employee satisfaction in this high-cost, low-availability housing market.
The Solution
Singapore is home to one of Graebel’s APAC operations centers. The veteran team there designed a pilot program for the client that would eliminate costly and disruptive interim steps in the relocation experience. The client agreed to try this model for its first group of assignees—30 people in all.
Rather than placing assignees into costly temporary housing for 30-60 days until their household shipments arrived, they were moved directly into their long-term housing space. Graebel provided each assignee with a menu of rental items to choose from, along with a pre-determined budget. The properties were staged with these items before the employees arrived, and the items were removed when the household shipments were delivered.
The Results
- Employees secured housing in just seven days—far less than the typical 20-day wait
- The cost of housing a new assignee for the first month or two was reduced from an average of $8,000 per month to between $2,000 and $4,000, including the cost of renting the furniture in those initial months
- Interim moves from temporary to permanent housing were avoided so an employee’s orientation to a new work assignment was not disrupted
Graebel has fine-tuned and expanded this relocation model for other clients with employees on long-term assignments in difficult housing markets such as Mumbai, India.