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FT editor Roula Khalaf picks her favorite stories in this week’s newsletter.
Not long after I turned 30, I was sent to Washington DC to become the bureau chief of an Australian newspaper in conditions that today seem unbelievable.
The movement was less impressive than it seems. The office consisted of one employee — me — and I was not the youngest foreign correspondent at the time.
But what was extraordinary by today’s standards was the magnificence of my expat perks. My rent was generously subsidized. I had top notch health insurance and allowances for my car, phone, newspaper and lots of other expenses. If I had children, their school fees would also be paid.
Other expats I knew had similar benefits, plus annual flights home for the whole family and money for things like accountants to deal with the Internal Revenue Service. Some were given extra dosh to make sure taxes collected abroad didn’t leave them worse off than they would have been had they stayed at home.
These flashy deals haven’t completely died out, but corporate relocation experts tell me they’re on the wane in many companies, not just in the media industry.
I suspect this is one of the reasons I keep hearing about a strange development in the workplace: less interest in the idea of working overseas.
This was happening before the pandemic, as traditional packages designed for men and their non-working wives clashed with the rise of professional women who sometimes outnumbered their partners.
Expecting a dual-income couple to cut their income in half and ditch their careers in exchange for a reduced expat package always seemed problematic, especially if they were also asked to endure the stifling air of Delhi or the crime of Tijuana.
However, to the surprise of some experts, indifference to international contributions appears to have intensified since the pandemic.
“It’s a bit of a shock,” says Caitlin Pyett, a consultant with the Crown World Mobility Group who has worked in the moving industry for nearly 30 years.
She told me she first noticed the trend late last year, when clients in industries ranging from renewables to medical technology said they were having a harder time convincing employees to take on foreign contracts.
This was unexpected at a time when the pandemic triggered an explosion of globe-trotting digital nomads, often in their 20s, who seemed to represent the future direction of work.
Pyett’s firm began doing research to understand what was going on. In the meantime, he has theories, starting with the appeal of working from home that workers 40 and older have discovered during the lockdown.
“They’ve developed the feeling that they can work perfectly from their kitchen table, so why go back to the office, let alone get on a plane and go to the other side of the world?”
This sentiment may help explain why international orders have changed at companies such as Ingka, the largest owner of Ikea stores. The group still sends employees abroad with their families for some important business roles. But a spokeswoman told me that the rise of telecommuting and “dual career challenges” had seen a “significant increase” in more flexible arrangements where staff commute or work on one-off projects in other countries.
There are other signs of a wider decline in the desire to work remotely.
A recent Boston Consulting Group global study of more than 150,000 workers found that the proportion willing to move abroad for work fell from 78 percent in 2018 to 63 percent in 2023.
This may be because the world is becoming less open, while work is becoming more global, says co-author Orsolya Kovács-Ondrejkovic.
By this he means that events like Brexit and geopolitical conflicts have made it harder for people to physically move abroad, while the rise of flexible working has made it easier to stay put. “Now you can work remotely in a better job without having to move,” he says.
In other words, before the pandemic, it was hard to imagine that one would gain much experience or benefit from working in China while based in Europe, but now that thinking has changed.
All of these explanations make sense and I can see why a well-completed assignment is lost on the expat. But moving to a new country for work can still be a wonderful thing, both for life and career, as anyone lucky enough to do so will almost certainly find.