Relocation Blog

When you are native-born or have lived in Sweden most of your life, it is easy to forget to mention small things that surprise new relocation recruits. Here are seven tips for Swedish global mobility managers to be sure to share about our unique country and workplace cultures.

1. Your Swedish colleagues will leave early to pick up children even if you are in the middle of an important meeting. It’s not you; It’s them, and you will meet again tomorrow.

2. There are many holidays in Sweden that are unique – embrace them – everyone else will on Midsummer’s eve, Walpurgis, Crayfish premier, Lucia and the list goes on.

Our commitment to a SWIFT DEPARTURE has given us reason to think about this for close to twenty years. We have zillions of stories, I’ll share one early on in my career which gave me and the HR at that company reason to find a system that works and it still does.

 fdsafasdMoving to Sweden tends to happen in the summer months and around Christmas time. These two periods are usually the busiest months of the year when it comes to relocating or new hires. Relocating entails moving into rental properties and the preparations for this can be difficult to deal with while juggling your own holiday as well as covering for absent colleagues.  

There’s a war for talent out there and the main things that makes the top talent tick is actually the opposite of what is happening in our own industry – how will this pan out? Top talent thrive on these opportunities; innovative work places, thin borders between work and leisure, little bureaucracy and few layers within the organization, and high salaries. A environment that encourages trial and error and avoid the “blame game” and “cover your back” mentality. It would also greatly reduce the number of CC emails that we all get.

We send surveys to all our clients, executive/HR and trainees alike to make sure we are doing the right thing, in the right way for the right people. We are human and not perfect, but we for sure strive to be and love when we get ideas and input from our clients to we can do things smarter and fulfil their needs. At the end of the day we try our hardest to make the transfers smooth and our ambitious goal is to make this the best time in the expats’ life. It takes two to tango so we give the tools and the expats use them. Since we often do exit interviews with our clients we know that most of them leave with Sweden in a special place in their heart. Once the obstacle of the move is out of the way, Sweden is a really great place to live.

We usually start talking about our summer vacation while on the current one. Promises are made, next holiday will be planned carefully, early and be just perfect, we will learn from our mistakes. Well the proof is in the pudding… with 3 weeks to go, nothing is planned.. still. Only thing we experience is what isn't possible, because others committed to their promise of last summer and planned in September. Planning is everything. So waking up a beautiful summer morning, I open the Perfect Guide a weekend mag. The archipelago is right here, how about a staycation, overnight trips no need for a foreign language. These places are recommended; hotellflora.se, grindawardshus.se, landsort.nu, hotellhavsbaden.se or to get the real advise go to the glass hut on Strandvägen quay and ask them about the more remote islands. We may have do that too!

When we achieved and re-qualified for the Global EuRA quality seal we also committed to always looking at new things, develop new systems, processes and methods to better serve our clients. Providing home finding in one of the most challenging rental markets in the world we need to educate, set expectations, have loads of empathy, and also provide the real guidance so in the end our clients end up with a place to live. And they always do, the road there can vary though. One of the tools we use for education, internally and externally is Webinars, they can be live or recorded, but the end purpose is the same, information transfer for all of our benefit. How do you prepare your expats to get a smooth landing? Ideas are most welcome!

It’s an interesting question and we on the ground often run into it. What do we do when a family with many children, pets, and without language skills arrive with needs that far exceed the allotted time given by their employer? We try to talk to the employer and while the company is aware of the challenges they are often bound by a policy that says a local contract should be in place with minimal relocation support.

It’s not as hard as you may think. If you move young people or staff that will only stay short term there are solutions.