Staff increasingly likely to resist relocation by companies because of family ties

Research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that the help offered by organisations to encourage relocation is mainly financial, including assistance with removal expenses. Many employers remain unwilling to acknowledge the impact that moving may have on their employees’ families, including the careers of working partners, children’s education and care for older relations.

Anne Green and Angela Canny of the Warwick Institute for Employment Research based the analysis on national survey data and on interviews with relocation agencies, employers, trade unions and government agencies. They also carried out in-depth interviews with senior managers in 12 case-study organisations and with staff and their partners who had been given opportunities to relocate. They found that:

• Employers’ business needs and the employee’s career progress were the two main reasons that staff were asked to relocate. Those asked to move to another site were predominantly younger or middle-aged men in higher-level, non-manual jobs.
• Partners’ attitudes to relocation ranged between willingness to ‘fit in’ and resentment at having to give up their own jobs or local connections with family and friends. In general, partners were less sympathetic than employees to relocation and more likely to end up sacrificing their own careers.
• Employees tended to link relocation with career development and were worried about the implications of refusing to move. Even so, there was evidence that staff were becoming more likely to set constraints on when they were prepared to relocate and how far they were willing to move.
• In addition to its effect on working partners, relocation sometimes had a powerful impact on other family members. The researchers found examples of young people leaving home prematurely when their parents decided to move. There were also cases of parents having to move away from their children from a previous relationship and an older parent who had moved out of the family home rather than leave the neighbourhood.
• Some employees chose to commute long distances, hoping to minimise the impact on other family members, including children settled in local schools. However, this also had its own adverse impact on families and was hard to sustain for long periods.

The study found that employers had made little formal attempt to assess the impact of relocation on staff and their families and that ‘success’ was usually assessed in narrow terms of employee productivity. The authors recommend that businesses examine the rationale for moving staff between sites in more detail, and look for ways of minimising the disruption to their families and work-life balance.

Anne Green, a Principal Research Fellow, said: “Employers should be asking themselves if relocation is really necessary and whether the same organisational goals could be met in other ways, including shorter distance moves that involve less family disruption. As partners’ employment has become more of an issue for families, employees have become more assertive about relocating. This means that employers are likely to have less room for manoeuvre in future if they want to retain valuable staff.”