Meet the team

Last week, our Country Manager Jonas Kempe visited the EuRA - European Relocation Association conference in Villamoura, Portugal to meet up with relocation companies from all over the world. We took the chance to get a quick roundup on his view on the future of the industry as well as his role as country manager. Read on and get to know Jonas!

As the Country Manager for Sweden, what do you see as your main goals and priorities in the next year or so?

In the next year, we’re supercharging our presence in Sweden and the Nordics, while at the same time supporting our global projects. Efficiency, sustainability and local presence are the name of the game.

Our goal is to grow together with our customers, wherever they need our services and want us to go.

Sweden is our stronghold, and I'm making sure my team has all the tools and motivation they need to provide the best relocation services available on the market.

You recently joined the EuRA conference in Portugal. Can you share some highlights, key challenges and trends the relocation industry faces?

Overall, there’s still a high demand for moving people around the world and we don’t see that need diminishing any time soon.

However, one of the main challenges of relocating talent across borders is complying with the immigration and employment laws of the destination country.

It becomes more and more difficult in many countries to get compliance for a work permit, rules are being tightened.

In Sweden, there have been many changes done at the Migration Agency throughout the last year. Thankfully, we have Migration experts in-house who have previously worked at the Migration Agency and can inform our customers promptly about upcoming changes.

It also means that it can be quite a challenge for our customers to get the right talent in place at the right time. This is why we like to tell our customers to contact us early in the hiring process. This way, we can avoid costly mistakes and make sure the overseas talent will make it here on time. We like to think of KEY Relocation as an extension of our customer’s HR team. This way, we learn a lot about our customers’ needs and adapt our services even more. In the end, it means we both benefit and grow together.

It's an interesting time to work with relocation and moving because technology is taking such big steps forward. There are more and more digital platforms with cloud solutions; not to mention Artificial Intelligence (AI). As all processes become more automated, we can spend less time at the desk; manually handling information making sure everything reaches the right person at the right time. This is good news we are a "people's business" and that is what we want to use technology for; free up time to take care of and meet our expatriates in person. Over the years, we’ve invested in some of the best platforms the industry has to offer and will continue to do so.

There’s also a lot of focus on sustainability. We must deal with the fact that we are not a very environmentally friendly industry because we move people all over the world.

But there are things we can do, with focus on reducing carbon footprints, promoting eco-friendly housing, and implementing green mobility solutions and so on.

We recently went through an ISO certification process and know what it takes to look at all aspects of sustainability; there’s a lot we can do to improve, and we keep learning and improving every day.

Referring to what you said about growing with your customers. How do you manage to stay agile, adapting business to customers’ needs in bad and good times?

It’s only doable with good communication – we must listen, stay attentive and sensitive to our customers’ needs and always keep a 'growth mindset'.

Relocation packages used to be more of “one size fits all” but now they are much more detailed and have been replaced with “core/flex” packages.

This places greater demands on HR to manage different packages and it places greater demands on us as suppliers to be flexible and deliver what customers really need and want to pay for. Again, it’s all about communication.

This is also one of the reasons why we provide our customers with a single point of contact (SPOC) throughout the relocation journey, from the first initiation to departure.

We know from experience that this is the best way to provide the safest and most efficient relocation experience for the employee and HR.