I hear a lot about globalization, usually just before (or after, seeing I’m the last to know) colleagues and friends leave Malaysia for pastures green (dollars), tan (sand) or red/white/blue (choose your country).
Say you are an international company with a setup in Malaysia, and have affiliates and branches overseas. If an engineer wanted to quit, but you persuaded them to join up another affiliate in another country instead, would you consider that as a headcount lost to attrition, or take credit that the engineer is still ‘with the company’, and not really a loss.
Some items for discussion (let’s call the displaced engineer a floater):
- Organisation – headcount = organisation – headcount, the way I understand it. A floater out of sight is out of the organisation’s mind.
- Does the floater earn extra income for the original hiring company, ala MLM?
- Now the org. company is short of an engineer earning revenue. Does the mother ship (i.e. headquarters) give it a discount or credit that it has generated a floater?
- Is the floater ever coming back? In some organisations (in Malaysia, I guess ExxonMobil and Shell are two examples), the floaters are meant to come back higher up the management chain, bringing expertise and maturity to their home countries. How does that work for consultants or engineering companies? Oversea companies tend to be older and more established. Would management skills gained elsewhere and applied locally cause companies to be top heavy, to many chiefs, not enough workers?
- Is there any guarantee that the floater will not use the foreign branch as a lauchpad to get a larger renumeration, as they probably now have PR status, or resident status. The floater can quit the overseas company and get more money (I call this a floater with a motor).
- Do you get a lot of expats floating from other affiliates to Malaysia? It doesn’t seem very cost efficient to bring them in, unless they have skills that they can transfer (hah, tech transfer is a topic for a later blog).
Maybe we should all be floaters.
Posted by Wata 
Wata - Malaysian Oil and Gas Engineer 