Last Saturday, on the 25th of September 2021, an end came to the 1,5 meters distance rule in the Netherlands. We are no longer a ‘1,5 meter society’…

As my role is in the Dutch Relocation team, I will not get into details about the current situation in Belgium and Luxembourg, where we have our other offices. In the Netherlands, I feel a significant change in many aspects since we suddenly ended up in a completely new situation on the 27th of February 2020. On the 582’st day after the outbreak of the pandemic, today was announced that we reached the number of 2 million infections in the Netherlands (of the 17.28 mln inhabitants).

Besides so many local difficult situations in the world that we most likely are not even aware of, I am pretty confident that Covid has been our main joint concern worldwide, present in every destination on the globe. This, together with serious environmental concerns and the well-being of people in countries not as secure and fortunate as ours.

I like to share what this period has meant for our company and brought us. Soon after the start of Covid, we felt a downfall primarily in the Relocation department, as physically, people were temporarily not moving. Some because they did not want to leave their home country out of fear that they would not be able to travel back instantly in case of emergency, some because there were too many border & quarantine restrictions, and several other reasons. In the Immigration department we were still fully occupied making arrangements and assisting foreign employees with their change of employer’s notifications. We also noticed that companies where looking to hire newcomers within the EU or the Netherlands who already were in possession of a valid residence status.

We started working from home, all received our EMG laptop and VPN access to the company server. We were almost burned-out of all TEAMS – meetings, but we started to get the hang of it and today appreciate this so efficient combination of partly working from home and partly joining some colleagues in the office. We made huge steps in our efficiency, compliance, GDPR measurements, training, (inter)national cooperation and partnerships, and the one-on-one relationships with our clients and service partners over the past period. We benefited by looking at all of this with a magnifying glass. Today we have doubled in staff since Covid started, because so many new companies reach out to us for assistance. They all are confident again to open up and use the talent of internationals from all over the world to help their businesses grow. And we are honored to be able to support. To assist our HR clients by giving solid advice, offering pro-active initiatives, unload them of sometimes complicated and usually always time-consuming details. It gives great pleasure to make a difference in helping internationals make their move a transparent, efficient, well supported and welcome one.

I am very proud of all we achieved, our team’s internal connection and our enthusiasm to continue and improve whenever we can in what we do best: try to make a professional and empathetic difference in theBenelux- and Global Mobility support!