You moved the employee. Nobody moved his family.

Ask any mobility team what went wrong on their worst relocation and almost nobody says the work permit. The permit is the part with a process attached, an owner, a deadline and somebody chasing it.

The family is the part where everyone assumes somebody else is handling it.

The top row gets a spreadsheet. The bottom row gets a sentence in an email — “his family will join him once he’s settled” — and then six months of nobody quite owning it.

What that costs, in the order it usually happens

First he is fine. He is busy, the job is new, there is a lot to learn and the apartment is empty but that is temporary.

By the second month he is flying home every third weekend, which nobody is paying for and which is quietly wrecking him. By the third he is on calls at odd hours with a wife who is managing two children and a full-time job alone, and who has begun to say that this is not working. By the fourth, the school year in the new country has already started without his children in it, so even when the visas come they now wait for the next intake.

And by the fifth, somebody in your business is having a conversation about whether he is going to stay in the role at all — a role you spent a year hiring for and a fortune moving him into.

The four things that catch people

The dependants were left until after.The instinct is to get the employee in and sort the family out once he has an address and a payslip. But dependant applications generally hang off the main permit, and starting them late does not just delay them — it stacks them behind a school calendar and a tenancy that will not wait.

Nobody asked what the spouse gives up.She may have a career, and whether she can work in the new country is not a footnote to her — it is the whole question of whether the family goes. Rules differ enormously by country and by the route the employee is on. Finding out afterwards is finding out too late.

The children’s papers were nobody’s job. A birth certificate that does not match a passport spelling. A child from a previous relationship whose other parent must consent to the move. A school that wants documents in a form no one has. Each is small and each takes weeks.

The school year was never in the plan. Term dates are the one deadline in this whole process that genuinely cannot move. A permit approved in October for a family whose children needed to start in September has arrived on time administratively and far too late in every way that matters to them.

What we do differently

We start by asking who is actually moving. Not who has the job — who is moving. A wife, two children, a mother-in-law who lives with them, a child from a first marriage. That conversation takes ten minutes and it changes the entire shape of the timeline.

Then we work backwards from the date the family needs to be there, which is almost never the date the employee starts. It is usually the first day of a school term, and everything else is planned to hit it.

The dependant applications are prepared alongside the employee’s rather than after it, so nothing waits on a permit that has already been approved. And you can see all of it on one screen — him, her, both children, each at its own stage — instead of finding out where things stand by asking someone who has to go and look.

We also tell you early when the answer is uncomfortable. If the spouse cannot work on that route, you need to know before he accepts, not after she has resigned. If the school term cannot be met, better to move the start date by a month than to move a family into six months of living apart.