Well-designed, clearly structured and regularly updated bilingual PDF document that serves for orientation and support of international PhD students and staff.

It is also useful to have the Welcome Pack downloadable from the website which international PhDs/visiting scholars use to get informed about their stay and activities at your university.

The package should contain:

• Guide on the organisation administrative procedures,
• Cultural guide/information leaflet about the city,
• Contact details for the services offered by the hosting institution to the international researchers prior to or on the day of their arrival.

By providing such a pack the institution ensures that the incoming researcher/PhD student will be able to:

• understand better the hosting organisation's culture,
• understand better the local culture,
• avoid potential misunderstandings.

This is a key service for effective social integration of international PhD students, academics, and researchers, especially in everyday life outside the academic context. It is an advantage if the hosting HEI can provide the service within its own resources (by Language Department/ Language Centre) with experts trained in teaching the national language as a foreign language. Moreover, the language department could also offer other foreign language courses.

If the hosting HEI does not have sufficient capacity, partnerships with other HEIs in the city could be formed or HEI should create a database of language schools in the city/region. The starting point could be the existing practice of providing language courses for incoming Erasmus+ students. A complementary option is to explore whether there are any already existing e-learning national language courses and offer them to internationals as an opportunity to get acquainted with the basics of the language even before their arrival in the host country.     

The FAQ section/page with well-structured quality content organized by relevant topics/categories and easy to navigate is a useful way to organize valuable information that incoming academics often ask. The FAQ page offers a lot of benefits, including:

• Provide quick/standardized responses to recurring questions helping thus incoming academics efficiently navigate through administrative duties and other topics of their interest.
• Reduce the time the HE institution's support staff members need to answer often simple questions.
• Reduce a lot of stress of incoming academics since they receive clear information to make the right decision and move.
• Improve your incoming academics' experience.
• Increase the institution's online visibility on Google and other search engines.
• The FAQ section usually draws most of the traffic.
• Could help in set-up of future chatbots

Considering the fact that English is not the native language in countries, many international PhD students and academic staff members face problems when it comes to filling in the forms necessary for the application process or collecting documents that would confirm their mobility/study/research abroad. Therefore, it would be extremely important (and favorable for both parties involved) to create forms in both the national language of the receiving institution's country as well as in English. The aim of this practice is to produce bilingual documents that can be filled in without seeking assistance or causing confusion.

The institutional welcome website is usually the first source of information about the HEI, typically containing information on the most important aspects related to smooth preparation and actual onboarding. It is important that the information is structured in a way that reflects the logic of end-users perspective. The webpage should be easy to navigate and high-quality SEOs should be used. The information on the website has to be regularly updated including the FAQ section which typically draws the highest traffic. 

Information Systems (IS) are an extremely important aspect of any properly organized institution, academic institutions in particular. As its components collect, store, organize, and distribute data throughout the organization, it could be said that in order to get acquainted with an institution, one has to have access to its information system. However, most academic institutions possess information systems in their country's official language. Due to that fact, international PhD students, academic, and management staff members may find it difficult to understand the data. 

Well-structured checklist covering the necessary steps to undertake to prepare for arrival efficiently. It can help improve the efficiency of preparing for the arrival in a host country/institution by minimizing mistakes. It should be precise, efficient, easy to use, and straight to the point. It may include a roadmap of the necessary steps.

The well-structured checklist should help international PhD students, researchers and other academics efficiently navigate through the administrative duties and procedures right after arrival in a host country /institution. It may include a roadmap of the necessary steps. It should be precise, efficient, easy to use, and straight to the point.

This checklist will help international PhD students and academics efficiently navigate through the administrative duties and procedures before the departure/completion of their stay/position at a host country /institution. It provides a written trail detailing what should be done on departure. It should be precise, efficient, easy to use, and straight to the point covering areas such as (reporting the end of stay at the respective authority office (foreign police office/local registration office/other, deregistration from the system of public health insurance, closing a bank account, termination of electricity provider/utilities/services/phone/internet/TV/garbage, deregistration from university services/ children from day-care, schools, deregistration of car, etc.).

The checklist can have or include a roadmap of necessary steps to be undertaken right before departure from the host country/institution.

The practice includes collecting relevant information and providing it to international researchers and PhDs in a structured and user-friendly way. It is important to envisage a regular update of the information in case of changes in the legal framework, national or organisational specifics regarding recognition of diplomas, study periods, educational outcomes, etc. 

This practice will save the support staff effort and time when providing information and support in view of the above.

Customised assistance provided to international Ph.D. students, academics, and researchers that fits best their specific needs, especially regarding information that may not be readily available on the institution's website or checklist. Immigration issues are the most crucial area of support. This service requires well-trained support staff in this area, with understanding of legal issues, practical procedures and possibly also collaborations and contacts for exact expert information provision. The goal is to provide the highest level and quality of service. Various levels/intensities of service provision might be opted for based on specific needs and available resources.

This service requires well-trained support staff in the area of work-related issues such as employment, health insurance and social security, taxation, and institutional duties with a focus on a specific group of academics – international academic staff. The goal is to provide highest level and quality of the service which might also require in-house legal advice. Safety, healthcare and wellbeing are essential for good functioning and a particular challange facing guests from abroad. It can be safely assumed they would be needing assistance all the way from the simplest general information, through getting through the necessary paperwork, to personal assistance and intervention.

The goal of preparing a check-lists of internal support processes is to collect and describe information in a user-centered manner.

• This checklist can improve the understanding of the most common service delivery paths across the whole organisation.
• It can be designed for several users' scenarios, facilitating service delivery description and visualisation.
• It can improve understanding of the services provided by every department and the organisational capacity to support researchers' needs.
• It can facilitate the training of the newly appointed staff. 
• The checklist can improve service delivery, easily orientating visitors about specific service paths across different departments.

Networking and study trips abroad provide an efficient tool to boost the overall visibility of a higher education institution, including various opportunities for study and work it may offer.

Participating staff members / managers act as ambassadors of their institutions abroad and also expand their own professional expertise and knowledge through the exposure to other institutions' good practice.

Prior research found that informal opportunities for learning sliding into the spaces around formal events were often responsible for unexpected and influential perspective transformations and that these opportunities for learning are often undervalued. It was also proven that international study visits where participants agree their own collective agendas and develop a trusted validating community group are more valuable than transmission models of leadership learning (Andy Cramp, University of Wolverhampton).

EURAXESS portal is the unique, single point of access to content and online tools, related to relocation of researchers and their families and career development. It hosts an online marketplace of CVs, jobs, funding, and hosting ads, connecting PhD students, academics, and researchers with their employers. It is one of the top science job platforms in Europe - with over a million visits per month, 80000 job ads published annualy, 65000+ registered organizations, and 18000+ researchers. In this video you will find out all you need to know about registering on the EURAXESS portal and start posting your first job vacancies. Publishing job ads on the EURAXESS portal is FREE. It helps HEIs and R&D organizations get unprecedented visibility and reach at no cost, and thus facilitate access to the best talents for the newly open positions. The ads, submitted by the organisations awarded with HR Excellence in Research logo will be flagged with the logo to highlight the highest standards in HR practices in that organisation.

Building a welcoming environment and improving support services for international students and staff is a high-level goal that needs to be recognized in the institution's strategies and related action plans. Based on such a strategic approach, institutions could reflect on the topic from a broader perspective related to its contribution to the achievement of the other institutional goals and missions. Incorporating this topic in an institutional strategic plan or internationalization strategy reflects the institution's commitment to these goals and, thus, involves an internal discussion on possible ways to achieve them.

Open, Transparent, Merit-based Recruitment (OTM-R) policy is one of the Europan Commission's flagship policies for development of a single European labour market for researchers. OTM-R implies: 1) publication of detailed descriptions of the open positions (including the career development prospects and selection process), on international web-based resources such as EURAXESS portal; 2) transparent and fair selection practices, as well as continuous communication with all candidates about the selection progress and outcomes; 3) taking into account whole range of experiences, skills and traits of the candidates and assessment in both quantitative and qualitative manner. OTM-R includes detailed description of the recruitment process that is inline with the principles of Charter & Code belonging to the Recruitment group. The following recruitment stages are concerned: advertising and application, selection and evaluation, and appointment. Implementing OTM-R policy will help making your institution more attractive place to work with enhanced reputation and image, enabling you to recruit better candidates and to implement equal opportunities.

One of the most frequent obstacles is the lack of human resources to participate in different types of research projects in the country. Attracting and retaining highly skilled researchers may help to bring new expertise and skills and also to create and maintain research and business relationships. Promoting international mobility of researchers is for the host institution and inevitable part of maintaining them later in the country which may result in overcoming labour shortages and boosting entrepreneurship in knowledge-based sectors in the host country.

Short course/series of courses on local cultural specifics. These include both specifics of everyday life and of organisational culture. The trainees will be able to deal better in everyday communication and to act more efficiently as a member of your ourganisation. Their spouses will find it easier to adapt to local cultural specifics..

Intercultural differences, sometime invisible, may destroy any team. The best way to:

• Avoid miscommunication;
• Ensure good athmosphere at work;
• Achieve better scientific results and
• Retain attracted foreign students and researchers,

Is to integrate them as much as possible into the local and organisational culture. 

The easiest and most effective way is to offer a series of short (preferrably 1-hour-long) courses on different themes from your local and your organisational culture. It is even more efficient if each of them is combined with a relevant informal event involving local researchers or visiting an external event, museum or exhibition. This way the international PhD students/academics and their spouses will be able to combine theory and practice, which in turn will facilitate their integration in the local/organisational culture providing them with opportunities to further socialise and with (hopefully) nice memories.

The main benefit of this practice is that this kind of training improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the support staff work. It also increases the satisfaction levels of international PhD students and academic staff. As a result, the atmosphere in both administrative and academic teams becomes much better since a lot of conflicts and misunderstandings would be avoided and communication will run more smoothly.

The most important thing for this practice is that to achieve sustainable results such courses need to be offered on a regular basis.