Global companies must realise that they cannot allow tax services and mobility programmes to become a secondary issue. Given the potential tax risk for businesses and workers, it makes sense to tax core services and flexible mobility schemes. This will require a formal global mobility strategy that clearly articulates the programs “business and talent management objectives and tailors companies” investment in contracts to the value they are intended to generate.
Get help from your global mobility advisory team so they can draw up a list of work and residence permits required in the countries where you plan to deploy staff, or make use of the services of specialist global mobility experts. This will not only help you to develop a strategy for each country in the long term, but will also help you build the overall mobility initiative for the company as a whole. Resources for business travellers include country profiles for non-resident business travellers, the use of trusted travel options such as global entry and self-assessments to identify travel and employee needs, and work permits.
Worldwide operations occur when a company sends an employee from their home country to another country to work on business processes in the company’s foreign office. As there is no single coordination point for their relocation and problems arise when relocating across countries, global mobility advisors can provide ongoing support for the posting of staff, including repatriation, where appropriate.
Vivian Yuen, Talent, Mobility and Immigration Manager at Electronic Arts presented at the Society for Human Resource Management’s Global Mobility and Immigration Symposium in Washington, D.C. Electronic Arts brought together several vendors that her team uses as immigration, relocation and tax service providers to work together and improve employee mobility experiences. The Global Mobility Framework, shown on the previous page, is based on two specific dimensions – the enterprise value and the value of talent development – indicating the fact that different tasks have different values for companies and that different values can help employees develop new skills and capabilities.
Whether top management decides what to do depends on the level of internal noise, corporate culture and global mobility strategy, and on the various steps that are taken to define what that means. It does not matter whether a company grows from 10 to 100 employees, relies on a deep global HR knowledge, understands legal requirements, manages employee expectations and provides the right level of support as long as requirements do not change with the size of the company.
Global mobility providers guarantee support around immigration, payroll, relocation, taxes, and other international business rules, and it won’t be long before you make headway in new markets. These statistics open the door to global mobility programs for companies, and employees will be more inclined to work for companies that take their wishes into account.
These days global mobility providers can and largely exist as part of a production environment software solution, no doubt operationally tailored to the specific needs associated with the working environment they’re deployed in. Companies are indeed going global at an unprecedented rate, thanks in large part to digitally deployed structures such as global mobility expertise.
