Talk about a baptism of fire. Alicia had just put down the phone to Phil, a consultant returning home from a vacation in the EU. At the border, the officials had held him and warned that he had exceeded the 90 days he was permitted to stay. He had missed his flight back to the UK, although he caught a later one without his family.
Luckily Phil wasn’t fined, but he could have faced one for several thousand Euros. The immigration officials had told him he would need a visa to return, which may be declined because he had already breached the rules. The problem was that he was due to return to continue a contract there in a few weeks.
This was only Alicia’s first day in her new role as Global Mobility Manager at Psyware PLC. She was one of the senior staff within HR. A quick call to the expert advisory firm started the costly process for applying for the visa, but Alicia knew she needed to get ahead of issues like these.
The challenge for Global Mobility
With Psyware’s rapid growth and global expansion, the Global Mobility function was only recently created to solve the variety of challenges now being faced. Some of the tasks were carried out by external experts who dealt with tax compliance, work permits, and business visas. Others she narrowed down to her responsibility to figure out how best to accomplish them moving forward:
- Where are employees working and how long have they spent there?
- Are we certain that employees have the right documentation to travel abroad for assignments/transfers?
- What are the tax or compliance implications for existing staff and future staff movements?
- How do we create, design, and maintain the documentation for global mobility?
- How should we best coordinate with legal, payroll, HR, and Risk around the movement of talent?
- What should our new remote work policies look like, to support growth, while avoiding significant risk for the business?
It was the first question that concerned her most. Without data, she couldn’t even start to answer the next two questions. Historically, the services partner had required employees to manually fill out a travel calendar at the end of the year. It had worked to an extent, but COVID, Brexit and more global warriors had drastically changed the landscape – data that was manually collected at the end of the year was no longer good enough.
Three immediate concerns
After reflection and some research, Alicia narrowed the problem to three things.
- What happens before travelling
- What can happen during travel
- The problems that might arise after travelling
The key thing was to understand where people were travelling, when and why. Data was critical to solving the issue.
You could fix some of these issues after the event, but she knew prevention is better than the cure and certainly less expensive. Alicia would need a pre-travel assessment for any international travel. For example, if a team travels from the UK to Germany, the company needs to identify who is going and what they will do. The company also needed each individual’s historical travel information to analyse for risks. Alicia would identify what paperwork, such as visas and posted workers notification, were needed using the pre-travel assessment.
She realised that she would also need to know where everyone was working and the plans of those already abroad. Global travel restrictions were changing weekly due to Covid. It was essential that employees were well informed. In addition, information about business travel and personal travel was needed, as Phil’s situation had highlighted.
Issues have also arisen post-travel where tax authority investigations caught up with paperwork.
Finding a way forward
The company had previously used an advisory firm but scaling that up was well beyond her budget. Instead, she needed to find a combination of internal resources, external support, and powerful technology to track, analyse, and report employee travel.
Her existing advisory firm offered technology solutions to help with the challenge, but she felt tying technology and services together would limit her flexibility for the foreseeable future. Instead, Alicia looked around for a solution that offered:
- Flexibility, enabling her to choose and update the right mix of partners across tax, immigration, travel and relocation.
- The ability to have an independent technology layer that can hold the right data and provide the insights she required in an easy-to-use user interface
- API integrations to the other solutions in the company, including the existing HRIS, Payroll and Travel platforms, to collect available data
After a rapid implementation, Alicia now had the information she needed at her fingertips in easy-to-use dashboards. It meant she could rapidly identify risks and take preventative action, including asking her expert advisor to manage the visas, work permits and tax returns as required.
Furthermore, the link to SAP Concur enabled her to identify when and where employees were going to travel. It was combined with information employees provided automatically through mobile phones and laptop apps to provide a comprehensive view on where work was happening.
Fact rather than fiction
Many companies have similar issues created by the constantly changing travel landscape. They are unable to manage employee travel compliance. As we slowly emerge from the global pandemic, demand from customers and employees is going to increase the need for global travel.
Customers will expect face-to-face meetings for crucial decisions and large contracts, while the fear of missing out on a sales opportunity will encourage businesses to become more mobile. There is growing demand among employees for international assignments. Combined with the demand for flexible working, companies will need to lean more heavily on talent mobility planning to ensure they keep their best people.
