What You Need to Know
Traditionally, organizations have expanded into other countries in order to engage with new audiences in new ways and diversify perspectives to meet global demands, among other reasons that could vary from cost control, employee satisfaction and speed to market. What’s less traditional, but has been brewing for years, is the emergence of a borderless workforce. Catalysts precipitating this most viscerally have been advancements in technology to support payroll, compliance, employee communication, hiring, and collaboration across international organizational footprints that are vast. An even greater factor has been so-called economic globalism. In tandem to all this, attitudes over the idea of a borderless workforce have fallen in line, largely in support of the trend.
Against this backdrop, the response of employers worldwide to COVID-19 has, in effect, turbocharged this already inexorable march in the direction of borderless workforces. It’s among the pandemic’s greatest lasting impacts on business. Forbes magazine reported that, although technology had already increased the ability for global workforces to integrate, the pandemic accelerated the creation of transboundary communities — at once shifting the focus from where employees work to how they work and eliminating borders between companies, people and countries. Meanwhile, the now-quickening pace of technological innovation is expanding employee choice and increasing demand for a positive employee experience.
In order to ensure effective global mobility, organizations must consider having systems and strategies in place to support workforce onboarding, managing and paying employees and contractors across borders. Especially without a proper approach to global payroll, organizations probably won’t meet their global mobility potential. Any employer about to face these circumstances (or already in the midst of them) must strategize quickly and effectively, wherever and whenever appropriate turning to the proper technology and drawing on the pertinent best-practices to help ensure its workforce can move as smoothly as possible from one international location to the next.
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