What is global mobility? What are its benefits? And how can international payroll support your global mobility ambitions?
What is global mobility?
Global mobility sees companies work with employees around the world. For a UK company, that may mean working with UK employees who temporarily or permanently relocate overseas. Or it may mean working with an international workforce based (potentially) in any country anywhere.
The benefits of global mobility
Global mobility has the potential to increase competitiveness, harnessing an international pool of talent and innovation. It can help fill skills gaps you can’t fill at home. It can give your people the flexibility to work wherever they choose, increasing staff happiness and retention. And it can bring your business new perspectives, increasing the level of cultural understanding and, perhaps, even its international reach.
For workers, employee mobility can help your people develop new skills and build fresh experiences. It can improve the language skills/capabilities of your team and organisation. It can help them achieve their ideal work/life balance while remaining loyal to your organisation.
How a global payroll supports global mobility
Inevitably, your workforce will want paying, and when that workforce is scattered across the globe, payment presents some significant challenges. Currencies, tax laws, national insurance (or the international equivalent), pensions and more will all need to be understood and complied with. And that’s where an international payroll partner can add value to your organisation.
Alleviating in-house burden: If global mobility is already part of the way you work, you’ll know all too well the importance that payroll – or, more correctly, accurate payroll – has on its success. An international payroll relies on clear, consistent, accurate data, and the responsibility for ensuring that can be onerous. By outsourcing international payroll, you can alleviate the burden on your managers.
Ensuring compliance: Global mobility has flown under the radar of most revenue services. Recently, however, more governments have started to realise the revenue potential of foreign nationals working in their territory. As a result, tax legislation has been changing at pace and, for most organisations, ensuring compliance with that evolving tax landscape (and avoiding the corresponding fines) isn’t easy.
Outsourcing international payroll places the burden of ensuring compliance on the payroll company, which makes life considerably easier for you.
Cutting costs: There is a risk that an expanding global workforce risks expanding costs in the logistics of paying them all. Because international payroll companies are set up and resourced to do nothing but manage payrolls, there are significant cost efficiencies to be found in outsourcing to a specialist.
Harnessing tech: As global mobility increases and international payroll becomes more complex, so payroll technology is helping to mitigate that complexity. For organisations managing their own global payroll, it may be difficult to justify the expense of new payroll tech investments when there are so many other competing priorities for expenditure.
That’s not the case for payroll companies. Outsource your international payroll and you get to harness the latest technology without any additional impact to costs.
Responding to global events: An unavoidable consequence of global mobility is that your organisation suddenly risks direct exposure to events that would otherwise only have had an indirect effect at worst.
In just the last year or so, consider how workers in Ukraine, Russia, Lebanon, southern Europe and more will have been affected by the enormous political, environmental and/or financial upheavals facing those areas.
A global workforce requires a global payroll capable of operating flexibly and responding fast when employees face trouble. An outsourced international payroll has the resources and experience to respond quickly.
Discover what more you could do with the insights from your international payroll. Talk to us now.