Having the Right Global Mobility Technology Has Never Been More Important
Global mobility has always played an important role in keeping organizations running smoothly. Through managing employee moves and travel, mobility teams get the right people to the right places on time, while ensuring compliance with regulations, corporate policies, and any tax or cross-border legal requirements.
But in today’s highly disrupted world of work, choosing the right mobility technology is more vital than ever as companies learn to manage and benefit from newly distributed, hybrid and remote workforces.
The best solutions support the growing demands of mobility and HR teams, whose responsibilities have often grown and radically changed during the pandemic. They streamline processes and automate tasks, so mobility teams can work more efficiently and have the time to focus on providing a high-quality experience for mobile employees. They also improve financial oversight and allow teams to develop insights from data analytics that benefit the whole organization.
Here, we examine the forces that are shaping modern business, and how leading global mobility solutions can help organizations handle them.
The pandemic and its legacy
The value of global mobility was highlighted during the pandemic as organizations had to deal with the speedy shift to remote working, a heightened emphasis on employee health and safety, and changing travel and border restrictions for their mobile workforces. Along the way, mobility teams built or enhanced many valuable relationships with IT departments, occupational health, internal communications, security teams – and most of all with business leadership. The right technology allowed them to support these crucial functions at a time of unpredictability and change.
Digital sprints and staying competitive
The right global mobility solutions help businesses stay competitive and grow across borders while undergoing significant change. The restrictions associated with the pandemic accelerated digitalization for almost all businesses and their workers, and there is more change to come. With the eventual re-opening of the world, companies need to ensure they (and their globally mobile workers) are best placed to take advantage of the opportunities ushered in by new and changing trade relationships, markets, immigration policies and supply chains.
A consumer-grade experience
Today’s employees expect the same digital experience at work as they get from providers such as Netflix and Amazon: personalization, ease of use and simple options to choose from. For global mobility, this means workers want to have visibility and input into how they’ll move, where they’ll live while on postings and how they’ll handle details such as filing expenses and getting paid – and they want to be able to do it all from a mobile phone. Global mobility tech with self-service tools and easy-to-use portals gives workers the experience they want and helps businesses to retain top-level talent.
Changing personal priorities
In such unpredictable times, employees have come to reassess their priorities, with many wanting to spend more time with family and re-balance their work and life commitments. It’s a trend that is likely to diminish workers’ willingness to accept long-term postings overseas, or frequent business trips. The right technology helps mobility teams to remain flexible and adapt to changing circumstances and workers’ expectations, so that they can support mobile employees’ desires to work the way they want.
Tougher compliance and tighter controls
The regulatory environment is getting tougher, with greater scrutiny from tax authorities, and evolving data protection rules and immigration laws. Corporate policies around business moves, duty of care responsibilities and fairness of opportunity are also receiving more attention from regulators and governments than in the past. HR and mobility teams can no longer handle this heightened regulatory pressure and risk through manual processes and spreadsheets. Global mobility technology helps businesses to effectively manage their compliance obligations through access to real-time tax rules, maps of workers’ locations, as well as strong workflow management to stay in control of the full lifecycle of employee moves.
A new generation of tools
Through a single view and set of data, the latest generation of technology supports the complexities of global mobility functions and empowers teams to have better, more valuable conversations with other parts of the business. Using joined-up mobility technology also eliminates the difficulties that arise from working in multiple vendor systems and provides a singular source of truth that leads to greater efficiency, higher performance levels and tighter security for employees’ personal data.
For more on how mobility technology can help your organization navigate today’s business landscape, read our full whitepaper, ‘6 reasons it’s time to invest in global mobility technology’.
