One employee, multiple journeys: building a more agile approach to Global Mobility

Traditional assignments now sit alongside international business travel, overseas remote working, short-term projects and international commuting, creating new challenges for employers seeking to balance flexibility with compliance.

Recent discussions across the Global Mobility industry, including at the ECA International Mobility Hub, highlighted a common theme: agility is no longer optional.

Global Mobility no longer follows a single path

Traditional international assignments remain an important part of Global Mobility, but they now sit alongside business travel, overseas remote working, short-term projects, international commuting and other less formal cross-border arrangements.

One employee may move between several of these categories during the course of a year. A UK-based senior leader, for example, could undertake a six-month assignment in Germany, work remotely from Spain for several weeks and make regular business trips to other countries.

Each journey may create different tax, payroll, social security, immigration and corporate tax considerations. However, in many organisations, each part of that journey is still managed separately.

The Mobility team may track the formal assignment. Another team may deal with the remote-working request. Business travel may be monitored through a separate process or platform, if it is centrally monitored at all. This can lead to duplicated information, fragmented ownership and no single end-to-end audit trail of the employee’s cross-border activity.

This is not simply an administrative inconvenience. Without a complete picture, employers may struggle to identify when obligations arise, apply policies consistently or evidence the steps taken to manage compliance.

What mobility teams told us

The discussions during the Blick Rothenberg session at ECA, supported by a series of live polls, provided a useful snapshot of how organisations currently track different mobile populations.

• For tracking assignees, spreadsheets and manual processes remained by far the most common response, selected by 80% of participants
• Dedicated technology or a mobility platform was selected by 27%, while 7% referred to an external service provider
• No respondents said that assignees were not tracked centrally

The position was notably different for business travellers.

• Of the 14 participants who responded, 43% said business travellers were not tracked centrally
• 29% relied on spreadsheets or a manual process
• Only 21% selected dedicated technology, and 7% used travel and expense data

The visibility gap was greatest for remote workers.

• Half of respondents said remote workers were not tracked centrally and 43% relied on spreadsheets or manual processes
• None selected a dedicated technology platform, travel and expense data, badge access information or an external service provider

When participants were asked to identify their biggest headache in managing a mobile population, the responses covered a broad range of practical challenges. These included knowing who mobile employees are, receiving late notification of employee movements, overseas remote working, assignment costs, immigration, responsiveness, employee engagement with compliance and managing expectations.

These are different issues, but many share the same underlying problem: organisations cannot manage what they cannot see early enough.

Why agility starts with good data

Agility is sometimes understood as the ability to approve a move or respond to an employee request quickly. In practice, genuine agility requires more than speed.

An organisation needs sufficient information to understand the implications of a proposed arrangement, involve the right stakeholders and make an informed decision. Where information is incomplete or spread across different systems, teams may spend time reconciling records, repeating questions or addressing an issue after an employee has already started working in another country.

This challenge is becoming more significant as tax authorities make greater use of AI and advanced analytics. AI has not changed the underlying tax rules, but it is changing the scale and speed at which information can be reviewed and inconsistencies can become visible.

For employers, this makes accurate and connected data essential. A policy may set out what employees should do, but an organisation also needs the practical ability to identify movements, maintain reliable records and demonstrate how potential obligations were assessed.

The future is connected, not simply automated

AI and technology have considerable potential to improve Global Mobility. They can help teams bring together information, identify patterns, prioritise cases and focus specialist time where professional judgement is most valuable.

However, technology cannot resolve fragmented ownership or inconsistent processes on its own. Automating separate processes may simply make separate processes operate faster.

Before considering what AI can do, organisations need to be clear about what information they require, where it will come from, who owns it and how it will be used. Technology is most effective when it supports a coherent operating model rather than sitting alongside a collection of disconnected processes.

The goal should be a consolidated view of each employee: one profile, a complete record of travel and overseas working, clear oversight and the ability to manage potential issues proactively.

This does not necessarily mean that every organisation needs to replace all its existing systems. The more immediate priority may be to connect information more effectively, agree ownership across functions and establish a consistent route for employees and managers to notify the business before cross-border activity takes place.

Moving from reaction to readiness

The future of Global Mobility will involve more varied journeys, greater employee choice and closer scrutiny of the data that sits behind compliance decisions.

Employers do not need to remove flexibility in order to manage that environment. They do, however, need processes that reflect how people actually work today.

There are three practical questions organisations should consider:

1. Do we know where our people are working? This should extend beyond formal assignees to include business travellers, remote workers and employees moving between different forms of mobility

2. Can we bring the information together? Separate teams may retain different responsibilities, but the organisation still needs a reliable overall view of each employee’s activity

3. Can we act early enough? Tracking has limited value if information only reaches the relevant teams after travel or overseas working has begun

Multiple journeys may create multiple obligations, but they should not create multiple versions of the truth. Organisations that build a clear, connected view of their mobile population will be better placed to remain agile, manage compliance and make confident decisions as the world of work continues to change.

Would you like to know more?

We see many organisations facing the same challenge: assignments, business travel and remote working are often managed through separate processes, creating fragmented data and limited visibility. To address this, we developed BR Navigator, our integrated Global Mobility platform. It brings together assignment management, business travel and remote working oversight in a single connected environment, providing organisations with a clearer view of their globally mobile workforce.

If you would like to discuss how your organisation tracks its mobile population, brings together Global Mobility data or prepares for the future use of AI and technology, please speak to your usual Blick Rothenberg contact or Joe Lankester.