What should global mobility professionals stay alert to this year?
Asma Bashir, 11 April 2024
Global mobility tends to be the most intensely personal branch of an organisation’s HR department.
Leaving home, friends, and family for new shores, even temporarily, is a major emotional step in anyone’s life. Workforce management specialists thus have to thread objectives together which are difficult enough on their own: keeping relocated workers safe, making their transitions as smooth as possible while also meeting their organisation’s commercial needs.
Recent years have shown how the best laid plans can be scattered by events that nobody could have foreseen. That’s part and parcel of orchestrating flows of people across borders, in a world ever more prone to dramatic system failures. The only unforgivable failures are the predictable ones.
Given the ‘polycrisis’ that’s defined the 2020s so far, this might offer scant solace. Wildcard scenarios and black swan events now seem to hurl themselves at us almost twice-annually. Even so, some of the risk factors weighing on global workforce management will probably seem much more mundane.
Don’t become a hostage to fortune. Let’s take a tour of the most pressing risks to factor into your global mobility strategy in 2024.
1. Changing legislation and regulations
When we ask our clients about their biggest worries, they almost always vent their frustration at unpredictable regulations.
Since 2023, several major economies have embraced more restrictionist immigration policies. Here in the UK, the government has instituted a slew of changes to limit net migration. From April, employers must now pay migrants at higher rates, while the Shortage Occupation List has been replaced by a new Immigration Salary List. Our recent article has a full breakdown of the changes so far.
Elsewhere in Europe, the once-liberal Scandinavian nations are clamping down on new arrivals. Thanks to the Tidö Agreement binding Sweden’s centre-right coalition government, an inquiry is being held to find ways to limit net immigration.
At the same time, regulators still haven’t really worked out what to do about the sustained post-pandemic popularity of remote working. ‘Work from anywhere’ policies create intricate issues around tax domiciles and visa types that countries are approaching in wildly different ways. For instance, Portugal has now cooled on digital nomads, precipitating an exodus by withdrawing a popular tax break. Yet further east, Japan and the Philippines are soon to introduce their own digital nomad visa offerings
Amidst all this regulatory variance, drafting a long-term workforce mobility strategy feels like a Sisyphean exercise. Global mobility professionals need to make sure they have a way to stay on top of all these changes.
2. Electoral politics
2024 is the biggest election year in world history so far. By the end of December, half the world’s population will have headed to the polls in dozens of countries. In many of these elections, immigration is the hot-button issue.
This is now the case for voters in the USA, though sentiment is particularly fierce among Republican voters. A Trump victory would certainly spell an end to the comparatively liberal stance of the Biden administration. Immigration may well also affect the upcoming European Union elections in unpredictable ways.
Here in the UK, a potential change of government may see the rules we outlined in the last section rewritten yet again by the end of the year.
Authorities across the world are growing wary of the malign possibilities of deepfake technologies to stir up tensions. Amidst the heightened passions of an electoral campaign, it is worryingly plausible that fake videos might be used to foment and direct anti-immigrant energies. Global HR teams should factor in this scenario as a potential risk to personnel.
While a boon to the flagging democratic order, this tsunami of voting may feel less joyful for global mobility specialists grappling with the changing writs of indecisive governments. An occupational hazard, I suppose.
3. Conflict and Geopolitics
We are, sadly, living once again in a time of violent volatility. In the last two years, as many wars have broken out in and around the European periphery.
It would not be appropriate for us to make any predictions or comment as to how these conflicts will unfold. We speak here only from the narrow perspective of global mobility professionals about their challenges and disruption to our field, and how managing risk and compliance during these challenging times will impact businesses.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine led Germany to pull the plug on the huge Nord Stream 2 project to build a natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea. The Swiss-based company building the pipeline had to abruptly fire large numbers of foreign contractors, with knock-on effects for the HR departments responsible for offboarding them.
The outbreak of conflict in Gaza has most directly affected the flows of Palestinian workers into Israel to work on construction projects. Yet the shipping crisis in the Red Sea crisis demonstrates how localised wars can quickly spill over and disrupt key supply routes a thousand miles away. Anyone moving people to and from the Gulf region must keep their eyes closely trained on how this unfolds.
4. Macroeconomic risks
As a rule, demand for global mobility services tends to ebb and flow with the global economy’s fortunes. While most major economies are doing better in 2024 than most people predicted a year ago, a few downside risks could still stymie your strategy.
China’s economic woes present a few potential snags. On 9th April, ratings agency Fitch downgraded the country’s outlook for both credit and growth. Persistent deflation also continues to stalk the Central Bank of the People’s Republic.
The consequences of this cooling are hard to predict. If inflation rises, either as a result of deliberate policy or a (still unlikely) sovereign debt crisis, China-facing HR departments’ cost of living assumptions will have to be reconsidered, and expatriate pay packages recalculated.
The boom in US tech stocks could also spell trouble for global mobility specialists. The ‘Magnificent Seven’ all have huge global footprints, with employees moving between multiple worldwide headquarters. If markets were to turn sour on the sector and wipe out their dramatic gains, these suddenly cash-strapped corporations might see global HR as ripe for cuts.
We saw a preview of this with Meta’s decision, during the bear market of 2022, to cut 13% of its international workforce. Let’s hope that isn’t a premonition of things to come.
Could animal spirits on Wall Street threaten your global HR strategy?
5. Talent shortages
Four years on from when the pandemic scrambled labour markets, 75% of global employers struggled with hiring in Q1 2024.
On the surface, this could be a shot in the arm for global mobility specialists. 88% of HR professionals see cross-border employee relocation as a key tool for attracting talent.
Yet there are also risks involved in deploying global mobility as a basic recruitment perk. For one, it might not solve the fundamental problem of too many employers chasing too few
workers. If workforce mobility doesn’t turn out to be a silver bullet, global mobility teams may draw the ire of a frustrated C-suite. Expectation management might turn out to be the most pressing objective.
For a more expansive take on global mobility’s role as a talent management device, read our article on the topic here.
6. Climate change
At the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, extreme weather was mentioned by 66% of business leaders as the most pressing risk for the year ahead. This put it comfortably at the top of the list of factors preying on executives’ minds.
From an HR standpoint, climate change is the ultimate ‘known unknown’. With freak weather events increasing in frequency, we can be confident that at least one will strike somewhere this year. This will inevitably disrupt some large-scale project, potentially even necessitating rescue operations for stranded workers. We just don’t know when or where it will happen.
This makes a watertight risk assessment the most important consideration in any global mobility strategy, with contingency planning a close second. If something goes disastrously wrong, workforce managers need to be able to spring into action straight away.
Let’s talk about how you can manage these risks
HR and global workforce professionals clearly have a lot of plates to keep in the air this year. But on the brighter side, the great ‘soft landing’ for the world economy should mean a lot of pent-up demand for global mobility services.
If you want a conversation about handling the specific risks to your operations, get in touch and we’ll be happy to provide some one-to-one strategic advice.
