People. Nothing holds the key to a company’s success and ensures the business survives, thrives, and grows in certain and uncertain times more than the people that work in it. They innovate, build, sell, and care for customers on behalf of the founders.
People are the biggest asset a company has as it brings its vision to life. Their experience as employees matters a lot, from how they are first recruited, to how they are employed and treated.
We have known this for a long time. However, as of not too long ago, we have had to accept the hard truth of how unlikely it is to find the best people within commuting distance of our offices. The chances that a person will possess the right skills, have the right experience, will be sufficiently interested in the role, will have appropriate salary expectation, and availability to start right now, are very slim.
The openness to the idea of remote/distributed/teleworking or however you want to call not working from “the office” was the result of realising this reality. For those who hadn’t opened up to the idea of their employees working from home, the COVID-19 global pandemic forced them to.
So here we are now, willingly or not, fully remote and distributed for the foreseeable future. According to recent polls, more than half of the workforce does not want to return to an office once this is over. Having tasted this flexibility, many future recruits are going to demand it. They are going to select companies which offer remote work and support distributed workers, even if they are halfway across the globe.
As I have previously shared, I started Boundless after I had experienced considerable challenges in managing employment for geographically distributed teams. While at the time the employees in my previous company going remote was unplanned, it was in no way as sudden or all encompassing as in the time of a global pandemic
If leaders do not make their companies fit for a world where a remote and distributed way of work is far more prevalent, they risk becoming less competitive employers. A change in how we operate is needed, which goes beyond opening up the recruitment pool and advertising remote-friendly jobs. To attract and retain people, we have to rethink the employee experience in a way that it addresses people’s needs. Let’s explore a vision of what leaders are going to have to do in terms of global employment, and how.
Getting the best candidates into your pipeline, and convincing them to come and work with you is all about ensuring that you are perceived as a great company to work for.
More and more, the definition of a great company is that of an organisation, which stands behind the values it puts on posters around the office. There is nothing more off-putting than a company saying one thing but doing another. You do not have to search much to find stories of companies filled with hypocrisy and how much that has tarnished their brand. (Communication, Respect, Integrity, and Excellence were the values Enron plastered on its walls ).
We have also come to understand that what makes a great employer has nothing to do with:
ping-pong tables
free lunch
beer on tap
or flashy offices ...
(Right now, what defines a great employer certainly isn’t flashy offices or cool amenities!)
Even before COVID-19, what was becoming abundantly clear is that what employees want and value most of all is respect. Alongside that, they put importance on things such as:
Recognising why these are important to employees and providing them as part of the employee experience, requires leading with empathy. Especially given the current situation - or the fact that, even when things are going great, a new recession, pandemic or another form of crisis is just around the corner - people crave safety, security, and stability.
How should all that affect how you lead your organisation and how you build your employer brand?
It’s time to ditch the idea of ping pong tables and focus on allowing your workers to have flexibility about when and where they do their work. That has to come on top of providing legal, secure, and stable global employment for all your employees, regardless of where they are based. I know that providing employment is more difficult for geographically distributed than for co-located teams. Still, I am here to tell you that global employment solutions are now more accessible than ever. Before we get to that, let’s look at your options for hiring someone in a different jurisdiction.
There are several potential options for running your internationally remote team, which vary in their legality (or lack thereof), cost, and ease of implementation:
While contracting sounds an easy and quick solution, and seems like it will solve all your admin challenges, it is, unfortunately, a hack. And as such works only in a situation such as a fixed-term project and, in many countries, this project would need to be something that’s not core to your business.
Most companies will, at one time or another, use fixed-term contracts for specific projects such as creating an inbound marketing strategy, process improvements, fundraising readiness preparation, etc. For such time-boxed projects, there usually is no permanent role in the company and most governments will look at that and say, “yes, that's a legitimate contractor.”
However, there are many scenarios where it is not legal to classify a worker as a contractor. Every government employment agency/tax authority has slightly different criteria for what qualifies as a contract role and where someone should be classified as an employee but, broadly, the following are the key measures that they'll look at:
If the answer to all/most of these questions is yes, then the local government - the employment authorities and the tax authorities - will say this person must be classified as an employee. The general rule of thumb is, if someone looks like an employee and sounds like an employee, then they are an employee!
In 2019, many governments actively started taking action on remote workers being misclassified in multiple jurisdictions. We have anecdotally heard of cases in the UK, Serbia, Canada, Spain, Germany, the Philippines and others. We believe this is only going to continue.
However, the problem with independent contractors spans wider than just the legal repercussions. Building a team using a hack will eventually dilute the value of your employer brand. When your company reaches an inflection point, such as a more considerable funding round, it's common for a new investor — or the existing board — to look at how international employment is being handled, and say that it's time to level-up and ensure that the company is compliant.
This is particularly important when a company is preparing for an exit. An acquirer that is looking to acquire talent is not looking to acquire a bundle of easily terminated service agreements. They're looking to get a compliantly employed, fully engaged, loyal team.
As much as we live in a globalised world and remote collaboration and communication are viable from a technology perspective, the employment of people which is heavily dependent on local regulations remains very difficult. Regulations and laws are as fragmented even in seemingly united unions (such as US States, Canadian provinces or EU member countries, to name a few). One common thing, however, is that according to every jurisdiction, a person working full time for a company needs to abide by its local regulations, regardless of where the employer is located.
Abiding with stringent governments is only part of the reason why companies need to seek a better way to employ international staff. We see seeking to compliantly hire international workers as an excellent opportunity to be a great employer by:
Above, I mentioned that there it is now more accessible than ever to employ distributed teams compliantly. The solution for that is a global employment platform that too has rethought distributed employment. A global employment platform takes the Employer of Record solution and enhances it with easy to use technology. The team building all that, possesses years of experience in the fundamentals of global employment and can tackle any issue or challenge immediately. All three combined allow for the entire internationally remote team to be operated from one single point.
The Employer of Record solution gives access to local corporate and employment infrastructure to enable legal employment. At the same time, the technology platform manages HR compliance, payroll and tax filings on behalf of the client company. For this to work well, both the infrastructure and the technology need to be owned and operated by the same entity. This ensures that international workers are compliantly employed, automates all of the hard stuff —minimising the risk of mistakes— and frees you up to focus on your core business.
This is our vision for Boundless. Solve global employment, make it easy for companies to avail of the abundance of diversity, creativity, and ingenuity of 1bn knowledge workers around the world, and democratise access to well-paid jobs for all. It's with that vision in mind that we have built our team with great internal expertise in global payroll, international People Ops and international employment.
It will be long before people will be able to return to offices and, even when they do, how they interact will probably never be the same. Many people will want to remain working from home or from places they have always wanted to live. Now is the right time to develop a considered employer brand, with empathy is a central value, which offers candidates flexibility, stability and security. By rethinking employment and people ops for a remote world, you are laying the right foundations for future growth.
You have the power to provide safety and security by ensuring people are legally and compliantly employed. The good news is that it’s not just on you to carry the responsibility for that. Building the world’s first global employment platform, we are here to help you. Start legally employing today.
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