How Employee Mobility Can Drive Your Global Growth Strategy

If you’ve ever been responsible for achieving market growth, you know firsthand that three key factors can make or break your success: planning, hard work, and the proper allocation of resources. This last point includes the right investments and technology, but never forget about your most important asset — your people. This is where employee mobility can make a huge difference for companies looking to deploy a successful global growth strategy.

Throughout 2024, 73% of leaders are prioritizing growth despite compounding pressures of economic uncertainty and talent shortages, according to recent G-P research. However, business growth does not occur accidentally; companies that want to thrive and expand must stay ahead of the curve. One way to catalyze new growth is strategically deploying your best and brightest where there are opportunities in new locations or to existing markets where you’re struggling to gain a foothold.

Enter employee mobility.

What is employee mobility?

Global mobility empowers employees to move freely across borders for work. It fosters diversity, innovation, and collaboration in a globalized economy, which gives companies a competitive edge. It stems growth by:

• Distributing expertise and specific skills to new markets faster.
• Bringing local employees up to speed with internal processes and culture.
• Delivering projects and initiatives aligned with corporate objectives.

What are some examples of employee mobility?

A strong global mobility strategy can spur growth in multiple forms. For instance, if your company wanted to enhance your competitive edge and bolster business in specific locations, you could relocate your top employees with the necessary specialized skills to reinvigorate growth. This is just one example of how employee mobility can rejuvenate market strategies.

Or, say you were securing a contract for a large project essential to future growth plans. To ensure success and to skip launching an expensive candidate search in this location, you could adopt a global mobility strategy and relocate an employee whose skills perfectly align with the project’s specific requirements. Additionally, if an employee shows potential as a future leader and growth driver, you could consider temporary relocation opportunities to expand their knowledge and experience.

Why is employee mobility important for growth?

As you plan out your growth roadmap, you may find that weaving in a global mobility strategy becomes naturally essential. After all, employee mobility is far more than relocating employees from one place to another — it actively drives global market growth. It offers your team the flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions, allowing you to pivot strategies as needed to capture growth. Here are some of the key advantages which building an international mobility program can provide your team:

• Speed-to-market: Relocating employees enables companies to set up operations swiftly, providing a significant speed advantage in competitive industries.
• Local knowledge and networks: Expanding into new countries requires a deep understanding of local markets. By implementing global talent mobility strategies, you can gather essential market intelligence. Employees on the ground who are familiar with the local culture and business practices can help navigate regulatory hurdles, build relationships, and identify potential customers. 
• Risk mitigation: Sending employees to explore new markets before making significant investments allows you to take a low-risk approach and make informed decisions. In fact, G-P’s recent Global Growth Report highlighted that one of the main reasons employees want to work for global companies is being better positioned to weather economic uncertainty due to an increased market presence.
• Relationship building: At a time when establishing trust and relationships is key in any market, relocated employees can facilitate relationship building by engaging with local stakeholders, attending industry events, and networking. You can leverage this approach to help identify where talent is most available and align hiring strategies with your market expansion goals.

How can employee mobility help retain your best people?

Is your company looking for ways to increase morale and retention rates? A recent EY survey of over 1,000 professionals across 21 countries showed that 64% of workers are more likely to remain with their employer after a long-term global assignment.

Explaining this decision, the workers cited the “life-changing experiences” of global mobility and the belief that the strategy improves company resilience. This highlights that companies like yours can leverage the global mobility experience to retain your workers, ultimately allowing your teams to remain focused on growth targets without the distraction of having to backfill costly, vacant roles.

Why is compliance important for an employee mobility strategy?

As you work to deploy an employee mobility strategy, remember to consider all angles of preparation, including the main obstacle when relocating employees: unfamiliarity with that location’s labor and immigration laws and other regulations.

Being unprepared to do business compliantly in a new market will be a significant blocker to using employee mobility as a growth accelerator. Noncompliance comes with repercussions that are detrimental to growth. A misstep when handling labor laws, immigration regulations, tax laws, or industry-specific regulations can churn out consequences like legal penalties, fines, and reputational damage.

This really ups the ante for companies, so ensuring compliance will be key for your operations to grow revenue (and not shrink it) by avoiding costly legal penalties. Here’s how noncompliance can hurt a company’s market growth ambitions.

• Diversion of allocated funds for growth: The financial burden of fines diverts money away from market expansion activities.
• Interference with speed-to-market: At the same time, legal issues not only consume time and resources but can delay and even stop your market entry efforts while you work to resolve compliance issues.
• Damage to relationship building: Noncompliance can damage a company’s reputation, making establishing trust with local partners, customers, and authorities harder. This is a slippery slope that can slow down negotiations, partnerships, and the establishment of a local presence, directly affecting relationship building — one of the significant benefits of launching a global mobility strategy.
• Unwanted additional scrutiny: Another problem of a damaged reputation is that it won’t be long before companies face increased scrutiny in other markets. Inevitably, this makes future expansions more challenging and time-consuming, as authorities in new markets can be more rigorous in their due diligence checks before granting operating licenses or permits, slowing down the market entry process.
• Immigration challenges: Noncompliance with immigration laws can lead to severe penalties and restrictions, complicating the process of relocating employees. This can hinder your ability to deploy talent quickly and effectively, disrupting your market expansion efforts and reducing your company’s agility in responding to new opportunities.

Build an employee mobility strategy today with G-P.

Employee mobility is a proven growth strategy to flexibly gather local intelligence and accelerate speed-to-market plans while expanding professional development — a proven retention driver. Yet, given the many labor laws and regulations that must be compliantly cleared when operating globally, it’s still a task that requires careful planning to ensure sustainable growth for your company.

Luckily, there’s a simple answer to tackling compliance obstacles: partner with a growth expert like G-P. 

G-P offers the local expertise and a deep understanding of laws, regulations, and customs your company needs to succeed in new global markets. Our 12+ years of experience developing and deploying technologies has helped companies relocate employees worldwide. For instance, our new, leading, generative AI-powered technology, GIA™, has absorbed our unmatched global expertise and proprietary knowledge into a singular structured knowledge engine. This helps customers with their employee mobility queries 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, meaning their global growth journey can continue unimpeded, night or day.