Global Mobility Dispatches with Ray Rackham
Picture it, a fully functioning Global Mobility team prior to the pandemic, relocating assignees, determining the extent of support the business would fund, and establishing the employment relationship through to repatriation. Like the assignee, the work relocated.
Increasingly in 2026, the work can relocate without the employee. An employee works remotely, manages an operation in another country, or supports clients across a region without ever leaving home. For the business, increased capability; for the employee, a greater sense of empowerment; but what about the law?
Immigration law generally starts with where someone is physically working. Employment law may attach obligations to that same location. Tax authorities consider where duties are performed, where income arises and whether the employer has established a taxable presence. Suddenly, an employment arrangement that makes perfect commercial sense becomes remarkably complicated.
The OECD has recognised this changing reality. Its updated Model Tax Convention commentary provides greater clarity on when cross-border homeworking might create a taxable presence for an employer. While welcome, it addresses only part of a much larger question: who decides where a job exists?
In our pre-pandemic mobility model, businesses created a need in locations where they operated, and Global Mobility relocated people to fill them. Increasingly, businesses identify the need, then ask whether the need can be fulfilled wherever the talent is located; a nuance that reverses decades of conventional workforce planning, presenting extraordinary opportunity.
Businesses can access expertise without necessarily funding international relocations, and employees can pursue international careers without uprooting their families, because Talent Mobility now designs capabilities in markets where the business infrastructure is limited.
But, let’s not confuse technological possibility with legal permission: the risks we’ve spent careers avoiding do not immediately become irrelevant because we want them to; and the decades spent becoming exceptionally good at moving employees to where businesses need them, can now help determine where work can happen.
That means bringing mobility and workforce strategy into the same dialogue, creating a shorthand that isn’t simply a theoretical debate. At Newland Chase Consulting, we’re already working with multinational organisations to undertake precisely this kind of workforce analysis: examining where expertise is needed, where work can legitimately be performed, and how regulatory considerations influence commercial decisions. We design smarter international workforce models, rather than simply managing the consequences of decisions already made.
And that is Talent Geography!
