The ongoing war in Iran is the latest global conflict disrupting employer operations and forcing HR to ensure benefits and policies are at the ready to protect employees and the organization as fluid situations evolve. These are certainly not new pressures for organizations, or HR, says Jim McCoy, CEO of Atlas HXM.
It’s no longer a given that stable policy environments will persist, he says, pointing to recent disruptors like Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine.
“Geopolitical instability is now a structural feature of global workforce planning, not a one-off disruption,” McCoy says, noting that organizations that best weather these unexpected conditions design “workforce structures that can adapt quickly to disruption.”
The rise in global instability is giving way to more flexible approaches to workforce architecture, which both reduces risk and enables an organization to keep operations running, even in the case of regional instability, McCoy says.
“A company might not necessarily want to leave a region due to instability, which might be short term, but they want to ensure that they’re not ‘locked’ into a region either, especially if risk exposure is high,” McCoy says.
Employee relocation is increasingly fading, in favor of building “where the talent already is,” he notes. That has led to a spike in the number of organizations turning to an Employer of Record to navigate international workforces. Atlas research based on a survey of more than 400 senior HR, legal, finance and operations leaders finds that 54% of organizations use or plan to use an EOR, a figure that stands at 59% in the U.S.
Such decisions will become increasingly critical, as global hiring doesn’t appear to be slowing, despite the volatility. Nearly 70% of organizations say recent changes to immigration policies are actually accelerating their workforce expansion, and more than half intend to ramp up their international presence in the next 18 months.
U.S. organizations intend to continue to concentrate international hiring in Canada and Europe, with major untapped talent pools in areas like the Middle East and Africa, according to the report.
Having the structures in place to hire and manage populations in regions with geopolitical instability will increasingly be a strategic differentiator, McCoy says.
“Workforce models are now becoming ‘strategic infrastructure’ rather than HR or administrative decisions,” he says.
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