March 2024 Newsletter

In this month’s newsletter we cover:

• Workation Wandering: Your Ultimate Guide to Balancing Work and Travel

• Trust versus Autonomy in remote work

• Tax & Legal Updates

• The Pros and Cons of Employers of Record

• Grow CFO & The 7 Benefits Of Workations

• Remotely Interesting with John – Catch up in Seville?

• Product Updates with Donal – Social Security Turbocharged!

• Mel’s Tip of the Day – Community Cafe

Workation Wandering: Your Ultimate Guide to Balancing Work and Travel

In this article, Workations 101, we cover the basics of what a workation is (hint: work + vacation ), how to convince your boss to say yes as well as sources for finding some of the best workation destinations.

Read more here.

The Balance Between Trust & Autonomy

“If autonomy is high and trust is low, that’s a recipe for chaos. If autonomy is low and trust is high, that’s a recipe for talent quitting. If autonomy is low and trust is low, micromanagement is used as a substitute for discipline. If autonomy is high and trust is high, you’re succeeding in building a great company…”

This post by Kate Lister inspired us recently.  

How do you see the balance between trust and autonomy in your organization?

Tax & Legal Updates

Below are some quick-fire tax and legal updates we thought you might be interested in:

• Global: This article in Tax Notes titled “Remote Work vs. Corporate Income Tax: Relocating Our Understandings” gave a very comprehensive overview of some of the challenges around permanent establishment and international remote work.

• EU: The taxation of cross-border teleworkers continued to be high on the EU agenda.  The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) published in the link above their views around taxation of cross-border teleworkers. It was interesting to note that they favoured taxing international remote workers in the country of the employer. The tax authority in the country of the employer would then share the tax on income with the country of the remote worker’s residence which in turn might potentially simplify the administration for both employers and employees. However there is a lot of water to go under the bridge before this becomes the reality, still it is helpful to see the evolution of how EU policy-makers and thinking about this complex topic.

• Japan: Japan has been busy launching their digital nomad visa which will allow people to stay in the country for up to 6 months.

• UK: Fragomen partner Charlotte Wills provided a really helpful guide to the recent changes to tourist visas in the UK, some of which impacts on remote working in the UK.

• UK: The UK government shared some very helpful updates around Right To Work Checks.

• Germany: The German government published legislative updates for the German Fiscal Code which included some new definitions around the risks of permanent establishment for remote work.  

• Canada: The Canadian government gave some helpful definitions on defining digital nomads.

• Finland: Social security can be a minefield, and while we’ve been busy enhancing the social security parts of the platform, we had to give kudos to Finland for providing a very comprehensive, user-friendly guide to social security and remote work.

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The Pros and Cons of Employers of Record

 

You might have seen an article John wrote a few months ago on the Pros and Cons of Employers of Record.

John followed this up with a workshop for the Expatise community as well as an ebook.

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Grow CFO & The 7 Benefits Of Workations

 

The Grow CFO team featured Work From Anywhere in their feature article on the 7 benefits of workations.

Don’t forget you (or anyone you know who is looking to build a workation policy) can access our free workation policy builder.

Anyone For A Workation In Seville?

Thanks to all the team at Mercer who shared some exciting updates about our Work From Anywhere platform on 20th March 2024.  They covered our features, country rollouts and our new mobile friendly platform.  Thanks again to Frederic Franchi and all the Mercer team who have been invaluable support helping get a range of Fortune 500 clients around the world on to the platform. We’ll be sharing more exciting updates at the Mercer Talent Mobility Conference in Seville on 11th-12th June 2024 which you can sign up for here.

I enjoyed catching up with the Mosh Pit community on St Patrick’s Weekend recently, you can see the presentation above if you’re interested.  We covered:

1. Survey data on how CEOs are approaching the topic of International Remote Work

2. How companies are putting together a Work from Anywhere policy

3. How you can benchmark your Work from Anywhere policy

4. Best practices observed in Work from Anywhere policies such as Spotify and Airbnb

In other developments, it was a privilege for the team to have gotten the opportunity to work with 5 outstanding MBA leaders in Matthew Dees, Temitope Omo-Olorun Ojo, Iyanuoluwa Oyindamola Ayoade, Jayant Kulkarni and John Dannehl. We had a high octane few days in person together working on a market expansion project, after spending the last few months going back and forth on how we can look at our strategy with a fresh set of eyes.

As for upcoming webinars and conferences, stay tuned for a webinar I’ll be doing with the Executive Research Association on 11th April. I’ll be presenting with Simon Rogers of Talent Mobility Search and we’ll be talking about the new employee benefits landscape and how international remote work fits into that.

As for other gems you might have missed over the last month, this post on the impact of RTO mandates caught my attention, highlighting how high-performers, women and millennials are the greatest flight risks when strict return to office mandates are implemented.

Social Security Turbocharged

Aside from our continuous focus on performance improvements, you might have noticed that we’ve been busy making a lot of changes to social security in recent weeks.

What did we do and why did we do this?

We heard from some customers last year that while they liked our platform risk ratings, they clearly wanted more from us.  It was not enough to tell people that there is a risk.  They were looking for the “what next?” 

So we took three proactive measures to structurally improve social security and listen to our customers:

1. We got a leading social security expert in Europe with over 15+ years of experience in international social security research and implementation to review our social security algorithm design and help us improve the commentary outputs

2. We also researched the outbound country website forms for every Certificate of Coverage and A1 form (where applicable)

3. In the compliance checklist, we added the links to those website forms (and believe me, some of them are VERY tricky to find!) to make it much easier for our customers to take proactive steps to become compliant.

This was a fundamental improvement to one of the key pain points in the international remote work journey for our customers and meant that not only were we able to now clearly outline the risks, but also put in place clear actionable next steps to help companies address the compliance risks of social security.

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Community Café

We had a really enjoyable chat with an intimate group of HR and Global Mobility leaders earlier this month where we got to swap notes on some of the challenges companies are facing when it comes to building workation policies and the practical challenges of international remote work.

I find these small gatherings great just to get a pulse of how people are dealing with the balancing act of keeping the day to day operations of HR and Global Mobility on track whilst also keeping one eye on where we all want to bring our functions over the years to come.

One of the key take-aways is there is no one size fits all, whether that be remote work policies, compliance risk appetite, or the tools and strategies different companies employ. And everyone has a different pace that suits them when it comes to implementing new ideas or processes.

We’ll try and run more of these community café’s over the coming months so if you have any topics you’d like to discuss, feel free to reach out (imelda@wfa.team) and I’d be happy to put more of these together.

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Thanks for tuning in!

Make sure to sign up for our newsletter below if you’re keen to hear more.

Donal Brady

Donal Brady is Co-Founder and Head of Product at Work From Anywhere, a platform to help companies execute a successful workation policy. He has deep expertise and experience in the world of remote work having spent nearly twenty years working in finance leadership roles with global multinationals like PwC, before entering the world of global mobility with International SOS and then pivoting into the software industry with Accel-KKR backed Smart Communications. He walks the walk with Work From Anywhere, speaking 5 languages, having travelled to 65+ countries and worked in 10.