At Boundless, we completely understand the challenges that HR and People Ops teams face when overseeing international employment. Not only do you have to navigate ever-evolving foreign laws and intricate local customs across borders, but the administrative burden can be overwhelming too.
Building benefits packages, drafting compliant contracts, and ensuring smooth onboarding are just a few of the tasks that can sap your bandwidth. And with businesses now looking to rapidly tap into global talent pools, HR is under more pressure than ever to facilitate rapid and frictionless cross-border hiring.
But there is help at hand. By leveraging an Employer of Record, you can tap into international HR infrastructure and expertise to overcome some of your biggest global employment headaches. That way, you and your team can focus on nurturing talent and enhancing the employee experience as you scale abroad.
In this blog, we will walk through six of the main challenges that we often hear HR teams express when expanding overseas and how partnering with the right EOR can help you overcome them.
The Challenge: We know how daunting it can be to grasp the intricate legal landscapes with every new country your organisation enters. From worker classification rules to maximum/minimum probation periods and even health and safety policies, getting up to speed with local regulations is no easy task.
Yet non-compliance could disrupt your global workforce if employees aren't set up properly abroad, and you might be the one who gets blamed for it. Depending on your international growth, ensuring full compliance could mean that you need to consult with local legal experts to analyse requirements per individual hire. Most HR departments simply don't have the bandwidth.
How EORs Overcome It: Top EORs have established local entities across key global regions, giving them a specialised understanding of localised legislation. Rather than research from scratch, you can lean on this pre-existing knowledge base when structuring international teams.
EOR experts handle the heavy lifting - from deciphering local laws to liaising with local lawyers on your behalf. That means your team avoids common legal pitfalls while benefiting from turnkey compliance. With an EOR as your guide, People Ops can enter new global territories armed with assurance instead of uncertainty.
The Challenge: Not only do you need to know the regulations when you initially enter a new country, but you also need to stay up to date as they change and evolve over time. And the uncomfortable reality is that new employment regulations crop up all the time - from alterations to annual leave entitlement and probation periods to changes in parental benefits.
Monitoring every update across your global footprint means more items piled onto your already crowded plate, coupled with the uncertainty of not knowing what you don’t know. And that's before even assessing how new legislation could impact existing overseas workers and contracts, which requires specialised regional insight. It's an endless game of catchup that can detract focus from more strategic initiatives.
How EORs Overcome It: As trusted partners with eyes and ears on the ground to monitor legal fluctuations, it is the EORs job to stay fully up to date with laws and regulations as they change. So, as laws shift locally, EOR experts immediately catch these changes and spring into action to update agreements and processes accordingly.
For instance, if Germany suddenly requires more stringent documentation around terminations, a capable and diligent EOR will rapidly amend relevant offboarding procedures and templates for German employees. This real-time legal monitoring lifts the burden, so your team avoids noncompliance pitfalls.
The Challenge: Putting together localised employment contracts and workplace policies as your company goes global is another significant challenge that those in HR and People Ops handle. Consulting local counsel to obtain locally compliant agreements and while organising translations is an intensive process, even with just a few overseas hires.
Yet without air-tight, region-specific documentation, you leave both the employee and company exposed. And while generic contracts may seem like an easy shortcut, we know first-hand how damaging non-compliant documents can become down the road. The legal intricacies simply can't be overlooked.
How EORs Overcome It: EORs assemble and provide best-practice localised contracts and workplace policies attuned to the latest compliance landscape. That means your staff gain the proper protections aligned to local labour codes - without you having to become regional contract experts.
Rather than draft from scratch, EORs create compliant documents that have already been validated by on-the-ground legal partners in every market. That guarantees compliant agreements while saving your department countless hours.
The Challenge: Building competitive yet compliant benefits packages across borders is a complicated task. Each country has its own intricate rules around employer obligations - from mandatory pension contributions in the UK and Australia to extensive sick leave allowances in the Netherlands. Even determining cultural norms for non-mandatory perks like health insurance in Ireland or lunch vouchers in Portugal requires tapping into real local insight.
Yet for internationally growing businesses, building irrelevant or uncompetitive benefits wrong could mean reduced employee retention or even non-compliance. Without a fluent understanding of local landscapes, you may struggle to construct balanced packages from scratch. And even after investing countless hours researching foreign benefits policies, there is still a chance that important aspects still slip through the cracks.
How EORs Overcome It: EORs recognise the intrinsic link between competitive localised benefits and access to exceptional global talent. Top providers conduct in-depth research on mandatory and supplementary perks that tend to resonate across key hiring regions.
Rather than leave HR teams scrambling, EOR experts take the reins on structuring compliant, appealing cross-border benefits packages. This allows your department to focus on the human element of nurturing and retaining talent, rather than getting tangled in administrative intricacies.
The Challenge: As a people leader, you strive to cultivate an equitable environment across your global workforce. One where all employees feel valued, supported, and invested in company success - regardless of where they reside.
Yet crafting consistent experiences when employees are distributed across separate legal entities invites some complexity into the mix. With each country having different statutory leave policies, pay rates, and benefits, it’s tough to maintain parity. Without transparency, overseas employee morale may suffer as they feel disenfranchised and harbour resentment over perceived preferential treatment or double standards. Misalignment on what shapes hiring terms per country can corrode engagement.
How EORs Overcome It: Partnering with an EOR takes away the need to understand local mandatory benefits as that is something that is part of their service. Beyond that, they also can provide advice on typical non-mandatory benefits as well. An EOR can also support standardising benefits across the board if desired.
If you decide to vary benefits and salaries based on local standards, EORs can assist by providing localised contracts and policies that clearly stipulate exact terms per country. This allows you to set consistent expectations upfront around why and how packages differ across locations. With clarity and transparency as the goal, an EOR helps arm people leaders with the information needed to maintain equity
The Challenge: We understand the delicate balancing act involved with ending employment, especially abroad. Each country has unique protocols around lawful dismissal processes and severance policies that can trip up even the most seasoned HR teams.
In many regions, there are specific acceptable reasons for termination, often requiring substantial documentation. In the Netherlands, for example, companies must acquire court permission to end contracts.
Employees terminated without localised due diligence may pursue legal action, creating liability risks. Without proper regional insights, well-intentioned HR teams could initiate unlawful terminations simply through procedural missteps.
With this in mind, you need to handle terminations with extreme vigilance, yet adding lawyers or local consultants to handle exits compliantly can be costly.
How EORs Overcome It: Seasoned EORs approach overseas terminations through lenses of legality, respect, and humanity. They know ending employment abroad must balance adherence to local laws with care for the employee experience.
EORs first confirm all procedural, documentation, and severance prerequisites per jurisdiction to ensure lawful, non-discriminatory dismissal. If special approvals apply, they secure these efficiently without sacrificing compliance.
With legal foundations covered, EORs then provide termination support customised per cultural employee expectations abroad. From additional severance to offering letters of recommendation, they ease transitions sensitively based on local norms.
We understand all too well the significant efforts HR and People Ops teams pour into getting global expansion right, especially since they are typically the ones put in charge for executing it well. The reality is, crucial talent nurturing and strategic initiatives inevitably take a backseat to fighting foreign employment fires day-to-day.
But it doesn't have to be this way. With Boundless as your trusted partner, you regain precious capacity - to invest in your people, enhance workplace experiences, and drive critical DEI efforts. All while benefiting from solid compliance guardrails.