Protecting Your Company and Distributed Workforce From New Compliance Risks

Weichert Workforce Mobility is a Business Reporter client.

Maintaining compliance and employee safety requires companies to synergize immigration and tax regulations quickly and seamlessly. Are you prepared?

A mobile workforce has always been one of the most valuable tools to grow business. Whether it’s a three-year assignment in Bangalore, a critical client conference in Denmark or a quick flight to train new staff in Brussels, the freedom to deploy talent across borders has been the foundation of success for many companies.

In the post-pandemic world, that’s changed. Tougher visa stipulations, Brexit, posted worker notifications and vigorously enforced tax penalties have converged with Covid-related restrictions to change business travel and corporate relocation forever.

If you manage your company’s workforce mobility program or business travel, your job has likely become more challenging over the past year. Unfortunately, that was just the start. The future will bring more complexity, including a need for greater vigilance in duty of care along with knowing where your dispersed employees are working and being able to connect with them when you need to.

Are you prepared for these new threats to your company’s growth and reputation, not to mention employee well-being?

New world, new challenges

Clearly, the best way to navigate the future of business travel and reduce risks is to implement an easy pre-trip approval process that identifies immigration, tax and Covid regulations before an employee travels.

But the key is to make the process seamless and an organic part of your company’s “return to work” strategy, showing business units that you take the new threats seriously while demonstrating to employees that their safety and security is paramount—especially since research shows that employees still want to travel and relocate if they can do so safely.

That’s why Weichert Workforce Mobility, one of the world’s leading global employee relocation firms, has introduced Weichert SMARTRIP™.

Know before they go

SMARTRIP uses more than 4 million algorithms to assess each relocation, assignment or employee trip against the latest travel, tax, Covid and visa/immigration requirements. This allows employers to protect their employees so that they can travel and work without the penalties, restrictions and reputational damage that compliance violations can bring.

It also empowers businesses to plan better, compare different strategies (such as sending a technician who isn’t approaching a tax threshold) and avoid costs and expensive delays.

Once employees are where you need them, SMARTRIP provides ongoing monitoring to ensure that they stay compliant with visa/immigration and tax requirements, while also allowing the company to locate and communicate with them in the event of emergency, strengthening duty of care.

“This solution evolved from work we had done for one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers to help better manage its human capital across the globe in the post-Covid landscape, and it’s a concern that will define the future of work for practically every company,” says Janet Markle, Weichert’s Senior Regional Vice President and one of the platform’s architects.

“With an increasingly distributed workforce, employers need to synergize both immigration and tax regulations to ensure compliance. This solution gives them the actionable information they need to make decisions that keep their business moving,” she says.

Is your company’s compliance management built for the future of work? Review this checklist to see if your business travelers are generating risks you cannot ignore.

Best practices for business travelers and relocating employees

Here are some of the ways SMARTRIP synthesizes data, keeps managers in the know and locks down corporate compliance:

• Pre-trip assessments ensure that employees are authorized to travel or work in their new location.

• An effortless mobile interface makes monitoring travel easy and provides an audit trail that supports duty of care, without dedicating enormous resources to self-monitoring.

• Since many jurisdictions count cumulative time in-country, the system monitors both business and leisure travel.

• Automated alerts deliver a highly efficient solution for managing an increasingly dispersed workforce with greater transparency and efficiency. This supports company cost-containment objectives without sacrificing security or duty of care priorities.

Weichert also offers a host of service options—from supporting in-house, cross-functional security, travel and mobility teams, to full outsourcing—that allow businesses to expedite compliance coordination associated with V&I, Social Security, A1, Posted Worker and I9 documentation.

To determine if SMARTRIP™ is right for your organization, we invite you to request a demo at our website.

_{This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credit: iStock-1271096599}