What if building trust helped global mobility thrive at the speed of change?

Market and geopolitical volatility are compounding prevailing business pressures: shrinking timelines, rising business uncertainty and cost concerns, and fragile trust foundations. Leaders require a paradigm shift to not only address these pressures, but also to be the architects of a more strategic future.

In this shift, organizations must transform quickly and have a clear understanding of their weaknesses, strengths and superpowers. Nearly all CEOs in a recent EY survey say they are transforming their businesses, leveraging talent and technology to boost productivity and competitiveness. They say geopolitical volatility is the top threat to growth amid broad erosion of trust in governments, institutions and businesses.

For workforce mobility, speed and trust are indispensable and interconnected. Speed is structural, underpinning cross border work, effective risk management, and the delivery of seamless experiences for a connected, mobile workforce.

Each dimension of trust for mobility reflects an opportunity for strategic influence and faster progress toward goals. Clearly defined experiences and outcomes, for example, empower employees to embrace new opportunities, take on unfamiliar roles and relocate with confidence — all aspects of talent development and building workforce resilience. Trust is ultimately a performance driver, underpinning credibility. When it is embedded into processes and decisions, organizations move faster with fewer delays, fewer reworks and far more confidence. This contributes to the ability of mobility functions to transform with confidence, supported by reliable data systems and technology stability. 

These characteristics of trust in a mobility context allowed segmentation of respondents based on their stated degree of success in each area. Analysis revealed just a fifth of functions operated with high trust, and realized better outcomes compared to those with low trust.

Compared to low-trust functions, high-trust mobility functions are 1.9 times more likely to report speed in deploying to new markets, 1.7 times more likely to report speed in policy decision-making, and 1.6 times more likely to get significantly positive ROI from their mobility investments. This represents a kind of “trust dividend” to the aspects of the mobility function that have the most influence for employees at the business.

Trust is not an all or nothing prospect, and mobility functions can show strength in some areas while lacking in others. But the organizations focusing on key areas can see benefits in operational speed and realizing their talent and business ambitions.

For example, having clear career pathways related to international assignments, and monitoring the quality of assignee experiences, are directly tied to talent retention. A convincing 80% of employees say that their recent international mobility experience increased the likelihood of staying with their employer. This underscores the role of mobility programs in strengthening retention and accelerating career progression. Employees increasingly evaluate mobility experiences not solely by the success of the move itself, but to the extent to which the experience advances their skills, builds confidence and supports their long-term career trajectory. In this context, mobility experiences are evolving beyond transactional assignments to become meaningful catalysts for professional growth and sustained employee loyalty.

But the inverse is also true — low reliability in the mobility program delivery can prompt employees to avoid opportunities. Nearly all (95%) employees say trust is a key driver of whether they will consider mobility assignments, and employees who don’t trust the mobility function are nearly five times less likely to take up future assignments, compared to those with complete trust.

A generational divide

Meeting or exceeding expectations, tailored to business purpose and employee priorities, is one way to build trust. Generational preferences for mobility assignments show stark differences between early- and late-career employees.

Nearly all employees (88%) believe flexibility in global mobility policy is important, significantly up from 70% last year. But Gen Z employees are nearly twice as likely to say that flexibility is “extremely important” than other generational cohorts. Those younger employees are motivated to seek mobility opportunities mostly by whether they offer better family opportunities and skill development. Baby boomers, by contrast, prioritize an assignment’s financial package and overall support, representing a more mature stage in their career nearer to retirement.

Mobility functions have a role in driving employee engagement, and fulfilling capability needs, but trust is what enables speed in delivery. When mobility programs transparently and reliably deliver career outcomes, offer flexibility and exceptional family support while on assignment, it strengthens multigenerational employee confidence and performance.

But accomplishing all of this while facing cost constraints and complex cross-border realities requires organizations to move past old operating models to embrace a new systems mindset.

As reactive workloads continue to strain internal teams, for example, demand for outsourcing is rising as a means to access speed, expertise and scalability. However, without greater simplification and stronger integration, complex multivendor models often introduce friction that slows decision-making and erodes confidence across the mobility journey. These findings suggest that while outsourcing reflects a clear aspiration for faster and more scalable delivery, trust itself cannot be outsourced; it must be deliberately built through integrated processes, system connectivity and consistently reliable execution.

“The future of Global Mobility is integrated by design,” says Juan Carlos González, Senior Director of Global Mobility & Immigration at Microsoft. “Employees expect a seamless, intelligent experience that spans mobility, immigration, payroll, and global talent without friction or fragmentation. At Microsoft, we see AI as the catalyst that unlocks hyper personalization and real time support across that ecosystem. When technology and trusted partners are intentionally harmonized, mobility becomes a force multiplier for both employee experience and business agility, not just a transactional function.”

But without harmony, piecemeal partnerships can create more pain than relief. More than a third (36%) of employers have five or more mobility vendors. Only 31% say they have complete trust in their third-party vendors, seeing fragmented technology and processes as the primary barrier to speed. A lack of coordination between the many parts harms trust, speed of delivery and the realization of goals.

One step toward better coordination is building an infrastructure that can orchestrate routine tasks reliably. Of employers, 89% see advantages from automating various mobility tasks with faster processing and approvals, and improved employee experience, as the top benefits. The data shows that the mobility function is in a transitional state: it is no longer a manual-first function, but it is also not entirely digitized and industrialized. Partial automation delivers some efficiency, but done haphazardly it still limits speed, scale and AI readiness.

Investing in smarter AI implementation

Years of headlines about what generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has the potential to do have been replaced most recently with calls for practical use cases and clear ROI. Just as many mobility functions have acted tentatively, hoping for quick wins, they have also lost valuable time building the foundations needed for more strategic integration.

Still, organizations are investing to progress. Three out of four functions are planning to grow their investment in mobility technology, up from 66% last year. For AI specifically, 72% of mobility functions are scaling up GenAI and agentic AI applications to transform multiple processes or overall mobility operations. Paired with its role as a lever for managing cost and increasing speed, AI is a key piece of the digital backbone helping modern mobility functions thrive.

But this AI investment is outpacing trust in the infrastructure that powers it. Just 51% of mobility functions believe that their data is accurate, and 47% consider their technology platforms are reliable. Other barriers to deeper AI adoption for mobility functions are connected to perennial issues for business more broadly: cost of implementation, data security and having skilled professionals to bring vision to reality. The relationship between trust and execution is critical here as well. High-trust mobility functions are four times less likely to face barriers to implementing AI. They are less constrained by execution blockers and are instead more focused on strategic issues, indicating greater readiness to scale AI responsibly and effectively.

“Across the industry, the conversation has rightly moved from AI potential to AI outcomes, but outcomes only materialize when the right foundations are deliberately built,” adds González.

“Our focus has been on designing a connected and trusted digital ecosystem for Global Mobility and Immigration intentionally built, not retrofitted. Mobility delivers its greatest impact when it underpins the end-to-end Hire to Retire experience, aligning people, process, and technology around the employee journey,” he continues. “By unifying employee experience ownership and HR’s technology blueprint under a single Digital Transformation model, bringing Engineering and HR together, we’ve moved beyond pilots and short-term wins. That level of integration is what sustains trust, accelerates execution and creates the momentum required to scale AI responsibly and with confidence.”

Momentum is not accidental. For mobility functions, it is the outcome of deliberate choices that balance operational speed with earned trust. The survey findings point to a clear path forward: simplify where complexity slows execution, invest where trust underpins confidence, and elevate mobility from a transactional service to a strategic engine for talent and growth. By acting intentionally across these areas, mobility functions can move faster and move the business farther.

To flourish, organizations should consider focusing on these key areas:

Design operations for speed

• Simplify and integrate the mobility ecosystem. Consolidate vendors, streamline workflows, and standardize delivery to reduce friction and execution delays.
• Apply AI where it directly accelerates outcomes. Automate case triage, cost modeling, knowledge search and employee inquiries to free capacity for higher‑value work.
• Build proactive immigration readiness. Anticipate regulatory change, reduce bottlenecks, and equip leaders to pursue cross‑border opportunities with confidence.
• Deploy talent faster without compromising compliance or cost discipline. Design processes that balance speed, control and risk at scale.

Cultivate trust architecture

• Strengthen foundational trust across systems and teams. Unify data, improve platform reliability, and ensure end‑to‑end process clarity across HR, Tax, Payroll, and Immigration.
• Create a secure, AI‑ready technology backbone. Clean and integrate data, strengthen governance and build platforms where AI can safely support faster, better decisions.
• Design employee experiences that build confidence. Deliver transparent communication, timely career outcomes and personalized flexibility that employees and families can rely on.

Generate momentum through strategic mobility

• Position mobility programs at the center of enterprise talent strategy. Use mobility assignments intentionally to build future‑critical skills, leadership capability and global experience.
• Integrate mobility programs with workforce planning and succession. Deploy talent where it accelerates capability development and closes strategic gaps.
• Shift from transactional moves to purpose‑led experiences. Align individual aspirations with business outcomes to create sustained momentum and measurable impact.

In an environment defined by constant change, evolution depends on what is built to endure.

What distinguishes leading mobility functions is their capacity to sustain speed under pressure. Trust is what helps functions turn that pressure into progress.

Summary

Global workforce mobility functions are being asked to move faster in volatile conditions of rising complexity and scrutiny. New survey insights show that trust is what allows speed to translate into results. Functions that build reliable systems, experiences and partnerships are better positioned to deploy talent, support growth and sustain momentum.