The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
This insight has usually been attributed to Alfred Whitehead, an English mathematician. The conundrum expressed neatly summarizes the challenge businesses face today in striving to adapt new technology and workplace attitudes in global strategic planning.
One field in which this ongoing, if quixotic, quest to preserve order amid change is global assignee deployment. That may be somewhat surprising, since the pattern in seeking and securing work authorizations abroad appears to be standard. A company in country A identifies an objective to be developed in country B and chooses an assignee, who then goes off for a year or more to establish processes, hire and train local staff, deliver contracts of supply or service, and gain insight as to the peculiarities of and possibilities in the selected foreign market.
Mix and repeat; variations would most often come down to whether the assignee was to be accompanied by family, if they were to extend their term longer, or if they had lost touch with and/or lost the confidence of HQ.
Increasingly, however, that pattern has come under question. Cognizant of the significant changes in technology, connectivity, and workforce attitudes, is there a more cost-efficient way to get even better results? Can remote work be structured to continue to gain market share, drive productivity gains and maximize profit from international operations — all without resorting to the difficulties and expense of sending an assignee(s) on a multi-year mission to foreign soil?
Outlay and return is central to any business discussion. Much work has been done in the development and nurturing of global supply chains over the past 30-plus years. The deployment of countless skilled professionals has been central to this effort. Yet the world has changed immensely over these past decades, as have the expectations — if not the shape — of remote work. How can businesses most benefit from their longstanding investments in developing the green fields of global business while seizing the opportunities available in better aligning workforce structure with technology?
Simply put: how can we make better use of the tools at our disposal to make remote work more effective, more economical, and more responsive to key stakeholders?
Defining remote work
When we use the phrase “remote work” these days, it almost always refers to a local employee working from home rather than in the office, as happened when the COVID-19 pandemic and our response to the challenge took the term over from the traditional idea of global mobility.
When immigration and international deployment professionals use the phrase, however, they are referring to those employees deployed to a foreign location for an assigned period to better achieve a specific business objective — the traditional assignment model. There are many variations on the theme, so it’s worthwhile to define our meaning more precisely by referring to these assignees as cross-border remote workers, or CBRWs.
Dr. Seema Farazi and her team at Ernst and Young LLP United Kingdom immigration practice set out several situations wherein the dynamics of cross-border assignments could be more closely catalogued. Their analysis, included the following observations:
- CBRW and “work anywhere” are terms often used interchangeably. But while “work anywhere” certainly encompasses CBRW, the concept of “working anywhere” usually refers to an employee working both from their home office and a local office.
- “Borderless work” denotes work that is not limited or dictated by geography or physical borders.
- “Anywhere jobs” refers to jobs that can be done from anywhere in the country of the employee’s residence, or from anywhere in the world.
- “Agile working” is a concept where employees perform their duties from where it is most expedient from a professional or a personal perspective, travelling across borders as required to undertake aspects of their role.
- Finally, the new term “digital nomad” refers to a more defined role than the traditional overseas assignment. These are location-independent workers who use technology to perform their job, often living a nomadic lifestyle.
What links all these concepts is flexibility, drawing on technology in a manner expedient to both the business and skilled individuals. Call it what you will, but the common element in these roles is a desire to better employ technology to break free from the defined box of a rigid overseas assignment. This is an objective shared both by businesses and, increasingly, prospective CBRWs themselves.
Trends leading the opportunity
In seeking to answer the questions posed above, we need to examine three trends pointing the way forward. The first is a by-product of the restless pace of technical advancement. The second is in the (virtual) clouds that increasingly cover us all. And the third is a workforce attitude that was significantly accelerated by the pandemic.
1. Computer says yes — the remote office with all the bells and whistles
Computers have, of course, long been a necessary component in any business location. What has accelerated tremendously over the past 20 years is the scope and viability of computer programs to efficiently sift data, reduce duplicity in tasks and establish formats for standardization. These three tasks are usually at the forefront of any mission statement entrusted to a CBRW. The core role is to bring an overseas operation in line with the proprietary approaches and mandates established by head office. The greater sophistication of computer programs and the broader familiarity by the international workplace in their use has been a significant productivity multiplier.
Consider, for example, the most common of computers, the modern mobile phone. According to the World Bank, the earliest mobile phones were so expensive that as recently as 1990 only 2% of all people in the US owned one. Today, there are more cell phones in the US than there are people. More important, by 2016, 73% of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa had cell phones. Globally today, there are more than 100 mobile phone subscriptions per hundred people. In consequence, people throughout the world, even in the poorest regions, are now accustomed to the use and utility of computers and application-reliant devices.
This portfolio of technology demonstrates that earlier generations of traditional remote workers have done their job. Today’s CBRWs are no longer being asked why and how to introduce computers into production and service delivery. These devices and approaches are, pardon the pun, no longer a foreign concept.
Simultaneously, the measure of computational power is also rapidly increasing. The speed of computer processors can be expressed in floating-point operations per second, or “flops.” One billion flops are called a gigaflop. In 1984, the cost of one gigaflop was US$18.7 million, about $60 million today. By 2000, the cost of a gigaflop had fallen to US$640, about $1,000 today. By late 2017, the cost had declined to $0.03 per gigaflop. The net result is a decline in the cost of using computers since the turn of the century by more than 99.99%.
This reality serves to illustrate that overseas business assignments today are not beginning from a standing start; all participants in the race had better understand both the rules of the game and the tools and technology designed to help them. Moreover, the utility, scope and cost effectiveness of computing power is better than ever before, and more adaptable to a multitude of tasks.
It can be anticipated that much of this leverage will be devoted to the broader introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) in production and service centers worldwide. CBRW assignments will play a key role in these efforts, but once introduced it is an open question as to how AI will impact domestic and international supply chains. For the immediate term, however, CBRWs can build on the foundations and investments made by travellers of days gone, if recently, past. Capitalizing on both this hard-won experience and the advancements in computer programming creates a head start to innovation and provides an opportunity to redesign future CBRW assignments.
2. In the air tonight — the telecommunication highway, facilitating communication with ease
Yet even the most sophisticated computer is merely a lump of plastic and components. The second trend to consider in reimagining remote work arises from the dramatic improvement in worldwide connectivity. The explosion in global access to the internet has been nothing short of miraculous. Relying again on data collected by the World Bank, the share of the world’s population with gateway to the internet rose from zero in 1990 (yes, the internet is that recent) to more than 52% in 2020. In the economies most likely to host CBRWs, the average figure approaches 80%, and is higher in business locations. The most common infrastructure investment in expanding economies, after electricity and sanitation, is the strength and reliability of the internet signal.
