Global Government Strategies and Compliance

My name is Julia Onslow-Cole and I’m a partner at Fragomen and I specialize in global government strategies and compliance.

I think it’s quite trite in some ways to say that it’s a very, very difficult landscape for employers to navigate at the current time, but really it’s so true with so many health and safety regulations and so many changes in the shape of the workforce. We’ve really seen a real challenge for employers because of the post-pandemic situation, and I was speaking to a client the other day who is a board member of a leading UK supermarket and they were saying to me that just before the pandemic, they had to bring about some amazing changes to their business, and they probably changed their business more in the last three months then they had previously changed in the last thirty years to get ready for a complete online delivery across the country.

Employers are challenged because they now have a future workforce that is wanting some agility and flexibility and a lot of people want to work from home or perhaps they’d like to work in another country as a digital nomad. We’ve been working on many projects like this across our client base, but in particular I’ve worked with one very large, global organization that really wanted to come up with some very new and exciting policies for its employees for more agile, flexible working in this very complicated immigration landscape.

One of the things I did was to look very closely at the digital nomad schemes that are in existence and have proliferated during the pandemic. And it was quite a good task for Fragomen to be able to do because we have been advising many of the governments who’ve introduced these digital nomad schemes and we made an assessment for the client on what sort of schemes their employees could easily take up if they wanted to work from another country and they wanted a complete change of scene for their family. And as you know many people have gone particularly popular to Dubai or to the Caribbean, and we gave an assessment of these global schemes saying which one would fit in best from a work perspective, so what schemes would allow the employer to have their employees working under those schemes, but also the flexibility of them being able to work for that employer.

We made that assessment, and then we also made a very detailed assessment of those employees that had immigration status in one country or the other,  and the impact on that immigration status if they were moving to a different city or even to a different country, and we collated all of that information together and we worked very closely with our clients’ other vendors, and that’s something that’s extremely important because all of these new policies and processes have to be very much aligned with the tax and employment situations, so there has to be a holistic solution. And then we came up with some suggestions working with the other vendors. The client was then able to implement a really state-of-the-art mobility policy for its employees looking at this post-pandemic situation.

It was a very enjoyable assignment to work with a client collaboratively with other vendors and really provide a solution for what is really quite a common post-pandemic issue. Thank you.