Every multinational company must decide where to carry out its work. Should a new artificial intelligence (AI) capability be built in Bengaluru or San Francisco? Is a new market best served by hiring locally, relocating specialists, or creating a regional hub? Individually, these sound like operational decisions. But taken together, they could decide how quickly and successfully companies build new capabilities or enter markets.
Organizations devote significant attention to digital infrastructure, data platforms, and supply chains because they understand that these systems underpin growth. Yet the infrastructure that supports global work has often received less strategic attention. This includes the governance, technology, data, processes, and specialist capabilities that help leaders understand where expertise sits and any constraints on deployment. Ultimately, this infrastructure supports better decisions about how work should be organized across borders.
The case for treating this infrastructure as strategic is becoming more urgent. Companies are competing for scarce specialist skills while navigating changing regulations and geopolitical uncertainty. These pressures can affect where work can happen and which workforce models are viable.
At the same time, work itself is becoming more knowledge intensive. Research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)1 shows that the use of information-processing skills has increased markedly over the past decade, with particularly strong growth in information and communications technology (ICT) skills. In contrast, the use of manual dexterity skills has declined, pointing to a broader shift toward more cognitive work.
For multinational companies, one consequence of this shift is a growing premium on access to specialist expertise. Capabilities in areas such as AI and advanced manufacturing can be scarce and unevenly distributed across markets. Companies cannot therefore assume that the expertise they need will be in the same place as the business opportunity.
As a result, decisions about where work should happen and how capabilities should be organized can now influence growth and competitiveness.
Historically, many of these decisions were grouped under employee mobility. International assignments filled immediate business needs while supporting leadership development. That remains an important outcome, but organizations are increasingly using global talent to meet their growth priorities. In addition to developing future leaders, organizations increasingly use global talent strategies to support growth and transformation.
As part of that, multinational organizations are now drawing on a wider range of options. They can relocate specialists, hire locally, establish capability centers, use remote teams, engage contractors, or combine several of these approaches. The strategic challenge is choosing the right combination of workforce models to expand or transform effectively.
Yet global work is still often managed primarily as an operational or compliance capability rather than a strategic input for growth and transformation. In a sense, this is understandable, because traditional mobility programs affected only a small proportion of the workforce; they were seen as successful if they operated efficiently and maintained employment compliance.
These success factors are no longer enough. When organizations are deciding where to establish a new capability or how to integrate an acquisition, they need to understand where skills are available, how quickly they can deploy them, whether there are any regulatory constraints, and which combination of workforce models best supports the business.
But these considerations are not always integrated early enough into strategic planning, which can result in workforce issues becoming constraints on effective execution. A market launch might be delayed because the organization underestimated the immigration requirements. Or an important project could stall because the organization cannot mobilize specialist expertise quickly enough. These are failures in business planning, and they could become more damaging as talent constraints increase. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 20252, for instance, found that 42% of surveyed employers expected talent availability to decline between 2025 and 2030. Just 29% expected it to improve.
This points to a broader governance issue. Workforce readiness is often viewed primarily through an operational or compliance lens: Can the organization meet immigration or tax requirements when deploying people where they are needed? Assessments of financial and operational readiness are already integral to acquisitions and major transformation initiatives. Workforce readiness merits the same scrutiny. After all, access to critical expertise, and the ability to deploy it quickly, can determine whether an investment delivers its intended value.
This means considering workforce questions from Day 1, alongside the commercial, legal, and tax-planning dimensions of an investment. How quickly can specialist expertise be deployed, and which workforce model will best support execution? Addressing these questions as strategic issues can help organizations move faster and with greater confidence while reducing the risk of costly delays later.
One barrier to effective decision-making is that responsibility for global work is often fragmented across HR, tax, legal, finance, payroll, and business leadership. Each area might have its own systems, data, and priorities. They may be high performing on their own, but they can still lack a shared view of how work should be organized across the enterprise.
When cross-border work consisted mainly of long-term relocations, organizations were able to accommodate this fragmentation. But it becomes a problem when they are making decisions about where capabilities should sit and how talent should be sourced globally.
Meeting those needs requires the ability to decide where and how teams will work as business priorities change.
If global work has become more strategic, why is its contribution to growth not always visible at the board level? That’s partly because it is still often discussed and measured in operational or compliance terms. Many organizations can explain what they spend on mobility in a year. Fewer can explain how those investments contributed to the company’s strategic growth agenda.
Operational measures such as the number of visas processed may provide useful context, but the more important insight is the enterprise value of workforce decisions—for example, whether they have accelerated market entry or improved returns on investment:
These questions are harder to quantify than operational activity, but they connect workforce decisions directly to capital allocation and growth. What matters at the board level is a clear narrative that links workforce decisions to business performance and shows what an investment achieved.
This means that the conversation needs to shift from cost to value. The goal is to not only reduce spending on global work but also invest in the capabilities that allow organizations to make better decisions about where work happens and how it is carried out.
Organizations that manage global work well connect workforce planning with business strategy, supported by shared governance across HR, tax, legal, finance, and business leadership. Technology and integrated data provide the connective layer. A common platform can give leaders visibility into where expertise sits and where regulatory or cost constraints could affect deployment. It can also reduce the fragmentation that results when different functions work from separate systems and datasets.
High-performing organizations also remember to design these capabilities to cope with disruption. Global growth is rarely predictable: Political change and new regulations can quickly alter where work needs to happen and what capabilities the organization needs. Resilient organizations invest in global work infrastructure that gives them options. Connected systems and data, integrated governance, clear accountability, and strong specialist partnerships allow leaders to adjust work more quickly in response to change. They can get the right expertise on a project even when the external conditions are volatile.
Taken together, these capabilities form the infrastructure behind global work. Like digital platforms or supply chains, they are rarely noticed when they function well. But they have significant business value.
As businesses become more knowledge intensive, the systems that determine where work happens warrant the same discipline as the systems that move capital, data, and products around the world.
The strategic question is whether organizations have the governance and operating models to make consistently good decisions about how work is organized across borders. Those that do are likely to adapt to change more quickly, make better use of scarce expertise, and execute their strategy more confidently.
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Eileen Mullaney
Global Leader, Vialto Advisory
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