01/26/2022

Building a Globally-diverse Team Is Actually Getting Easier

This includes association talent

Open your favorite news site, and you’ll soon immerse yourself in a bleak reality of global migration, spanning from the U.S.-Mexican border, to China sending home expats, to urgent labor shortages in post-Brexit UK. These struggles are real. But they are not the entire story.

From a global perspective, it has in fact rarely been easier for skilled talent to cross borders. By and large, we see more and more firms build globally diverse teams, as research has shown these teams tend to drive firm-level and ultimately also country-level innovation. Germany is now considering a points-based visa system to attract skilled talent. France has introduced a new visa for entrepreneurs. Although it’s not widely known, Japan offers a visa category aimed mainly but not exclusively at tech talent. Even in post-Brexit UK, a points-based skilled worker visa remains a core pillar of the country’s talent strategy. Australia’s COVID-19 restrictions today make mobility challenging, but this is expected to be a transitory phenomenon.

As part of our research on “Innovation Without Borders,” we analyzed the relative ease of global relocation for skilled talent, comparing the world’s 10 most popular destination countries as well as China and Japan. Many countries have now put the legal framework in place to hire and relocate global talent at a cost and speed that is broadly comparable with hiring domestically. The world is now “flat” for global talent (this includes association talent, per ASAE).

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.