What we heard from two HR Leaders Roundtables earlier this year.
Nobody plans a global team. You hire one country at a time, and five years later you’re “building the tracks in front of the train,” as one attendee put it.
We heard versions of that again and again at our two HR Leaders Roundtables this year, from People and HR leaders employing in five to thirty-plus countries. None of them were Teamed clients (yet), so when they mention “providers”, they mean their own.
Four themes came up in nearly every session:
- Compliance monitoring is hope-based. Regulatory change gets caught by a provider, often late, or by an employee who noticed first.
- Consolidating vendors doesn’t remove the patchwork. It hides it.
- AI is fine for tier-one questions. Nobody trusts it past that.
- Standardisation is a dance, not a decision. The EU Pay Transparency Directive is forcing the issue anyway.
Compliance monitoring is hope-based
There’s no internal process for catching regulatory change. It gets flagged by their provider, sometimes late, or by an employee who noticed first.
“Sometimes our providers will tell us, but quite often it’s late. Other times it’s a member of staff messaging us going, ‘did you know this has changed?’”
People Lead, UK-based foundation
The pattern held across teams of a hundred and teams of a thousand. Nobody has the bandwidth to own monitoring across every country they employ in, so the work happens reactively, after the fact.
Consolidating vendors doesn’t remove the patchwork. It hides it.
Almost nobody is on a single provider. Most run two or three: an EOR in some countries, an outsourced HR partner in others, a local lawyer for the rest. Contracts, where they’re held centrally at all, often sit on someone’s desktop.
Everyone wants fewer vendors. But attendees who had already consolidated found the patchwork hadn’t gone. It had moved underneath their provider, into a chain of local partners they couldn’t see until something went wrong.
An HR Director at a European logistics scale-up found that out in Turkey. Instead of a local team, their provider passed them from one contact to the next:
“In Turkey [we] realised only at the end [the provider] didn’t have proper support on the ground.”
HR Director, European logistics scale-up
The useful question isn’t how many vendors you have. It’s who actually stands behind your people in each country, and how many hands a problem passes through before it reaches them.
AI is fine for tier-one questions. Nobody trusts it past that
Every attendee uses AI. None trust it for anything with real consequences for an employee.
“I’m finding myself having conversations with ChatGPT, and it’s spitting out things that are completely wrong. The ramifications to us as an employer are large.”
Founder, online legal service
The room’s read: AI handles the easy questions better than it used to. The hard ones, where compliance is dynamic and depends on the country, aren’t getting meaningfully better. Confidently wrong is a worse outcome than slow.
Standardisation is a dance, not a decision
What’s fair in one country isn’t fair in another, and someone in head office always has an opinion about a market they’ve never operated in.
“It’s a dance. We hold that tension and help other people understand what to do with it. Sometimes we go around the roundabout a few times.”
CPO, energy trading company
The EU Pay Transparency Directive came up repeatedly as the thing forcing this conversation regardless of appetite: compensation that grew organically over five years is now being audited against a regulatory standard.
Where most companies actually sit
We asked attendees to place their setup on four stages: ad hoc, patchwork, coordinated, unified. It isn’t a scorecard, just a way to name where you are.
Most landed in the messy middle, between patchwork and coordinated, and several were mid-transition between the two. Nobody claimed stage four, and a few doubted it’s fully achievable for a genuinely multi-country setup. The aim, as one put it, is just to keep narrowing the gap.
Narrowing that gap is mostly about not being surprised. Teamed tells clients what’s coming before they have to ask, and flags when their structure should change.