Chapter 5
Workplaces without Borders: (Or, Why the War for Talent Has Gone Global)

There is a good reason why culture and engagement are part of our everyday vocabulary, but our grandparents' generation probably never spoke of them during their careers. They talked of things like loyalty, dependability, and opportunity, all of which are still part of the culture equation, but in varying degrees than in the past. The workplace of now differs greatly from the workplace of just 20 years ago. It was a different time and place. Society valued different things. People behaved in different ways.

For one thing, our increasingly globalized and freelance economy means that talent is now borderless. Consider the movement of people.

• In 1990, the world had 154 million international migrants (generally defined as people who reside in a country in which they were not born) (Engaging and Integration a Global Workforce, 2015, 13).
• In 2000, we had 173 million international migrants (244 Million International Migrants Living Abroad Worldwide, 2016).
• As of 2015, that number had grown to 244 million (244 Million International Migrants, 2016).

And about half of those international migrants reside in only 10 countries. The United States alone houses 20 percent of international migrants, followed by Russia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

Let's frame it another way. In 1990, all of us in the world put together took 400 million trips abroad annually, including all business, touring, studying, and everything else (Exploding Digital Flows in a Deeply Connected World, 2016). In 2016, we have nearly tripled that to more than 1.1 billion.

Or consider the growth of emerging economies. In 2015, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the BRICS countries) claimed 30 percent of global gross domestic product (BRICS, 2015). Toss in the other developing economies, and together they accounted for 42 percent of world merchandise trade and for 35 percent of trade in world commercial services (Engaging and Integration a Global Workforce, 2015, 8).

What's more, the World Economic Forum's latest 2016 survey on "The Future of Jobs" projects that by 2030, Asia alone will account for 66 percent of the global middle class and for 59 percent of middle-class consumption (World Economic Forum, 2016). We are seeing the world's economic center of gravity shift away from North America, away from Europe, and toward emerging economies that are emerging as hubs of talent, entrepreneurship, and consumption.

So what does this mean for us? It means the workplace of the future looks unmistakably different than the workplace we know today. We need to expand our thinking of where and when work gets done and who does it.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, take another trip back in the culture time machine. Picture this: you step into a fresh morning and determine what the day will hold. You commit yourself to useful and collaborative work. You achieve the mighty and intoxicating realm of flow. This is a professional dream, right? Welcome to the surprisingly alluring workplace world of 12,000 years ago, when people mostly foraged wild food for sustenance. According to renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who coined the notion of "flow"), our hunter-gatherer ancestors may not have had it too bad, professionally speaking (Kawamura, 2014). People used their skills to collaborate with others in service of clear goals, and they received immediate, actionable feedback.

Then along came agriculture, which, for all its merits, brought a surplus of resources and newfound notions of ownership, property, and wealth. And consequently, it brought the ability to hire others and the need for a hierarchical society. With hierarchy came competition, increased efficiency, envy, vulnerability, and so on. Flash forward several millennia, and our workplace has expanded to this messy conglomerate we see now, rampant with surplus, wealth, hierarchy, and exploitation. Technology, though, might have something to say about that.

The research and academic literature around global political economics is rich and diverse and worth reading, and we are not here to offer sound or comprehensive novelty to that space (though we can recommend some fascinating places to start: Poor Economics, Post-American World, Collapse, The World Is Flat). But as businesspeople, as mobile app people specifically, we cannot help but see firsthand how technology is seismically shifting the game. Here are a few key ways technology has enabled a workplace without borders.

Access

This one is really key, because it is more recent, unprecedented, and honestly thrilling. Technology levels the playing field. Companies gain greater access to talent, talent gains access to resources and opportunities, consumers can access products from nearly anywhere, and companies can advertise and sell to anyone. The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) dubs this phenomenon a "massive democratization of the global economy" (Exploding Digital Flows in a Deeply Connected World, 2016).

In the past, globalization was driven predominantly by large, multinational, Western companies like Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Monsanto. In today's shifting landscape, however, technology and digital platforms enable small businesses around the world to participate directly in globalization. As MGI notes, today there are 50 million small businesses on Facebook, twice as many as only two years ago (Exploding Digital Flows, 2016). From this kind of digital platform, these companies can reach out to, connect with, cater to, and study customers from all over the world. Of the people who have liked these small business pages on Facebook, 30 percent are from different countries than the business.

The same goes for platforms like Alibaba (which facilitates 10 million small businesses connecting to customers) and Amazon (2 million). In fact, MGI conducted a survey and found that 86 percent of technology startups around the world today initially create their business models and strategies oriented to a global market (Exploding Digital Flows, 2016). The old hindrances to global expansion like resources, talent, customers, and communication are falling by the wayside.

So what does this mean for us? The main takeaway is that technology, with its resulting speed, interconnectedness, and access, gives us the ability to source the best talent and the best input the world has to offer. It drives efficiency, innovation, and economic growth. And it connects us with exceptional communication, heightening our ability to work seamlessly across these dissolving borders. Between videoconferencing, voice messaging, online collaboration, in many ways it's not too much more difficult for us to have an employee halfway around the world as it is to have an employee one state over (McGregor, 2016).

Legal Tools

Yes, it's true, employing foreign-born workers entails some additional steps. But the steps are not onerous, they do not add exorbitant material costs, and they are well worth it. Talent reigns supreme, and the need for competent people far outweighs the cost associated with pursuing foreign-born employees.

With the help of immigration resources and experts, you can hire people for positions ranging from accountants to software engineers, help desk administrators to salespeople, mechanical engineers to attorneys, nurses, scientists, teachers, and everything in between. No matter what business you are in, you are in the talent business. In a world with rapidly dissolving borders, hiring foreign workers is a viable option for almost every employer. Hire a trusted practitioner, leverage legal tools and processes to streamline the extra paperwork, embrace the workplace landscape of the future, and make the most of the unique talent that can be found around the globe.

Michael L. Kim, immigration attorney at Hall Render, adds the following:

I was fortunate to have commenced my employment-based immigration practice during the great dot-com bubble of 1997 to 2000. I personally had friends who were creating business-to-business Internet startup companies, and it was during those years that I began to imagine a business community that was no longer constrained by national borders or the expanse of the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

Instead, I witnessed firsthand the previously burdensome and inflexible hurdles of jurisdictional and geographical lines begin to crumble. Indeed, I had the opportunity to work with an Internet startup company founded by a U.S. expat living in Tokyo during the dot-com bubble. The founder formed her company in Japan, secured funding from a European venture capital firm, and then established a U.S. subsidiary that just happened to require a foreign-born professional worker, using the H-1B Specialty Occupation classification. The confluence of these elements opened my eyes to how quickly and thoroughly our business community was becoming borderless.

I took a calculated risk and focused my practice exclusively on employment-based immigration law. Fast forward 17 years, and I now assist billion dollar enterprises, national health care systems, and cutting edge technology companies, as well as local businesses, in securing foreign-born talent to fill critical roles in their U.S. operations. We interact with these foreign-born workers every day, largely relying on the services or products they produce. They are our physicians, our aerospace...