Friends,

I’m back in Australia and (mostly) over my jet lag — but I passed out asleep twice this week despite expecting myself to immediately slot back into my normal work routine.

I had unreasonable expectations of myself.

It was an ironic moment of reflection as I prepared this week’s edition. I’m sure that, like me, you’ve been responsible for global mobility at one point in your career. And just how shambolic it can be, especially in startups.

We spend so much effort just to meet the legislative expectations of the process, that often little thought is given to the human and performance toll inflicted on the person who is supposed to be excited and engaged throughout the process.

These high value employees show up in a new country with no friends or family, no understanding of how things work, and a completely destabilised home life — and we expect them to onboard or hit the ground running like any ordinary employee.

We have unreasonable expectations of them.

In reality they’re often trying to find a home, get their kids into school, make sense of the tax or healthcare system and not figuring out how to do their job (or not to their full capacity, anyway).

So it was great collaborating on this week’s article with friends of FNDN Series, Concord. If you’re looking for a startups guide to moving and hiring overseas, they also produced an amazing guide I wish existed when I was doing these. Get it here (free).

Enjoy ✌

Matt

In case you’re new here (or just missed it) here’s the past three editions of the FNDN Series:

I've signed comp data contracts in a hurry before. I think we all have.

Whether it was the rep who got back to me first. The vendor our VC swore by. Or a decision made in rapid fire.

Six months in, the symptoms started showing:

That's why I worked with my friends at Pave to build a playbook on how to evaluate the next comp data vendor without getting sold to.

It's the guide I wish I'd had the first time I made this call.

Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

Todays edition is produced in collaboration with Concord Visa. Thank you for supporting our brand partners, who keep this newsletter free for all FNDN Series readers.

Somewhere along the way, "employee experience" became shorthand for the nice (but fluffy) stuff. The team offsites. The Friday drinks. The snack cupboard.

Those of us who read FNDN Series know, though, that the companies actually winning on employee experience right now are focusing on the fundamentals: transparency, honesty, say-do ratio, responsiveness, clarity. Those are the core elements that create the environment people want when they're building a career at your company.

Open salary bands. Clear progression frameworks. Strategy shared with the whole team, not just leadership. Honest performance conversations about what's working and what's not. That's what real employee experience looks like, and the best People leaders know it.

But there's one area where even the best companies consistently fall short, and it happens to be one of the most stressful things an employee will ever go through.

That area is global mobility.

Not intentionally. In fact, almost never intentionally.

Because the people managing the immigration process are the same people who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into crafting the perfect performance framework or transparent employee handbook. They really care.

I've lived this. When I led the People function at one of the fastest-growing startups in ANZ, we were obsessive about employee experience. We got it right in so many areas - winning multiple Best Place to Work awards, having articles written about our practices. Yet our global mobility processes never matched the standard we'd set everywhere else, even though we tried our best.

Why? Fundamentally, it's an area that's tricky to do well. HR people usually have this thrust on our plate with little context and, in most cases, no experience at all - so we're at the mercy of the immigration partner we choose. Usually that's a fairly traditional law firm, simply not equipped to cater to startup pace or needs. The immigration rules are complex and bureaucratic, and differ wildly from country to country. We jump to using an EOR thinking they'll save us, only to find halfway through the process that they can't legally sponsor the kind of work visa we need - and then having to unpick it all and start over while the candidate sits there stressing about timelines.

As a People person, you end up stuck in between an incredibly stressed employee whose life and career are imminently changing (in what should be an incredibly exciting opportunity but is just pure dread) and a law firm that takes three days to respond to any query and bills you for every escalation.

It's a standard most of us in HR wouldn't tolerate in any other area we manage. Yet it's the status quo for global mobility.

It's simple: company-sponsored immigration is a key milestone that happens at high-stakes inflection points for your business, and the people going through it tend to be your top performers or most senior hires. If you’re considering sponsoring a visa, you’re probably:

Getting immigration wrong at these moments doesn't just create a poor employee experience. It damages relationships, erodes trust, and in the worst cases, costs you the person (or the opportunity) entirely.

But getting it right builds extraordinary loyalty.

Immigration is a hot potato. I've seen it everywhere, including in my own career.

Nobody volunteers to own it. It gets shuffled between legal, ops, and finance. It's complicated, compliance-heavy, and frankly intimidating. So it ends up as everybody's problem and nobody's responsibility.

I feel strongly that the right home for global mobility is within HR. Not as a burden, but as an opportunity.

It's fundamentally a critical touchpoint in the employee lifecycle. HR teams are the best people to think about it through that lens - because that's what we do. You'll absolutely want to pull in legal or ops for specific tasks, and a cross-functional working group can be brilliant. But the ownership, accountability, and momentum should sit with the People team.

When you reframe immigration from a logistical headache to an employee experience lever, the whole approach shifts.

Because it's not just the visa and compliance - both genuine components of employee experience in their own right. It's everything around it - helping someone find accommodation, set up bank accounts so they can get paid, get their family settled. This support directly shapes how quickly someone becomes productive in their new location, and how happy and established they feel. That's exactly the kind of support People teams are built to provide. And every week someone spends distracted by logistics is a week of performance you've left on the table.

Your employees going through the visa process are carrying an enormous amount of stress and anxiety. Their whole lives are changing. The least we can do is make sure they can see what's happening, when it's happening, and what comes next.

That means accurate timelines. Visible progress tracked within a dashboard. Proactive flags when something needs attention. Fast responses - not three-day email turnarounds. The same transparency and clarity you'd offer in every other part of your employee experience, applied to the process that arguably matters more than any of them. And holistic support for settling in on the ground via a network of vetted partners in tax, HR consulting, salary benchmarking, accommodation support, and more.

This is exactly why Kevin and I are building Concord. We wanted to build the immigration experience that matched the standard the best companies set everywhere else, and give People teams the visibility and tools to own it properly.

It's not an onboarding swag bag or a ping-pong table - although those are lovely perks. It's treating immigration with the same rigour, transparency, and empathy you bring to your performance review cycle, your parental leave policy, and your onboarding programme.

If this is the standard you're aiming for, reach out to see how Concord can help. It takes less than 30 minutes.

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A roundup of the most interesting stuff from the week:

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help you:

1. Tools & resources
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3. Startup People Summit
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