Geopolitical shocks from visa overhauls to Middle East conflict are forcing businesses to rethink how and where work gets done, pushing HR leaders to swap cost-cutting reflexes for agile, globally savvy people strategies
Geopolitical shocks used to feel distant for many Australian organisations. Today, they are reshaping everything from talent strategy and mobility programs to operating models and leadership expectations – often overnight.
Speaking to HRD, leadership advisor Chris Power and global mobility specialists from Vialto say people leaders can no longer treat conflicts, visa changes or fuel disruptions as “someone else’s problem”. Instead, they must anticipate “inflection points”, build flexible work models and resist the urge to simply “pull the cost lever” when the next crisis hits.
From moving people to moving work
For decades, global mobility has been built on a simple premise: move the person to where the job is.
“That philosophy used to be ‘move the people to the work’ – short-term, long-term, how do we move them around?” said Vialto director Alysha DiMartino. “Now it’s a lot more about moving the work to the people.”
DiMartino and colleague, Vialto partner Hugh Cook, said geopolitical volatility, talent shortages and changing employee expectations are colliding with new technology to fundamentally change how international work gets done.
Where mobility once meant traditional, expat-style assignments, employers are now dealing with:
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Hybrid and international remote work
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Virtual assignments (working in one country for the benefit of another)
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Employees wanting to tack remote work onto overseas holidays
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Domestic employers recruiting globally for specialist or senior roles
Vialto’s own research shows virtual assignments jumping from about 6% of arrangements in 2023 to a projected 17% by 2025 – almost tripling in two years. That shift is driven both by business need and by a workforce that is more global, more diverse and more demanding of flexibility.
“In the next decade we’re going to see five generations in the workforce,” said Cook. “They’re looking for different things from employers – different experiences and benefit packages – and mobility and international flexibility are a big part of that.”
For APAC-based employers, the stakes are high. By 2030, roughly 65% of the world’s talent and 45% of global GDP will be concentrated in the Asia region, noted Vialto. That makes access to cross-border talent a strategic necessity, not a nice-to-have – precisely at a time when geopolitics is making borders more complex.
When policy changes overnight
The most obvious pinch point is immigration. DiMartino pointed to the recent overnight changes to the US H‑1B visa system as an example of how quickly geopolitics can translate into real costs.
“In the US there was a really quick overnight change to the H‑1B visa,” she said. “The cost has gone from a couple of thousand to 100,000 for each individual.”
A change of that magnitude doesn’t just trigger a compliance scramble; it forces a complete rethink of the workforce strategy underpinning those roles. Are those people in the right locations? Is that market still viable? Does it still make sense to send talent into that jurisdiction when geopolitical risk is priced in?
Similarly, conflict in the Middle East has pushed global employers into crisis mode. Vialto has been helping clients answer basic but critical questions: Where are our people? Who is at risk? How do we extract them safely? What does that mean for business continuity?
“We’ve done a bit of work around setting up crisis hotlines and dashboards,” said Cook. “It’s about getting information to clients quickly… particularly around immigration in crises like Iran and the broader Middle East, with alerts and information freely accessible so organisations can navigate really uncertain times.”
For HR, that means crisis management and mobility strategy are now inseparable – and both are being shaped by geopolitics.
Inflection points: Why leaders must stop “just pulling the cost lever”
Power argues that many organisations are misreading what these geopolitical shocks represent. They see them as temporary storms to be ridden out, rather than “inflection points” – structural turning points that permanently change the operating environment.
“These inflections are moments where everything comes together and there’s a shift,” she said. “Some leaders treat each one as ‘big inflection point – phew, now it’s finished’. But you never go back to where it was again.”
Power pointed to COVID‑19 as the archetypal example: those who used it to reinvent their operating models – rather than simply hunkering down on JobKeeper – fundamentally changed how they do business, including the ubiquity of remote work. Current fuel and Middle East disruptions will have similar long tails, from supply-chain reconfiguration to sector consolidation.
For people leaders, Power said the first step is role clarity.
“Right now people are scrambling and there’s a lot of doing and being very busy,” she explained. “HR leaders get sucked into that – partly because everyone is, and partly because they want to be of service and prove value when things are tricky.
“The first thing is to get really clear on your role: what is actually required of me right now? Not my preferences, not what a handful of people are asking for – what’s required of me to help this organisation navigate the inflection?”
The second step is constant realignment, not one‑and‑done offsites.
“The days of ‘set and forget’ once‑a‑year realignment are over,” Power said. “At a minimum it’s quarterly check‑ins: realign the team, iterate the strategy together. One person doesn’t hold the strategy and one person isn’t solely responsible for culture anymore.”
The third step is readying the business: creatively rethinking operating models, organisation design and culture to match a more fluid, crisis‑prone environment – rather than retreating into rigid structures or blunt cost cutting.
“Pulling the cost lever is the most uncreative, old‑school thing you can do, yet it’s where some leaders go,” Power noted. “Instead of just freezing roles or cutting development, ask: where is the opportunity here? What’s the new way of organising work?”
Fuel, supply chains and the hidden exposure of “local” businesses
Even organisations that see themselves as purely domestic are discovering just how global their exposure really is.
Power’s client list spans agriculture, FMCG, printing and packaging, construction and finance – sectors now feeling the ripple effects of conflict and supply constraints.
Agriculture clients are contending with fuel shortages to plant and harvest. Food manufacturers are staring down future potato shortages and margin pressures. Construction firms are bracing for another spike in build costs, accelerating a move to prefab. Finance and mortgage lenders must rethink risk models as build costs and supply chains shift yet again.
“I think people thought geopolitics didn’t impact them – especially in Australia, where we’re very good at saying ‘nothing to see here’,” said Power. “Now what’s coming to the fore is: oh, actually, it does. Even if you’re Australia‑based and focused, everything that’s happening still impacts you: energy, fuel, supply chains.”
That reality should be on every executive agenda, she argued – not as a scare tactic, but as a driver of more sophisticated scenario planning.
Senior teams need regular time set aside for genuinely strategic conversations: “What are we noticing? What are we reading? What are the plausible scenarios in our sector given what’s happening geopolitically?” Without that, the only tool left when a crisis hits is short-term cost cutting.
Global mobility in a world of constant disruption
For Vialto, the same forces are making mobility more complex – but also more critical to competitive advantage.
Technology has made virtual assignments, cross‑border remote work and global collaboration vastly easier. At the same time, every cross‑border arrangement now carries a tangle of tax, immigration, social security and permanent establishment risks that vary by jurisdiction and can change rapidly with political winds.
“If an individual is working in their home country for the benefit of an entity in another country, you’ve got to understand what that means from a tax and employer perspective,” said DiMartino. “That’s where organisations need real support.”
The answer is not to retreat from global talent, but to be crystal clear on intent and risk appetite.
Think through the company’s objectives and strategy, map the risks, decide what level you’re comfortable with, and ask: is this the right role in the right place for both the individual and the employer?
When organisations do that well, they can take advantage of APAC’s vast talent pool, meet workers’ demand for flexibility and still protect their businesses in a volatile world.
What employees want from leaders now
If geopolitics is making certainty impossible, what do employees actually want from their leaders?
Power cited Gallup research showing that “hope” has now edged out “trust” as the number one thing people look for in leaders, while “stability” ranked surprisingly low.
“I’m not sure people want stability anymore,” she said. “They don’t necessarily want leaders to take control and provide certainty. They want hope that we have a way – a process – to adapt and adopt new ways of being.”
For HR leaders, that may be the central challenge of this geopolitical era: not promising that shocks will stop coming, but building organisations that can flex, learn and keep their people safe and productive when they do.
In practice, that means:
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Designing operating models that can reconfigure quickly
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Embracing more fluid structures – project‑based “squads”, cross‑functional teams, and startup mindsets within legacy businesses
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Investing in data and AI to stitch together mobility, payroll and people data so decisions can be made fast – in crises and in strategy
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Creating space for leaders to think, read and scenario‑plan, rather than running back‑to‑back just to keep up
“There’s absolutely an opportunity in every inflection,” Power added. “The question for leaders is whether you see it and organise around it – or just pull the cost lever and hope it passes.”
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