A termination that's routine in one country is a legal exposure in another. The two situations that catch scaling businesses out hardest aren't obscure: they're a redundancy that has to run across several countries at once, and a "secondment" that's quietly turned into something else.
Why this catches scaling businesses out
Most scale-ups build their People processes around the country they started in, then hire abroad without revisiting them. It works, until it doesn't. A UK-style settlement agreement offers no protection in a US at-will state. A US-style "let go with immediate effect" triggers a statutory notice claim in Germany. None of this shows up as a problem until someone leaves, usually the worst possible moment to discover it.
Two situations account for most of the real exposure I've seen: redundancies that have to happen across more than one country at once, and secondments that don't stay secondments. Both are covered below, along with what actually resolves each one.
Making a team redundant across countries with different rules
A redundancy that only touches one country is hard enough: consultation periods, selection criteria, notice, pay calculations. Run the same process across several countries at once and the legal side is only half the problem. The other half is sequencing.
Each country has its own consultation period, notice requirement, and documentation standard, and they don't line up. If one country's process takes six weeks of formal consultation and another allows notice the same week, telling everyone on the same day either forces you to hold the fast country back artificially or lets word travel to the slow country's team before their process has even started. Either way, people who were never at risk hear about it secondhand, draw their own conclusions, and start job-hunting anyway. The legal exposure is manageable with the right advice in each jurisdiction; the upheaval across teams that were never in scope is the part that actually damages the business if it's handled badly.
Getting this right means mapping every country's process end-to-end before any conversation happens anywhere, building a sequence that respects each jurisdiction's timeline without leaving a gap where information can leak, and being deliberate about what other teams are told and when, so the redundancy stays contained to the people actually affected by it.
When a "secondment" turns into a transfer
Secondments are meant to be temporary: an employee sent to another country for a defined project or period, still employed and paid from their home entity. In practice, that line blurs easily: the assignment gets extended informally, the person starts reporting into the local team full-time, and eighteen months later what was on paper a short secondment looks, in substance, like a permanent transfer.
That gap between the paperwork and the reality is where the tax risk sits. Most secondment frameworks rely on the arrangement staying temporary to keep the employee's tax residency and social security in the home country. Once it functions as a de facto transfer, that host country can reasonably argue the employee, and sometimes the business, has a tax presence there that was never declared or planned for.
Fixing it isn't just a paperwork correction. The employee didn't create the risk and shouldn't absorb the cost of resolving it: their pay, benefits, and pension arrangements were built around the original secondment terms, and unwinding that carelessly can leave them financially worse off for something the business let drift. The right fix regularises the employment properly (a real local contract, correct payroll and social security registration, tax positions reviewed for both sides), protects what the employee is entitled to under the arrangement they actually agreed to, and closes the exposure for the business going forward, rather than pretending the secondment was never functionally over.
What good looks like
A People function that's genuinely on top of this can answer these questions for every country it operates in:
- If we had to run a redundancy in more than one country at once, do we know each country's consultation and notice timeline well enough to sequence it properly?
- Do we know the notice period and termination process here, by tenure and by reason?
- Are any of our secondments still operating as secondments in practice, or have they quietly become something else?
- Are our contracts locally compliant, not just translated?
- Do we know the statutory minimums for leave, redundancy, and benefits?
Frequently asked questions
Do we need local legal advice for every country we hire in?
Yes, for contract drafting and any live dispute, but legal advice alone won't tell you where to prioritise or how to sequence something like a multi-country redundancy. That's a People leadership question first, a legal one second.
How do we know if a secondment has quietly become a transfer?
The usual signs: no fixed end date left on the arrangement, the person reporting fully into the host-country team, and no home-country work actually happening anymore. If it's been more than a year and any of those are true, it's worth reviewing before it surfaces on its own.
What's the difference between an EOR and getting this right ourselves?
An Employer of Record handles local compliance mechanics, but doesn't manage the People strategy sitting on top of it: performance, culture, and structure still need senior ownership regardless of which entity technically employs someone.
At what headcount does this actually become urgent?
Earlier than most businesses assume. The risk starts with your first hire in a new country, not your fiftieth, and it's invisible until someone leaves, or a secondment quietly outlives its purpose.
Facing a redundancy or secondment question like this?
Happy to talk it through. No pitch, just a conversation about what you're dealing with.