Work From Abroad Is a Benefit Your Talent Expects. Unmanaged, It's a Liability You Can't See.

How many work-from-abroad requests did your company turn down this summer, not because the answer was no, but because nobody was sure how to say yes safely?

That question sits at the center of a conversation between Brock Dale of WorkFlex, which automates cross-border compliance for companies that send people over borders, and Zoltan Szalas, CEO of Croissant, which gives distributed teams governed access to professional workspaces in hundreds of cities. Per a WorkFlex survey, 97% of talent says flexibility is a key factor in choosing a job. The companies that can approve a workation with confidence are winning candidates and keeping people. The ones that can't are quietly accumulating risk they will only discover when something goes wrong.

Watch the full webinar above, or read on for the takeaways.

The office made a hundred decisions for you. Now nobody makes them.

Zoltan's framing for why this problem exists at all: the traditional office was a bundled operating model. Where does onboarding happen? Where do customer meetings happen? Where do people work? You never had to decide, because the office decided for you.

When companies went distributed, that bundle didn't get replaced. It got pushed down. Every one of those decisions was silently delegated to line managers and individual employees. Zoltan calls it the silent toll: "Of course you're going to get more compliance violations, because there isn't that governing structure."

And nobody owns the result. Work from abroad is a hot potato tossed between HR, workplace experience, legal, and finance. Brock sees the same pattern from the compliance side: companies of 30,000 people where the entire global mobility function is one person and a spreadsheet. It holds until you realize how pervasive the issues are at scale.

This is not a summer problem

Two assumptions the usage data kills quickly.

First, that workations are seasonal. Croissant's workspace usage data shows demand is nearly flat across the year, with only a small summer bump. Whatever policy you write has to work in February too.

Second, that trips are short. The fastest-growing segment Croissant sees is what Zoltan calls super nomads: people spending a month or more working from a different region. Those longer stays used to be about 10% of usage and are growing significantly. Longer stays are exactly where the compliance thresholds live.

What going wrong actually looks like

The webinar was unusually rich in true stories, and they escalate.

The false positive. At a previous job, Zoltan spent three days in Montreal. A VPN misfire kept reporting him in Canada afterward. Months later his Chief People Officer messaged him: "Why have you been in Canada for the last four and a half months?" The company had accrued something like a $20,000 to $30,000 fine while he was sitting in the Bronx. The tracking was wrong, and it still cost real money.

The lockout. A senior partner at a Canadian firm flew to Barcelona without knowing his company had implemented a VPN policy. The moment systems detected him abroad, he lost access to email and Teams entirely. Compliance controls with no employee experience design just create a different failure.

The house. An employee asked his boss, over Slack, for a week working from Portugal. Then another week. Nobody checked back in. Months later, hidden behind Zoom backgrounds, he announced he'd bought a house there. The company had no Portuguese entity, he had overstayed his Schengen allowance, and the scramble began.

The one nobody forgets. An employee took a short workation with her manager's blessing and no paperwork, on the assumption that corporate insurance covered everything. Working from a cafe, she tripped on her laptop cable, hit her head, and was left paraplegic, spending six months in hospital. The insurer refused to pay: she was on holiday, not working. The court disagreed. Six months of VPN logs proved she was working, which made it a duty of care lapse by the employer. The company paid tens of thousands of euros in fines plus repatriation and hospital bills, and her manager lost their job.

The risk map, briefly

The full deck covers eight compliance areas. The ones that generate the most surprises:

• Right to work, not just right to enter. Canada and Indonesia have both recently moved against working on tourist visas. Getting in with your passport is not the same as being allowed to work there.
• Tax residency. The rough threshold is 183 days in a host country, but the clock and the consequences vary. It can bite the employee personally with double filings, and the employer with fines.
• Permanent establishment. One senior executive or salesperson negotiating contracts abroad can trigger it on their own. And there's a cumulative version: multiple colleagues doing the same work from the same destination country can collectively create PE exposure. You have to track presence institutionally, not just individually.
• Social security and A1s. If someone can be proven to be working from another country without the right filings, the company is at fault for allowing it, even if the task was pushed to the employee.
• Duty of care. Wildfires, geopolitics, or a tripped laptop cable. If you don't know where your people are, you can't protect them, and courts will hold you responsible anyway.
• Work environment rules. Some countries regulate the workspace itself. Zoltan described a customer putting a go-to-market team into Finland and Sweden, where employers must provide a work environment meeting specific standards, with budget allocated to it. You can't just drop people into coffee shops and ask for revenue numbers later.

Stipends are the easy button, and the easy button breaks

Because nobody owns the problem, companies reach for the easiest tool available: a stipend, a capped credit card, reimbursements. Zoltan's assessment is blunt: that solves the spend question and nothing else. Compliance, visibility, and duty of care are untouched.

And it decays even on its own terms. One chief of staff told Croissant why they finally replaced reimbursements: "The last reimbursement was actually a sailboat." Beyond the sailboat, it was costing 15 to 20 hours a month of chasing receipts.

The pattern both speakers see: what works at 20 employees fails at 100, and what works at 100 fails at 1,000. Five employees who want to work from 15 countries means 15 compliance regimes and 15 workspace vendors. The biggest risk isn't a fine. It's that managing this manually becomes someone's entire job.

The reason to do it anyway: retention

It would be easy to hear the horror stories and conclude the answer is no. Zoltan pushed back with data. Croissant analyzed five to six thousand five-star Glassdoor reviews, written by people who love their employer, and roughly 40% mentioned isolation or a hunger for more flexibility in where they work.

The demand is real, and it decides offers. "Sometimes just saying, you can go work from Spain for three months and we're okay with that, sometimes that's the deciding factor," Zoltan said. At a previous company, one of the best data scientists he ever worked with turned down higher-paying offers for one reason: "We let her travel and live in a new country every three months."

Brock's word for it is employer brand, borrowed from an HR leader he learned from years ago: a happier employee is a more productive employee. Companies that can't offer this are watching people vote with their feet.

How to build the policy

The good news from both sides: this is weeks of work, not quarters.

Brock's baseline: decide which countries you allow and how much time per year. That alone puts you ahead of most companies. A structured policy with proper risk assessment shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks to stand up, and every request after that gets evaluated against a rubric instead of a Slack thread.

Zoltan's framework for the workspace side is three questions: "Where are your people, what departments are they in, and what are the business outcomes they achieve." In a distributed company, you only need physical space for outcomes: onboarding a cluster of hires in Porto, an R&D planning week, a customer meeting. Audit where people are, find the clusters, define the outcomes, and the access policy and budget follow from usage data. Croissant has over four million hours of it to benchmark against.

That's the same discipline that turns workspace from an unmanaged perk into a governed spend category: policy, visibility, and usage data instead of receipts and goodwill.

The one question to ask this week

Asked what they wish every HR leader would ask, both landed in the same place. Brock: "Do you know where your people are?" Not approximately. Actually. Because every risk above, from tax to safety, starts with that answer. Zoltan's addition: and are they set up with a place to achieve their business outcomes once they're there?

If the answer to either is no, that's the gap between work from abroad as a liability and work from abroad as the benefit your next hire is comparing offers on.

Want to offer work from abroad without absorbing the risk? Talk to Croissant about governed workspace access for distributed teams, and reach out to WorkFlex for cross-border compliance. The webinar deck, including the full breakdown of the eight risk areas, is linked in the video description.

Watch the full conversation: Webinar: Work-from-Abroad as a Benefit, Not a Risk