If you know what's involved in employing people in other countries, I'd really love to hear from you...
Adaptavist are growing pretty quick. We're struggling to fill all positions with staff located in the UK so we're now looking worldwide.
However, we've hit one huge brick wall - nobody in the UK seems to know what is involved or required to employ someone in another country - eg. Canada or Australia.
For example, we have to pay very high taxes on UK employees (for every 3 or 4 members of staff we could hire another person if the taxes weren't so high). Also, our employment contracts and employee handbooks are all based on UK law, as is our outsourced HR agency. What happens for employees outside the UK?
So far we've been unable to find anyone that knows really how to employ someone in another country, it's crazy! The UK is a little island in the sea so I would have imagined lots of companies needing to employ skilled people in other countries, but apparently not.
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Well, considering the connection between Adaptavist and Atlassian, I'd suggest asking your bigger brother.
They have staff now at a site in USA. But then, they might not be familiar with UK laws and you might not want to grow to USA.
Thus, I suggest advice from an international lawyer. Or is that barrister to you?
Anyways, good luck in your hunt for information.
It's taken some digging but I've started to find more information now. It took about 6 hours of phone calls (about 30 calls in total) before I even started getting through to agencies and people who knew what the requirements were.
As we already employ a foreign national who lives and works in the UK (under a visa) we thought the situation would be similar, but it turns out to be quite different and it seems very few UK companies (certainly companies as small as Adaptavist) employ people outside the UK.
I investigated the following routes to employing people in other countries:
As we're currently only going to have one person in the foreign country, we decided on the first option.
From the UK perspective, companies don't have to pay UK salary taxes (PAYE and NI) if the employee meets all the following requirements:
From the employee end of things we've found that it's easier for them to check their local laws and tax requirements. For example, they will usually have to pay tax on their wages and they will work under the employment law of their own country. The employee is much better suited to finding such information as they know how their country works far better than we do.
With regards to the employment law, we intend to compare the UK and foreign country laws/regulations and then create employment contracts that give the best of both worlds and then feed the improved (from employee perspective) stuff back in our general employment contract.
We've found that there are some lawyers in the UK who specialise in such scenarios but it's unlikely we'll need them initially as we've already found most of the required information.
We've identified one obvious issue - sending wages to the foreign bank account. Banks here in the UK (and elsewhere it seems) are still stuck in the dark ages and while they allow you to easily send money between accounts in the UK, it's a royal pain in the ass to send money overseas. We're still trying to work out if PayPal would be a better way to send the money, although the transaction fees would be quite high and there would still be a 3-5 day delay on the other end while money is transferred from PayPal to the employee's bank account.
It's been very time consuming getting things sorted out, but it's quite exciting. Having someone 9 hours outside our time zone will certainly be a good test for the inherent distributed nature of our company and give us invaluable knowledge for progression of our "other" plans
Foreign bank? Wait, don't you have banks in the UK that are international? If so, then "maybe" luck will be on your side if they have a branch where you wish to have an employee.
Funny you should mention that, we investigated that with our banks several times already because we have customers and suppliers outside the UK (90% of our customers are outside UK and one of our major suppliers, Atlassian, is in Australia).
We wanted to know if we could have accounts in other countries so that customers could pay more easily without needing to use IBAN/SWIFT/BIC/etc. and also so that we could pay Atlassian more quickly (in the days before we had a credit card).
It turns out that what UK banks offer is "foreign currency accounts" - ie. a UK bank account denominated in some currency other than GBP rather than being an account in a different country. In order to open an account in another country, we'd have to deal directly with their branches in that country which in turn generally requires us to be a resident of that country.... Rargh!