How do you regain control when exceptions take over

Your Global Mobility (GM) policy should support your business’s international goals and be practical enough to apply in the real world. However, if you’ve ever felt like your policy is a rarely visited artefact, or its interpretation varies wildly across the business, this blog post is for you.

When global mobility policies start to drift

You might recognise the signs:

• A few “special cases” turn into a precedent
• Different global teams apply the policy in different ways
• Historical decisions can't be traced
• You’re left retrofitting logic onto something you didn’t sign off

Over time, the outdated policy stops being a tool and starts becoming a barrier. Or worse, it becomes something to be bypassed altogether. When that happens, the control of a GM team slips. Not just over individual cases, but over the consistency, fairness, and even compliance of your programme. This is why there’s good reason that a GM expert needs to have a hold on the population they manage and the policy that sits behind it all.

With the EU Pay Transparency Directive just around the corner, there has never been a better time for GM teams to ensure they can explain and justify pay decisions linked to their policies. If they can’t, both compliance and credibility are on the line.

Based on ECA’s Managing Mobility Survey, where participants were asked about the main challenges they face within their GM function, we saw that:

• 37.7% of GM teams find it tough to manage exceptions
• 43.9% of GM teams struggle to have a flexible policy approach

With so many GM teams facing these challenges there is a risk of them becoming policy gatekeepers instead of mobility enablers. When the wider business starts to see you as a blocker, they’ll find ways to work around you rather than with you.

Getting back on course

Often it can feel like the precedent set by historic actions are irreversible. However, there are quick, practical things GM teams can do to create clarity and set boundaries.

• Get everything in one place: If your policy, exceptions, and historic decisions live in different folders (or people’s inboxes), consolidate them. You can’t manage what you can’t see.
• Log the exceptions: Create a simple, internal record of off-policy cases and why they were approved. Patterns will emerge quickly and it’ll give you a stronger position when pushing back or proposing changes.
• Check what the business thinks your policy says: Talk to key stakeholders. Ask how they understand the policy, what they believe the flex points are, and where they go when they need clarity. The gap between intention and interpretation is often wider than you think.
• Update the internal guidance, not just the policy: If rewriting the full policy isn’t possible, create add-on guidance notes for your team and trusted HR contacts. A one-pager that clarifies how to handle repeat cases is better than silence or inconsistency.
• Draw a line in the sand: Even without major changes, you can define what will and won’t be allowed going forward. Communicate this clearly to your stakeholders. It’s better to be transparent than to keep negotiating in the dark.

These steps may not fix every issue, but they help you stabilise the current state and stop further drift, which puts you in a stronger position when the time comes to reset things properly.

What’s the goal? Reclaiming control without losing flexibility

GM teams who face these challenges won’t overcome them purely by enforcing stricter policies. They need to regain control, restore credibility, and position GM as a strategic enabler.

A good policy should:

• Help the business make informed decisions
• Support fairness and compliance
• Stop GM firefighting and exception-chasing
• Offer a clear, defensible structure for managing and rewarding international moves

Control doesn’t mean inflexibility, it means having a structure that supports a variety of possibilities.

How ECA can help

We help clients step back, assess where things stand, and rebuild policies that work. Not just in theory, but in practice.

Within our wider process of GM Evolution, our Discover Phase is where we often start. It’s a structured review that looks at how your policy is written, how it’s being used (or ignored!), and whether it still aligns with your business goals. We combine document reviews, stakeholder input, and external benchmarking to help answer:

• Is your policy still fit for purpose?
• Is it being applied consistently and understood clearly?
• Does it help your GM team lead, or get in the way?

As mentioned, this sits within our broader GM Evolution approach. It’s a phased process to redesign policy, improve governance, and make GM more strategic and effective.

The Discover Phase gives you the insight to take action. Whether that’s a full reset or a few targeted changes to get things back on track.