Why HR and finance can’t get aligned on mobility and how to fix it

Mobility is one of those topics that quietly spreads across the organisation. In many companies, employee mobility management involves HR, finance, payroll, and mobility teams. Everyone has their own focus and responsibilities.

HR designs the policies. Finance monitors the costs. Payroll processes the financial impact. Mobility or fleet teams manage execution. Meanwhile, employees want things to work without delays and frustrations. On paper, the responsibilities look clear. But in reality, mobility often sits in an uncomfortable grey zone.

Think about how HR optimises for employee experience, fairness, and flexibility. Finance optimises for cost control, compliance, and predictability. Both teams solve legitimate problems, but rarely from the same operational perspective.

The result is not open conflict, but something far more familiar. Slow decisions, endless variations, recurring corrections, and a feeling that mobility is more complex than it should be.

At first sight, it looks like misalignment between teams, but it's usually something else. Mobility doesn't break down because HR and finance disagree. Instead, it breaks down because the system they operate in makes alignment far more difficult than it needs to be.

To understand why alignment is so difficult, we first need to examine the underlying dynamics of mobility management. Only then can we see what organisations can practically do about it.

The root problem: HR and Finance work from different realities #

Mobility discussions around company cars, mobility budgets, and reimbursements often sound like alignment issues. In practice, they are usually mobility data issues. HR and finance are not only looking at mobility from different angles, but they are also working from different information environments.

For example, HR operates in a world of mobility policies, eligibility rules, and employee categories. Their focus revolves around benefit design, employee experience, and mobility policy compliance. In other words, who qualifies for what, under which conditions, and how to apply policies across teams.

Finance has a set focus on transactions, budget lines, mobility cost control, payroll impact, and compliance constraints. Their reference point is financial behaviour. They look at spending, cost allocation, and whether everything aligns with tax and reporting requirements.

Both teams handle employee mobility, but they rarely deal with the same version of mobility. The data they use lives everywhere across the organisation's mobility management landscape.

Employee information sits in HR systems and spans multiple locations. Reimbursements in expense tools, vehicle costs in fleet systems, and taxable benefits in payroll. Finally, mobility budget management and tracking happen in spreadsheets.

Technically, all information exists, but it just doesn't work together. And so, the real work becomes comparing, checking and correcting data across systems.

Finance flags unexpected mobility costs, then HR validates eligibility, and payroll identifies inconsistencies. This doesn't happen because of unclear policies. Rather, it happens because every team must reconstruct the full mobility picture from fragmented inputs.

Over time, mobility stops being a structured management process and turns into a continuous exercise in interpretation.

Mobility lives in the gaps, and friction fills the space #

Mobility involves multiple teams, and it forces them into constant coordination.

Even minor mobility decisions rarely stay contained. For instance, a policy update affects budgets. A budget constraint reshapes eligibility. An exception request triggers financial, legal, and payroll implications.

What first appears to be a simple adjustment quickly becomes a coordination challenge.

Because mobility spans benefits, compensation, and cost control, alignment must happen far more often than organisations think. And in most companies, that alignment still depends heavily on manual workflows.

Teams validate eligibility through emails. They calculate financial impact in spreadsheets, add approvals to prevent mistakes, then apply corrections when something inevitably slips through. What should be payroll mobility integration becomes a recurring exercise in validation and correction.

As a result, mobility rarely operates as a predictable administrative flow. It turns into a continuous cycle of checks, clarifications, and adjustments. The process still works, but mainly because people keep it together.

What companies often overlook is how expensive this friction becomes. These operational inefficiencies rarely appear as visible line items. Yet, they quietly increase the true operational cost of mobility management through delays, corrections, duplicated work, and budget leakage.

Why more coordination rarely solves the problem #

When mobility friction becomes visible, organisations tend to react in predictable ways.

They schedule alignment meetings, introduce additional approval steps, and request more reporting to reduce errors and improve control. These responses seem logical: if mobility requires coordination, then improving coordination should solve the problem.

However, in practice, the opposite often happens. More meetings involve more stakeholders, more approvals mean more handovers, and more reporting only results in more reconciliation work. Instead of making mobility simpler, organisations gradually increase the amount of communication required to keep it running.

The workload grows, but the underlying problems remain the same. Coordination mechanisms do not fix disconnected systems and workflows. They shift the burden onto people.

As a result, the root cause stays untouched. Data stays fragmented, rules remain detached from workflows, manual checks remain unnecessary, and inconsistencies continue to exist.

More coordination adds another layer on top of the same instability. This is why many organisations experience a familiar paradox: despite investing more time in alignment, mobility rarely becomes simpler.

How to fix it: From coordination to operational alignment #

If mobility misalignment were mainly a communication problem, more meetings would solve it. But in reality, mobility friction hardly ever comes from a lack of coordination. It originates from how organisations manage mobility across systems, rules and workflows.

To fix alignment, therefore, requires something entirely different, namely, reducing the need for coordination altogether. The most effective companies treat mobility alignment as an operational problem rather than a coordination issue.

So, instead of adding validation layers, they focus on shared visibility, clear rules, and predictable workflows. In practice, this typically involves four structural shifts.

1. Create a single operational view of mobility #

Alignment becomes much easier when HR, finance, payroll, and mobility teams share a common data foundation. When eligibility, costs, taxation, and budget impact rely on shared information rather than fragmented sources, many recurring discussions simply disappear.

2. Define rules once, then apply them automatically #

Mobility policies often follow clear logic, yet organisations still rely on manual interpretation. Embedding policy rules directly into workflows supports mobility administration automation. At the same time, it ensures consistent policy application.

3. Connect mobility directly to payroll and financial flows #

When mobility data seamlessly integrates into payroll and finance systems, corrections decrease, and coordination work decreases. Finance teams can shift their attention from validating transactions to managing exceptions and analysing costs.

4. Shift from approvals to exception-based management #

Too many approvals create unnecessary administrative work. A more effective model lets systems handle standard cases, while teams focus only on exceptions that require judgment.

5. Align on shared mobility metrics #

Success often looks different across teams. HR evaluates employee experience and policy fairness, while finance focuses on cost control and compliance. Without shared reference points, discussions easily drift into interpretation rather than decision-making.

Establishing shared mobility metrics creates a common operational language. These metrics may include cost per employee, budget utilisation, processing times, and policy compliance.

Better coordination alone does not create alignment. It improves when the system produces fewer inconsistencies.

Conclusion: Alignment is a system problem, not a people problem #

HR and finance rarely disagree on mobility objectives. They struggle because the operating model surrounding mobility forces them into constant interpretation, validation, and correction.

When organisations redesign how mobility works across visibility, rules, and workflows, alignment stops being something teams must continuously negotiate. The system itself begins to produce consistency.

The objective is therefore not better coordination between teams, but removing the causes of misalignment. When organisations redesign employee mobility management processes and eliminate recurring inconsistencies, alignment no longer requires effort. Instead, it becomes how organisations operate.