ANDRES KÕIVA: The unplanned remote-work problem. Until someone's leaving

I want to tell you about a specific retrieval we ran earlier this year because I think it illustrates something most growing companies don't think about until it breaks.

A global technology company with over two thousand employees had a remote worker in India. He had been working there on a tourist visa, which is not unusual. Many companies with distributed teams have people working from countries where they are not formal residents. It is one of those arrangements that works smoothly right up until it does not.

His employment ended. The company needed the laptop back. Raal was asked to handle the retrieval.

The initial plan was straightforward. The employee had the original packaging. We would send a return label, arrange a pickup, and ship the device back to the company's location in Poland. Standard process. Then we checked India's customs rules.

The part nobody tells you about India

Indian customs law places specific documentation requirements on private individuals who want to export goods. For a foreign national on a tourist visa, meeting those requirements isn't simple. You typically need Indian citizenship, a valid residency permit, and a registered utility bill at a local Indian address.

He had none of these. He was in India temporarily, working remotely. No registered address, no residency documentation, nothing that would let him ship a device out of the country through the standard private export process without triggering a customs procedure that would take weeks, if it cleared at all.

And there was a harder constraint on top of that: he was leaving India within three days.

Once he left, the window for an India-based retrieval would close permanently. Any process that depended on Indian customs procedures, even an expedited alternative route, would have taken longer than the time available. The standard options had run out before we had even started.

"The problem was not the logistics. The problem was that we had three days and a hard regulatory wall between us and the device."

What we did instead

When the standard route is blocked, the question becomes: what other routes exist?

We asked a simple question: where was he going next? He was travelling to Sri Lanka. And Sri Lanka, it turns out, has different customs regulations for this kind of situation. The barriers that blocked the India route did not apply in the same way.

So we called him. Directly. Not through HR, not through a ticket system. We explained the India problem clearly: here is why the standard return cannot happen, here is the timeline, here is what we are asking. Would he be willing to carry the laptop with him to Sri Lanka as personal baggage?

He agreed. Because we explained it clearly and made the request easy to say yes to.

We dispatched a return kit to his Sri Lanka address before he arrived. Packaging, return label, instructions. He packed the device, a courier collected it, and the laptop arrived back in Poland a few days later. Wiped, confirmed, case closed.

The thing that actually worked

The resolution here came from two things that are not technical at all.

First: finding the alternative route quickly. We knew about the regulatory barrier early enough to look for another path. If we had discovered it on the day of the scheduled collection, we would not have had time to pivot.

Second: treating the departing employee as a partner. He was not an obstacle. He was a person transitioning out of a job who still had the capacity to help if someone asked him clearly and made it easy. We contacted him directly, explained the situation honestly, and asked for something specific. He helped.

That model, identify the blocker early, find the alternative, communicate directly with the person involved, works across most of the hard retrieval cases we handle. It is not complicated. It just requires someone to own it.

In most distributed companies, that person doesn't exist. IT sends a form. HR sends an email. Nobody checks whether the employee is actually in the country the HR system says they are in. And then a laptop with company data ends up at a customs wall in India with three days on the clock and no one with a plan.

Why I am telling this story

This is not primarily a story about Raal. It is a story about a category of problem that any company with globally distributed people will eventually encounter, and that almost none of them have a plan for.

Distributed work has created a new normal where your employees are not where your HR database says they are. Someone hired to work from Berlin is actually in Lisbon for a month. A developer in India on a work trip for a quarter. An engineer working remotely from a country where they have no formal status. These arrangements are common, they are often perfectly fine legally in terms of employment, and they create edge cases in your offboarding process that your standard procedures were not designed to handle.

The tourist visa problem is not unique to India. Brazil, several Southeast Asian markets, and parts of the Middle East have comparable complexity for device exports by non-residents. The pattern is the same every time: an employee in a country where they are not a citizen, leaving soon, with equipment that needs to come back. No plan for it. No one thinks about it until it becomes urgent.

Andres Kõiva is the co-founder and CEO of Raal, an Estonian company that handles physical IT assets for local and distributed teams across 150+ countries, automating asset management, on/offboarding logistics, device retirement and soon procurement.