The Conversation Nobody Has Early Enough

Two-thirds of the organizations we surveyed for Verbate's 2026 Annual ERG Program Manager Report now have employees in multiple countries. And more than half say that global expansion has already affected their ERGs. These are not aspirational numbers. This is happening right now, across industries, across company sizes.

And yet, most of the ERG playbooks in circulation were written for a single-country context. If your program was born in the United States (as most were), everything from your heritage month calendar to your event cadence to the way you think about identity was shaped by a domestic lens. That's not a criticism. It's just the starting point.

The question is what happens when your company's footprint outgrows the model you built.

I spend a lot of time in conversations with program managers at this exact inflection point, and the pattern I keep seeing is this: the instinct is to extend what already exists. Take the ERGs you have, plug international employees in, and hope it holds. Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn't. At least not without some real thought about what you're building and why.

This piece is meant to be a primer. If you currently have U.S.-based ERGs and you're thinking about what it looks like to go global, or if your company is expanding internationally and you know this conversation is coming, here are the trade-offs worth considering before you start building.

Start With How Your Business Is Structured

This is the single most important question, and it has nothing to do with ERGs: how does your company operate internationally?

There are meaningfully different flavors of "global," and each one implies a different ERG model. A company that has acquired a subsidiary overseas with its own workplace culture, leadership, and operational independence is in a very different position than a U.S.-based company that just started hiring remote employees in Mexico and Canada. A pharmaceutical company with manufacturing plants in Singapore, research teams in Switzerland, and commercial offices in New Jersey has different connective tissue than a tech company where 90% of international employees work from their kitchen tables.

What matters is how employees experience the company. That's what your ERG infrastructure should mirror.

If your international employees' primary relationship is with their team and their laptop, not with a physical office or a regional culture, the ERG model should reflect that reality. When employee engagement happens primarily through a screen, the ERG has to meet people where they are. If you've got 200 people in a Toronto office with their own leadership and their own local culture, that's a different conversation entirely.

The bar charts in our report showing how global ERG programs are structured (U.S. primary with some international presence, global ERGs with regional subgroups, independent regional ERGs) are really telling you something about how those companies' businesses are organized. The ERG structure is downstream of the business structure. Always.

The Three Models (and What They Actually Look Like)

Let me make these concrete, because the labels alone don't tell you much.

U.S. Primary with International Presence

This is the most common model, and it's where roughly six in ten global programs sit today. The ERG is headquartered in the U.S. That's where the leadership team is, where the budget lives, where the programming calendar is set. International offices might have a few members who participate remotely, or in some cases a small regional presence that operates under the umbrella of the main group. A good example is a 4,000-person entertainment company headquartered in New York but owned by a European parent, with offices across Scotland, Ireland, Romania, and Canada. Their ERGs are based in the U.S. with regional groups in their European offices that share resources with the main group but have the latitude to do location-specific programming when it makes sense. Black History Month is a great illustration. The heritage exists in the UK too, but it's celebrated at a different time, with different context. That regional flexibility matters.

Global ERGs with Regional Subgroups

‍Companies with a more substantial global presence invest more energy into regional infrastructure. Not every ERG automatically gets a subgroup in every office. It only happens when there's critical mass and genuine demand. But when the numbers are there, these companies create a more formal chapter structure where each region has its own leadership, a small budget, and the autonomy to run programming that reflects its local reality. This model requires more governance, more coordination, and more leadership development depth, because you're essentially building a second tier of ERG leaders who need training and support. It also tends to correlate with higher program confidence in our data, which makes sense. Investing in a thoughtful global model is itself a sign that the program has reached a certain level of maturity.

Independent Regional ERGs

‍This is for companies where operations are genuinely different across regions. Think chip manufacturers with facilities in Japan, Singapore, and the U.S. Think companies where the same ERG exists in multiple countries but is solving very different problems. The women's group in Tokyo is working through a completely different set of cultural challenges than the women's group in New York. The time zones don't overlap. The languages are different. In these cases, it doesn't make sense to force everything into a unified global structure. It creates more bureaucracy than benefit. The groups collaborate, but they operate independently.

Most companies reading this are probably somewhere in the first model, thinking about whether and how to move toward the second. That's the sweet spot where the real decisions get made.

The Question Behind the Question: How Big Is Your Footprint?

Here's where I want to be direct, because I see this go wrong more than I'd like.

Critical mass matters. I generally don't recommend a company even start having ERGs until they get to about 200 employees total, because the connective tissue just isn't there yet at smaller scale. The same logic applies to regional expansion.

If you have six people in an international office, creating a formal subgroup structure for them is likely going to create more challenges than benefits. You're giving someone a title and a mandate without the membership base to sustain it. That doesn't mean you ignore those six people, far from it. It means you think carefully about the right level of infrastructure for the reality on the ground.

This is where the liaison model comes in, and I think it's one of the most underutilized approaches in the space.

The Liaison: Your Lightest-Weight Starting Point

Before you build regional chapters, before you allocate budgets to international offices, before you create new leadership roles, consider starting with a liaison.

A liaison is someone in that international location who identifies with the community the ERG serves and is willing to act as a connector. They're not running programming. They're not managing a budget. They're serving as a stakeholder, a translator, and an insights provider.

What does that look like in practice? It's the person who says: "Hey, this event is great, but can we make sure the time zone works for our folks in Toronto?" It's the person who flags that a heritage month you're planning doesn't resonate the same way in their country. Not to stop what you're doing, but to suggest how to adapt it. It's the person who tells you, six months in, that there are actually fifteen people in Mexico City who've been asking about joining the group, and maybe it's time to think about something more formal.

The liaison is your bellwether. They help you learn what the international employee experience actually looks like before you invest in infrastructure you might have to rebuild.

I frame it like this to the companies I work with: we'd rather build with your insights in mind than rebuild with your pain in mind. Starting with liaisons is a learning approach. It's lightweight, it's low-risk, and it sets the expectation, both internally and with international employees, that the structure will evolve as the company learns and scales. That's not a weakness. That's intentional design.

When to Graduate to Regional Subgroups

The threshold isn't an exact number, but the signal is pretty clear when you see it. Somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 people in a location, you start feeling the pull. Your liaison is telling you that every event has a dozen people wanting to participate and the current setup feels like it's not enough. There's genuine demand for location-specific programming. The identity or experience the ERG represents shows up differently enough in that region that a generic, U.S.-centric approach leaves people out.

When you make that transition, it doesn't need to be dramatic. Give the regional group a small budget. Even $1,500 is enough to do something meaningful. Let them run programming that has a local flavor while staying connected to the broader ERG's goals and resources. The key is that this should feel like a natural evolution, not a reorganization. The liaison has already been building the relationships and gathering the insights. The subgroup formalizes what was already happening.

The Cultural Dimension You Can't Skip

The logistical challenges of going global (time zones, languages, calendar coordination) are real, and they're the ones everyone talks about first. But the harder work is cultural.

Identity shows up differently depending on where you are in the world. The experience of being a woman in the workforce in Japan is profoundly different from the experience of being a woman in the workforce in the United States. An LGBTQ+ ERG in a country where those rights are legally protected operates in a completely different context than one in a country where they're not. Even something as seemingly universal as a "Black ERG" means different things in different places. The history, the politics, the lived experience are all shaped by local context.

This is why the listening-first approach matters so much. You cannot design an ERG experience for a region you don't understand. And the fastest way to erode trust is to assume that what works in New York will automatically work in São Paulo.

The organizations in our data with the most developed global structures have one thing in common: they listened to employees in each region about what they actually needed. And what they heard often surprised them, which is exactly the point. If it doesn't surprise you, you probably weren't listening carefully enough.

What International Employees Are Actually Looking For

One thing I've observed consistently across the companies we work with: the needs of international ERG members tend to be simpler than what we've built domestically. And I don't say that pejoratively at all.

People in smaller international offices aren't typically looking for an activist movement or a social justice platform. They want connection. They want to feel like they're part of something at their company that goes a little beyond sitting next to each other or being on the same Zoom. The ERG, for them, is often more about belonging in the workplace and genuine employee connection than it is about advocacy or programming. That sense of belonging, of being seen and included across borders, is often the most powerful thing a global ERG can deliver.

That's an important signal when you're designing infrastructure. It means you probably don't need to replicate your entire domestic operating model internationally. A lighter-touch approach, one that creates genuine connection and gives people a voice, might be exactly right. And it has real downstream effects on employee retention and workplace culture: people who feel connected to something meaningful at their company tend to stay.

The Trade-Offs, In Summary

If you're a program manager thinking about global expansion, here's the honest framework:

The liaison model is your starting point for any location under 30 people. Low cost, low risk, high learning. It keeps international employees connected without creating infrastructure you may need to dismantle.

Regional subgroups make sense when you have critical mass, genuine demand, and enough cultural difference to justify local programming. Budget accordingly, but keep it lean.

Independent regional programs are for companies where operations are genuinely different across regions. Different time zones with no overlap, different languages, different business models. This isn't common, but when it fits, it fits.

The decision isn't permanent. Build with the expectation that your structure will evolve. Set that expectation internally. The worst outcome is overbuilding infrastructure for a future you're not sure is coming, and then having to rebuild when reality turns out differently.

And through all of it, listen first. Build second. The data from our report is clear: the programs with the most developed global structures report the highest confidence of any segment. Not because they got lucky, but because they did the work of understanding what their employees actually needed before they started building.

The throughline across every model, every threshold, every trade-off in this piece comes down to one idea: we'd rather build with your insights in mind than rebuild with your pain in mind. That's the posture. Start there, and the structure will follow.

Building a global ERG operating model is one of the most complex challenges in this space, and one where an expert external perspective can make a real difference. If your team is working through global ERG expansion and wants a strategic partner, let's talk.

For more on the data behind this piece, read Verbate's 2026 Annual ERG Program Manager Report.

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