Very happy to share what worked for me, when I had a close Indian colleague who I felt was underpaid/under-appreciated.
Context: This is a technology company (3k+ employees) which offers a SaaS product to enterprise customers. I was part of the customer-facing account team (think: sales person, solution engineer, professional services team, and support team). The support team was often located in "low-cost centers" (such a euphemism!), such as India. My Indian colleague was on the support team, where often they would spend long amounts of time diagnosing customer issues. I was a solution engineer / "CTO for the customer" / technical account manager-type role.
After some informal phone calls & chats with my Indian colleague, I found out that he wanted to work more closely with the customer as a solution architect capacity, instead of just performing a more reactive support role. I was really excited to help him pursue this dream.
Here's some of the the advice I'd offer to others on how to help "level up" an undervalued overseas colleague:
* Have regular 1:1s with people you find valuable, from all over the organization. In this case, I spent several 1:1 meetings with my Indian colleague, getting to know personal information (what area of India he was from, what the food's like, what's the work-life like, what do you do for fun - soccer, etc). This helped ME build up empathy for who he is, who he wanted to be.
* Find out unrecognized skills — I found out that my colleague used to tutor other students on math & science when he was in university, and loved mentoring people, and was pretty good at ad-hoc presentations. I found out that our company often performs customer-facing classes about our products, to teach customers how to get the most out of the stuff they bough. My colleague was already so familiar with the product at a technical level, so I just had him practice presenting to me in a coaching session, where I'd pretend to be the customer. Later, I had him present a very focused topic to one of my trusted customers (it was something like, "Top 10 diagnostic tips, tricks & tools for Product X" - showing off the various debug tools, logs, etc available). The customer LOVED it, and actually recorded the session to share around the company. I asked my customer to send me email containing feedback about my colleague's presentation. I got glowing feedback from the customer, which I forwarded to a large internal distribution list - "Check out this awesome presentation Support Engineer X did for Big Customer Y!" (+cc'ing my colleague's manager). The email thread got lots of good attention from "high visibility" people like sales & management, who are happy to see examples of people "delighting the customer". If you think about it, these people are 99% of the time dealing with the fall-out from issues, support escalations, and so on. Positive vibes are a welcome refreshment!
* Develop & be recognized fro subject matter expert (SME)-like skills: Several of my customers were concentrated in a specific customer vertical (e.g. "Media", vs "eCommerce"). My colleague didn't recognize it at the time, but he worked primarily with several large customers which were all in the same customer segment. As a result my colleague was very knowledgeable in a couple product areas specific to that customer segment, and that segment's challenges. I setup some internal "lunch & learns" where 2 people would present some of the use cases for which their customer is using a product, and share out any advice, gotchas, etc. For my presentation - instead of traditionally having the customer-facing solution engineer discuss the technical parts of the presentation - I asked my Indian colleague to co-present with me. When presenting, I would deliberately defer to my colleague for certain areas - to reinforce credibility & trust - but I also had him present the "advice & lessons learned"-part. Afterwards, he got SO MUCH positive feedback from internal folks. I made share to socialize & forward on this feedback around - greatly increasing the visibility of my colleague's name, way outside of his immediate group. From that point on, my colleague was known as an expert in that area, and would commonly be hit-up to answer questions, do presentations for other customers, etc.
* Be recognized as a human being. This might sound obvious, but the unfortunate truth is that in many USA-based technology companies, overseas colleagues can be pretty invisible to the "home office". They are often deliberately hired because their salaries can be lower; they are not physically present in the main offices where informal chit-chat occurs; culturally, there may be barriers like English language fluency, or even the spelling/pronunciation of their names. I made a point to learn how to pronounce my Indian colleague's name (and he even offered a "Westernized" nickname which he liked, which sounded like a cool rapper's name, so we just rolled with it!). In our team, we often had to go onsite with customers ("customer business reviews) - what we're working on, how the product is being utilized, etc. I made a point to include a "Your Team" slide - and it included the names AND PHOTOS of the members of the team aligned with the customer. Instead of boring corporate photos, I included photos with actual personality (e.g. my Indian colleague scaling a rock wall, or him and his family at a birthday party in India). These photos would always invite questions & comments from the customer, and my colleague would get some air time to talk about themselves. Really helped the customer get to know them (and avoid the pejorative, "get me someone who actually speaks English" attitude), and built trust both ways.
* Get endorsement from the people with the money. There were times when there were staffing changes, which might result in a customer-aligned support person to be moved to another customer. I would often give my customer a heads-up that there might be changes to the staffing - and I'd tell them, if you feel strongly about keeping Person X on the team aligned to you, please send me a "strongly worded email" asking to keep the person on your team and why. This would often result in the customer explaining how important person X is to their company, the impact they had to their business, etc. Very good stuff for internal managers to see.
THE RESULT
OK, so I've accidentally written a novel here, and you might be able to te tell I feel strongly about helping raise my colleague up. So what actually happened?
* I asked my Indian colleague to help out with a small professional service project for a customer, paired with a senior person advising along the way. This was outside of his typical role, and was OK'd by his manager (I made the sales person ask it, so it was more "unrefusable"). The project went very well, and again got great feedback from the customer.
* An "associate" solution architect role req opened up. Originally it was just for employees located in USA, not remote-friendly. I successfully petitioned that we TRY to do it as a remote-only position, and have my Indian colleague try it out for 6 months, and work with customers who already know & trust him. It worked great. As a result, my colleague got a job title change and a very SMALL pay increase. But since he was on the "revenue generating" team now, he got tons more visibility around the organization - his name was tied to various "high-five" emails and such.
* About a year later, a solution architect position opened in Boston - again, not remote-friendly. I asked my colleague if he'd be interested in the job & relocation - he said VERY INTERESTED, but that from his experience in India, it was nigh unheard of for the company to do that kind of transition. I made a point to speak to some of the highest level people I could find - basically telling the story of this skilled person who's personally recommended by some of our most strategic customers, who's looking to relocate for this role. "What can we do to endorse this move and make it happen?" I actually challenged an executive, I bet you can make this happen. It turns out, we got attention from enough of the right folks, and we were able to hire him in (along with all the legal / H1B stuff required for that) to the Boston slot. He got a huge salary increase, moved to Boston with his wife. I don't work at the company any more, but I stay in contact with my former colleague. He's super happy, and just checking out his Facebook photos, it looks like he's really into snowboarding & microbrewing now :)