Digital nomads
Issue 62 - 13 July 2021 (6-min read)
I didn’t choose the nomad life, the nomad life chose me.
I’ve been working remotely for some years now and, while it took some time getting used to, I’m starting to enjoy the flexibility it offers. No other job would have allowed me to travel all the way from Tahiti to Karachi and stay here nearly three months, with little to no interruption in my work life. Another job would perhaps pay more but I guess you cannot have it all.
There is now a term to describe people who work the way I do: digital nomads. In no way is this a new phenomenon but, much like everything else, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the move away from traditional workplaces towards remote work.
This week, The Global Tiller follows the journey of digital nomads to see how prevalent this phenomenon is. Who does it benefit and what are the pitfalls of this unusual freedom? Does it have the potential to become a global trend or will it stay restricted among the top 10 passports?
Remote working is certainly not a new phenomenon. Journalists, writers, photographers, etc have been working remotely for a long time in our recent history, not to mention the pre-Industrial Revolution when all work used to be remote. But now, ease of access to the internet has definitely made it possible for a larger number of white-collar jobs. As more blue-collar jobs get automated and white-collar ones go remote, the need for a traditional workplace is getting slimmer by the day.
Initially when Covid lockdowns sent the entire workforce into their homes, companies struggled to manage. HR departments did not know how to record employee hours with no one clocking in and out, workers did not know how to work while their human and pet babies screamed for attention, and their bosses struggled to navigate the complexity of virtual meeting platforms. Over a year into the pandemic, most of us have overcome the initial hiccups and almost all of us remember to mute ourselves on Zoom calls.
Another logical consequence of remote work has been the move of the workforce out of dense cities into suburbs, or to exotic destinations. Before the pandemic, only about 7% of American workers worked full-time at home. Yet, according to a Stanford University study conducted last summer, the number was approaching half of all workers. In July 2020, 42% of American workers reported working from home full-time. In Japan, 74% of respondents to a human resource tech company survey said they would like to continue to work remotely.
Companies in the travel industry and countries reliant on tourism are already jumping on the bandwagon of digital nomadism. Airbnb has shifted focus from short-term vacation rentals to longer staycations. Countries, such as Iceland, Estonia and Croatia, are offering digital nomad visas for the influx of remote workers they expect. Knowing the quarantine requirements, it is no surprise that even non-work travel will extend well beyond regular vacation days.
Those working remotely appreciate the flexibility their digital nomad lifestyle offers. Their employers, for the most part, can save on office rentals and other fixed assets. However, as more and more people venture out of international borders to work for companies back home, their employers run additional legal challenges unless they implement a digital nomad policy, where they create a semblance of freedom for workers while keeping them within legal jurisdictions. Though in the absence of good faith, we have secret nomads whose bosses don’t know they’re working abroad.
As we see a growing uptick in digital nomads, let’s not forget to pay attention to who these nomads are. Will this privilege extend to only those who earn a certain level of money and carry passports of rich countries? Where is the flow of these nomads heading to? If they are all heading to developing countries to save more money, do they not have an obligation to pay taxes to their new hosts? How will these nomads be accepted in their host countries, especially if the same countries are turning away refugees fleeing wars and climate catastrophes?
Do let us know what you think about this trend and where would you like to work remotely from?
Until next week, take care!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
If you’d like to read our previous issues, you can access our archives here.
…and now what?
There was a time in humanity’s history where you could have both sedentary and nomadic people on Earth. They both lived together, probably not completely without conflicts but each in their own right.
Then with the spread of the “mainstream” systems, sedentary became the rule. We put up borders and limits, we got people to settle, find a job, buy a house and stay. Travel became mostly a leisure, and only a few cultures remained nomadic, including that of an international consultant. But they still have their own home bases eventually.
As the pandemic has shaken out this globalised system, a lot is being challenged: from the four-day workweek in Iceland to digital nomads, suddenly the workplace is no longer the centre of gravity of our lives.
We discovered we can do other things. We discovered we can do work somewhere other than in an office, within four walls, eight hours a day.
Last week in The Global Tiller, I mentioned how recent the office culture is in our history. As the pandemic is shattering lots of foundations of the dominant system, the question remains: is this the end of office culture?
But if it is, how can we reinvent from scratch? How do we go back to a time where some could be nomads and others could be sedentary? How do we make sure there are ways to maintain cohesion when half the workforce is spread throughout the world?
How do you even manage a team and maintain a shared purpose, shared goals and values when it’s so diverse, dispersed and somehow unequal between those who can and those who can’t?
Well, the same way we managed to put everyone together in one office space when it was an entirely new concept, we can create a new office culture if we want. It can be messy at first, but as long as the leader of the organisation clarifies the vision, defines the end goal and gathers everyone towards shared values and a shared purpose, the rest is just logistics.
In a recent publication, Quartz CEO Zachary Seward talks exactly about this. In a world where flexibility is a necessity because of the pandemic and, even more so, because of climate change that will keep disrupting our organisations and systems, we need to learn from this nomadic trend on how to be flexible and movable as organisations.
As Seward puts it in this piece:
The point is there really is no such thing as “hybrid” work in a company that employs people in multiple locations, let alone one like ours with staff on five continents. Even when you’re in the office, the work itself is still best done with the assumption that everyone is remote. And since “remote” implies the office is the node, an even better word to use is “distributed”.
We can’t create a new office culture, even new completely nomadic lifestyles that plays over boundaries, passports and workplaces, if we still attach them to a central node, whether it be an office or a state. We need to learn to be distributed. We are already, on the Internet. We belong to distributed communities that share common purposes even continents away. We also know how to build grids that don’t rely on one node but work as decentralised networks to be more sustainable, more resilient. So we know already how to do it, we just need to extend it and learn to be distributed: for work, for life, for communities.
Organisations may lead the way, but this challenge of flexibility, nomadism, distributed entities is one for our species in times where places on this planet will become harder and harder to live in.
Philippe - Founder - Pacific Ventury
Thanks, Philippe and Hira for this article. I'm jumping into the digital nomad visa link to find out more, sounds exciting!