What do you think of the future of Remote Culture and Individuals working Independently?
Product Prompt #5 on Product Disrupt Blog
I’ve been freelancing and working independently along with my day job for 5+ years now, but it was only recently that I had the first taste of The Remote Life when I took a month-long work-vacation to Thailand. Of course, I had to quit my day job before flying to Thailand.
A wide majority of the working class isn’t even aware of the remote way of working. May be the tech industry is somewhat aware of this digital nomad lifestyle where the individuals find a shelter in some foreign country for a few months, continue their regular work from there and repeat.
That said, it’s still a very small fraction of the folks working in the tech industry who go on such a nomad trip or are even aware of this culture. The unawareness isn’t very surprising though, since it’s unconventional and challenges the norm, but I’m pleased to see its rapid acceptance.
I reached out to a couple of friends who’ve been working remotely and running their businesses for quite a while now. Also, I made a lot of amazing friends while in Thailand and thought it had be a nice idea to connect with them and know their thoughts on the remote culture and their experience of working independently. And this is what they had to say.
Given enough time, remote culture will become what more than 50% of people do. Not having to schedule your day around an office is such a freeing feeling that I almost can’t put into words.
Slack, Trello, Zoom, GitHub, and other web applications have made it super easy to communicate, so the days of that being an issue are gone as well, so there’s really no excuse to not go at least partially remote. There are certainly arguments for having face-time with your teammates, but being a remote team shouldn’t stop you from that.
You can go on a retreat, meet at conferences, vacation together, or really anything. The money you’ll save on an office will more than enough compensate for allowing you to do these things.
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My view on the future of remote work is both scary and liberating at the same time. I’m very sure that we’re moving towards a world where an individual’s skills will be the one and the only factor contributing to their professional life. Borders, resumes and market inefficiencies will be completely taken over by a huge network of shared skills available globally.
In the simplest terms, organizations would stop ‘hiring’ people, individuals would stop going to an office of a company in a city and work-compensation will be based on fair evaluation of skills and experience.
I see a world where a designer from India and living in Columbia will be able to work on challenging projects and get paid on par with any other designer of the similar skill-set across the globe. Technology marketplaces and better connectivity will make the world a fairer and more balanced workplace.
I see this as the future because this is the only way to make the world a better place.
Equal opportunities for everyone was the fundamental promise of the internet and we are now living in a time when it is actually coming true.
Skills would be the highest valued commodity in tomorrows’ global economy where organizations themselves would live on the cloud with a distributed workforce that pools their skills and time to build bigger and better companies. People or Skills themselves may not be limited to work for a single company and might distribute their time across organizations.
A developer might be working for a multi-national corporation for the bigger part of the day but would also contribute to a startup’s success part-time and volunteer her skills for an NGO over the weekend, all in a professional capacity without any limitations or physical restrictions..
The future of work is distributed, de-centralized and balanced.
As I see it, more and more companies tend to switch to working remotely, creating beneficial conditions for both their employees and themselves. They don’t need to rent an office, obviously, thus decreasing the expenses. It also helps the companies to get started much faster with a lower budget.
At the same time, maintaining a flexible schedule helps to attract more freelancers and professionals who want to switch from office work to remote.
What is more, modern technologies allow us to communicate easily, helping to organise the workflow inside the team, so there is no problem in making an online meeting in a video-chat either in Skype or Google Hangouts.
Speaking of freelancers and individuals, working remotely has a bunch of advantages which made me choose this way of building my career, too.
First of all, the above mentioned flexible schedule. It doesn’t mean that you can do merely nothing (However, if you already found a perfect source of passive income, then why not? That’s possible too!). It means that you can manage your working hours, distribute them among work, studies, other activities and your personal life, in a way that makes you feel comfortable and most productive during the day.
As for me, I’m a night owl, that type of person who feels most productive during the night hours and totally powerless in the morning.
Another giant plus of working remotely is that you don’t need to spend time and money to get to your office. People spend hours in buses and metro, while they could devote this time to something more fruitful.
What I mean is that nowadays remote work is not a vague dream anymore. If you take GitHub or Trello, they are great examples of world-known companies running their business remotely and successfully.
So, if you’re still hesitating, now is the perfect time to start exploring all the opportunities of the remote life.
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In the near future, I see a steady increase in importance of remote work, worldwide. For individuals like digital nomads and entrepreneurs, the raising standards of stable internet connection opens up a lot of new destinations around the globe and this will only speed up in the coming years.
Remote work also affects huge companies, majorly in the tech sector. The so-called war of talent forces the enterprises to offer more flexible working models in order to attract the smartest people. By allowing them to work remotely, the firms improve their chances of hiring the best people, worldwide because there are no geographical restrictions anymore.
When the big companies raise their support of remote work, there could be a shift in the general social understanding from fixed workspace towards a more location-independent culture where working is not directly related to a particular location.
Today, people that want to work remotely, mostly have to run their own business because it doesn’t fit with the common expectation of employers. In the future, I see a more flexible working culture where employed and self-employed people are both allowed to work location-independent from anywhere in the world.
– Moritz Kormann
Remote independent work will become a lot more popular. There’s a clear benefit to both sides — employees get location-independence and employers get reduced overhead costs. Humans need connection, so of course remote culture will follow.
However, I think right now, a lot of smart people don’t believe remote work is an option in the same way they see job/company choice as an obvious decision. Yet all my friends would love to (someday) travel to about 10 different spots across the globe, which is one of the biggest benefits remote work allows. So there’s a disconnect.
People think you have to work or travel, but it’s not binary. It’s easy enough to work while traveling, and co-working spaces make this super easy.
Regarding the short term — I think once the ease of this sinks in, more individuals will request to try it, and employers will eventually follow.
Thinking longer term — it’s a given that technology will force more remote work to occur. I’m just curious what’s really going to popularize the concept of remote-lifestyle for the individuals since I think there’s an awareness gap of this great option.
Happy brains perform better.
– Ross Difuria
