Remote Work: Working from Home to Digital Nomadism

00:07 Do you have any digital nomad friends? I've been asking this question a lot recently, and sometimes people ask me back, "What is a digital nomad?" At that point you can easily explain that it is someone who has a digital business model and lives a nomadic lifestyle.

00:24 So the prototype would be someone who lives in Thailand and works digitally as a designer, programmer, or tax accountant while sitting on the beach, at a hotel, or anywhere. People who can work from anywhere and at any time are an extreme example of the new working environment.

00:42 At the same time, it has a significant impact on you, your company, and your employees, because an increasing number of individuals now desire this independence, at least temporarily, within an organization.

00:56 They then state, "I would like to work from home," "I would like to take a three-month sabbatical," or "I simply want to be able to combine work and travel to some extent." So this is a forerunner, a trend that we are already seeing in many businesses.

01:11 It's not even about living entirely independently somewhere in Asia.

01:15 It is about having certain values, which are prescribed by this community, by this movement. It's about freedom and self-determination, about time management, and about the questions of how I want to live, how I want to work, where I want to work, and where I want to live.

01:33 You can be certain that all of this has an impact on your business.

01:37 If you're sitting in your office when an employee walks in and says, "I want to work remotely - I want to start working remotely by tomorrow," you've got a problem.

01:46 As a result, we need to think about how we may address this problem right now, which is why I used a fake example to find out how we can possibly diffuse this situation.

01:59 The first question is, "How do we want to work in the future?" The employee walks into your office and declares, "Starting tomorrow, I no longer want to live in Paris." This is where I work, but I wish to relocate to Lisbon." The question is, how do we want to go about doing this? Will they have to come to Paris every two weeks for a short visit because it's half the week? Is there a specific number of hours that must be worked? So the question is, how do we want to work remote in the future? The second question is, what types of work can genuinely be done remotely? How about communication? What about other departments and coworkers, whose processes and structures can theoretically be remote, and which cannot? Where do we need to make adjustments? On a higher level, we could question, "How do we define remote work?" What exactly is "remote work"? Was the employee already done working if they were sitting in Lisbon and had a work accident during their lunch break? Did they take four hours off to sleep on the beach before returning to work after sunset? This is not always specified.

03:08 We must consider these issues, particularly you as a manager.

03:15 When we think about remote work, we should think about it on different levels, and here are three levels for you to consider: It is about technological, structural, and attitude levels. Let's start with the technology level and ask ourselves, "What tools do we actually need?" Which software would be beneficial to us? Which apps do we require as a group? And, of course, we need a digital infrastructure to ensure that everything works well, and we should not forget about data security, privacy, VPN, anti-virus, and so on. In terms of structure, former O2 CEO Thorsten Dirks said in 2006, "When you digitalize a shitty process, then you have a shitty digital process," and that pretty much sums it up, because we often care about technology but not structures, and if we want remote work, we need to think about which processes and structures we need to digitalize.

04:17 Is this wise? Isn't this clever? What are the obstacles to remote work? We will surely consider how to avoid a silo mentality so that the greater vision does not prevent remote work.

04:33 The attitude spectrum is extremely diverse.

04:37 I would begin by asking myself how we want to function as a team, but also how we will handle the inevitable problems that will arise.

04:45 How can we continuously adapt the framework circumstances of remote work to new daily challenges? How will we communicate as a group? As a manager, you may ask yourself, "How do I communicate with my employees?" How can I evaluate - evaluate them? How can I lead a team from a distance? Another question is, how can I manage technically skilled employees? That is a relatively simple task.

05:10 But how do I manage employees who aren't technically savvy? How am I going to bring them all together? How can we progress together? Finally, you could wonder, what about the problem of privacy - data security? How can I ensure that my staff do not connect to a public Wi-Fi network and essentially expose company data to any amateur hacker? We require a certain level of awareness for this - security should be enjoyable, and this will be part of your responsibilities.

05:40 In addition to this tremendously wonderful development, there may be a minor bad component, given that we can be accessed from anywhere.

05:48 No matter where we are or what time it is, your staff may read emails at 10:00 p.m.

05:53 to begin a new project at 11:00 p.m.

05:55 and end work at 1:00 a.m.

06:00 As a result, some of them are more anxious, some are burnt out, and so on.

06:06 That implies you should plan ahead of time to prevent it, sensitize, and coach your employees so that it doesn't happen in the first place.

06:13 This is something we must learn.

06:15 This is something we can learn - it's part of the journey.