By now, remote work has settled in as a part of normal business operations. While working remotely was not exactly the norm in 2019, by the time the pandemic was a few months old, many employees were forced back home – and both companies and employees learned that the hybrid work arrangement had many benefits. Companies are helping employees to work from a host of different locations, but not without new expectations.
Even though we have likely entered into a permanent shift in how we work, we are still in the infancy of this solution as a comprehensive strategy. Because of this, some snags and pitfalls still need to be worked out before we can pop the champagne and celebrate a new era.
We’ve identified some unresolved issues around the new hybrid and remote work trend that deserve discussion.
Hybrid Work and Digital Nomads
In a recent study, Emergent Research found that American workers identifying as digital nomads rose from 7.3 million in 2019 to 10.9 million in 2020 — a whopping increase of 49%. What is a digital nomad? A remote worker who travels and works from different locations. They may set up in a coffee shop, co-working space, or public library, jumping onto wifi wherever they can find it. They also tend to use their phone as a hotspot to expand their work universe to include virtually any place they travel.
Before COVID-19, most digital nomads were freelancers, entrepreneurs, and contractors. They worked primarily in three industries: software development, marketing and journalism. During the pandemic, however, the demographics shifted dramatically, with full-time employees joining the nomadic workforce.
While freeing for many, it poses a unique challenge – we have remote, hybrid workers, but few companies have a hybrid work culture. Whatever structure that existed was quickly stitched together within the days and weeks after everyone was sent home. Most organizations remain unprepared for the reality of their hybrid situation: some remote employees, some full-time office employees, and a host of others who come and go throughout the week.
Corporations must find new ways to manage their employees and innovative ways to assess job performance. They need to develop practices around team organization, meetings, recruitment, onboarding, and leadership. However, full-time digital nomad employees are typically not governed by policy. When people work in their own space and move around, they tend to be freer with employment “rules,” often clashing with management and executives who still expect traditional workflows and procedures.
A clear and consistent remote work policy needs to be established and disseminated. Legal and HR issues should be codified and formally made into policy if the new hybrid workforce is to work long-term.
Hybrid Work Tools Standardization: Remote employees should utilize the same tools and workflows consistent across the brick-and-mortar organization. Cloud services and applications, digital communication systems, and mobile devices and services would need to be standardized, and particular focus would be placed on digital nomad cyber security.
Labor Law Discrepancies: Applicable labor laws were once set in the jurisdiction where the employee resided, not where the company was headquartered. However, this concept is obsolete, as even full-time employees who work in the office are not in the office full time – they travel, work on weekends, and more. Some people even live and work in different states. Now with remote workers, employees can and do live anywhere – but the laws on the books still assume that everyone is sitting at a single permanent location. The proliferation of hybrid work, including full-time remote work and digital nomadism, raises concerns about using the employee’s location to identify applicable labor laws. Some dedicated digital nomads have no address at all. Tax and labor laws based on the location of the company, not the employee, would solve many legal issues.
Remote workers and digital nomads are likely here to stay, but the corporate culture needs to catch up to make the arrangement productive and efficient.
If you are a Sarasota area SMB looking to bring your culture up to speed with the new reality, call Alliance IT. We have the expertise, software, and communications to bring it all together.
