How the World Changes When Everyone Works From Home

Sneak Peek:

Hosts:    00:00:00    Say, and that's, that's the thing that fascinated me about you, is that, uh, we call it work from home because that's where we do it from when we don't have to go in the office, but technically it's working remotely. And that remotely means anywhere. So why necessarily work from the couch in your house when you could be working from, you know, a sun porch in Costa Rica, or in your case, uh, a sun porch anywhere. And it's like, as long as you're punching the clock, nine to five, who cares where you are?  

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.

Kristin:    00:00:53    Hi everyone. Kristin here from Traveling with Kristin, and we have big news this week as both Estonia and Barbados have announced the launch of their respective one year digital nomad work and travel visas. So cool. I made videos about both of them with all the details available now, which you can find on my YouTube channel, Traveling with Kristin. And it's just an absolute perfect synchronicity with the topic of today's episode. Um, as many of you may remember, last year I published an article called 12 Ways the World Will Change When Everyone Works Remotely on Medium. And I even did a podcast episode back in January about what the world would look like with 1 billion digital nomads. And I'll link to that in the show notes just in case you missed it. But little did I know, however, a few months later, those predictions would begin coming true through the Coronavirus Pandemic.  

Kristin:    00:02:05    Um, you know, content about remote work and hashtag work from home has really exploded since March, and it's on everyone's mind right now as people try to manage the day to day and reconcile their past lives with a very uncertain future. And as such, the mainstream media has been talking about this nonstop, as I'm sure you've noticed. And recently a producer for the Guy Phillips Show on KTRS Radio in St. Louis, Missouri reached out to me to provide more context for that article and sort of weigh in on what's next. So their audience is largely that area of the Midwest, you know, middle America with very traditional industries. So we talked about a lot of topics in a really short amount of time. It's only 15 or 20 minutes long. But we talked about, you know, should you move away from where you are now for a lower cost of living or a better quality of life if you're now working from home?  

Kristin:    00:03:23    And what are the job perks of working for a remote company or an offshore company that pays you perhaps in a different currency, maybe funds your traveling lifestyle? Um, should you be paid now moving forward based on the value of your output at work? Or should your pay be tied to where you live geographically? And, um, how do you choose between working for yourself and working for someone else in this new economy? How can you make more money or have a better lifestyle? And as the host said in our conversation, that really resonated with me, it's a fascinating look at a what if scenario that is fast becoming our day-to-day reality. So this is a conversation that needs to happen as we make sense of the changes going on in our world. And I hope that this episode helps you get more ideas and more clarity and certainty and perspective as you think about the new normal that you want to manifest in your life.  

Kristin:    00:04:46    Coincidentally, before recording this episode, I also happened to publish another article on Medium about how society was quote unquote wrong about how to live life. And that it turns out in the context of the pandemic living in untraditional, unconventional outlier lifestyle like a digital nomad lifestyle actually isn't so bad and might have been the right path all along. So I love flipping things around on their heads, and I love looking at the unconventional side of unconventional wisdom. And so I hope that this, this, uh, conversation helps you and gives you more courage and certainty in making hard choices and going against the grain and doing things that maybe nobody told you to do, but that you've been feeling like you want to do on the inside. Also, before we begin, thank you to Stephanie Ward from the Netherlands who left a review in the Apple Store that says Kristin is an absolute expert. Kristin is the queen of digital nomads. There isn't a topic she doesn't know. Follow her and learn how a real pro makes it happen. Uh, shuck, Stephanie, I don't know <laugh> if I would say that about myself, but thank you so much. It's so humbling to read your kind words and thank you to you, all of you for listening right now. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Hop over to the Facebook group, Badass Digital Nomads, let me know what you think and enjoy the show.  

Radio Interview:

Hosts:    00:06:54    Welcome back to the Guy, Guy Philip Show here on a Friday afternoon, Josh and Heidi, Luis on the ones and twos. And I saw an article, Heidi, because I was so curious. Probably about three, four weeks into the pandemic, everybody was working from home. Ah, you know, I'm driving down the street, there's nobody out on the roads and everything. And I started thinking to myself, what, what would happen if nobody went to work anymore? Everybody worked from home-- 

Hosts:    00:07:21    If this became the norm.  

Hosts:    00:07:22    Yeah. So I googled, you know, to see if anybody, uh, wrote an article about it. And the first thing that popped up was Kristin Wilson and I I wrote down here on the day sheet. Kristin, welcome to the show. Uh, I wrote down here that you're a digital nomad. I'll just kind of let you explain, uh, kind of what you do and what your background is.  

Kristin:    00:07:44    Sure. Thanks for having me guys. And thanks for finding my article. Something that I wanted to write about for many years because I took a little bit of an untraditional path outta college. And, um, yeah, lo and behold, what I wrote about happened. I didn't think it would happen for the next 10 years maybe. And then a few months later, the coronavirus hit. So here we, but, um, I had a pretty traditional childhood, everything growing up, but I had the opportunity to study abroad in college at 20 years old. And that kind of opened my eyes to what life would be like if I lived abroad and had a, you know, kind of a different type of career. So I studied in Costa Rica and then I studied in Australia, and then I still wasn't sure what to do for work. So I went to grad school and got an MBA, but it was kind of just to buy time before I could find a job in a different country. And I ended up, um, going back, I have owned an international relocation company, so I have worked and traveled in many countries, over 60 countries around the world, helping thousands of people move to about 35 different countries. And after the first year or so of doing that, I thought, why am I doing this from Costa Rica when I can work from anywhere? Huh? So I became a full-time digital nomad, so to speak, um, in 2012. And then ever since I've just kind of been homeless by choice, I guess could say.  

Hosts:    00:09:29    And that's, that's the thing that fascinated me about you is that, uh, we call it work from home because that's where we do it from when we don't have to go in the office, but technically it's working remotely. And that remotely means anywhere. So why necessarily work from the couch in your house when you could be working from, you know, a sun porch in Costa Rica or in your case, uh, a sun porch anywhere. Uh, I saw some of your pictures where you are, uh, over in Portugal, and it's like, as long as you're punching the clock nine to five, who cares where you are? Um, so this article that you wrote and, and the fascinating life that you've built for yourself, it's, it's very inspiring to know that, um, you know, you've created your own niche, but this article that you wrote, we just went to a traffic, uh, break and, and saw how the roads are looking right now, traffic will be fundamentally different if none of us are actually going to work every day.  

Kristin:    00:10:28    Exactly. Yeah. It's, um, the realization that people who work from home come to inevitably when I started working from home in 2008, but it wasn't until the end of 2012 that I started traveling and my home was in Costa Rica, so I was already technically somewhere else. But after a couple years of doing that, I think, and even sooner, people start to ask themselves, what if my home was somewhere else? And it kind of starts with like, what if I didn't live in the city, but what if I lived in the countryside? Or what if I lived in a different state or a different town that had a lower cost of living? And then when you get more and more comfortable with that, it's like, what if I lived in a different country or, you know, and it starts to go from there. So yeah, we end up having a group of remote workers and digital nomads, people who've been doing it for a long time.  

Kristin:    00:11:20    We're kind of living in this parallel universe where before the pandemic for us would naturally start going places during off peak hours. So whereas most people only get to go to brunch on a Saturday or a Sunday, you could go on a Monday or a Tuesday or a Wednesday. So what the big thing I've noticed since the pandemic, since things started reopening again is what I wrote about last year in the article, that the traffic patterns would, would change. We wouldn't have these peak rush hour periods. You would just kind of have a more normalized flow of traffic and make, many people have probably noticed, even at grocery stores, like if you go to the grocery store in the middle of the day during the pandemic, there's people in there, but normally all of those people are at work. So whether people are unemployed right now or they're working from home, they have more freedom and flexibility as to how they go about their daily activities. So we're not gonna see as much of those crazy fluctuations, uh, like we did pre pandemic. 

Host:    00:12:26   Kristin,  you kind of touched on it, uh, briefly, but what does that mean for our cities? What will our cities look like if more and more people are working remotely?  

Kristin:    00:12:38    Well, the first thing in the article, the biggest change I think when everybody works remotely, is that people will move out of cities. Because even though there are many things to love about cities, there's culture and nightlife and restaurants and energy and, and lots of good things, there's also a lot of bad things. And studies have shown that, uh, there's one Gallup poll that I write about that said that while 80% of Americans live in cities or metropolitan areas, only 12% wanna be there. So when you disconnect a place of work from a geographic location, then there's no reason to live in that sea anymore. So the jobs aren't gonna be in the cities, the jobs are in the internet, they're in the cloud. And so there becomes that disconnect there, and then people can move outta them because typically cities have a high cost of living, right?  

Kristin:    00:13:36    So to save money, and Facebook has already, uh, realized this as Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement just in the last week of May, that any Facebook employees that decide to move outta Silicon Valley to smaller towns for a lower cost of living are going have a cost of living salary adjustment. So there's a lot of controversy now over these types of policies because salaries to be based on where you live. But you know what, if where you live doesn't matter, then should, should you still get paid based on that or should you pay based on the value that you're providing to the company?  

Hosts:    00:14:19    I think, uh, Kristin, what I think I would do is I would say I still live in Silicon Valley <laugh>, and then not tell Mark that I moved to, you know, the middle, was it Tulsa, Oklahoma recently that was offering people $10,000?  

Host:    00:14:31    It was somewhere in Oklahoma Yeah.  

Hosts:    00:14:32    To relocate there.   

Kristin:    00:14:34    Um, yeah, that was Tulsa. There's actually a few cities that offered remote work incentives and remote work programs before the pandemic because they just wanted to attract new workers. And um, I thought that was very interesting because as a group, like let's say in the US in the last couple years, there were almost 60 million freelancers and on a large portion of them could work remotely or do work remotely depending on what their job is. And then when you combine that with 6 million digital nomads in the US and then another however many million remote employees, there's like this big influential group of people who are working from home or working remotely and, and the smarter cities have said, let's create something to attract and appeal to those people. So instead of just continuing to get Amazon to put their headquarters here, what if we offered incentives for individuals to come here?  

Host:    00:15:38    Very interesting. I know one of the other things that you point out is that the balance of power will shift from employer to employee. How so?  

Kristin:    00:15:47    Uh, yes. That has not been proven yet, but I just think that it's inevitable when the workforce is distributed remotely this way, employees are gonna be calling more of the shop because they can decide where they go. And the same way that employers will have, um, greater access to a bigger hiring pool of people so they don't have to only hire within a one hour radius of the city that people can commute to the central office. There's multi-billion dollar companies that don't have a headquarters, and so they can hire people from anywhere in the world. And so that gives them a bigger hiring pool, but that also gives employees more options for jobs because, um, I have an American friend, for example, who works remotely for a company that's based in Europe. She actually gets paid in Euro, she gets vacation days as if she were European.  

Kristin:    00:16:49    Oh, I wish. And she's a digital nomad, so she lives, she was living in Bulgaria last I saw. And then they, the company will fly her to Malta for the company annual conference or, um, they'll have like in-person events. And so yeah, she doesn't have to just apply for work in her home state in the US or her hometown. She can apply anywhere. And so, um, I think that people will not only have the opportunity to apply to more jobs with more companies, but they'll also have the opportunity to work for themselves without going anywhere. And so companies are gonna kind of have to accommodate for that if they wanna compete for the best talent. And sometimes people might make more money for themselves than they would in the salaries.  

Hosts:    00:17:35    Now you just touched on something, uh, European companies generally give a lot more, uh, vacation days and, you know, sick days and, and personal days than, than we do here. So that might be a bonus for somebody who's contemplating uh, making this lifestyle adjustment. But you mentioned that your friend gets paid in Euros. Uh and one of your things that are in here, and guy would kill me if, if, if he was here, and I brought this up, people aren't gonna be getting paid in Euros or dollars or yen or whatever. Uh, if they are working remotely and they're working for other companies that are based out of the country because the exchange rates are so confusing and where do you get a bank? People just, just start paying your paycheck in Bitcoin <laugh>.  

Kristin:    00:18:21    Yeah, there's plenty of companies that already do that, especially in the, in the FinTech, like the financial technology industry and um, Bitcoin and technology companies, they offer that as an option. Or in some cases it might be that's their only option, <laugh> to get paid in Bitcoin. Um, but it only makes sense if you have an, an international borderless company with employees from every continent that you would wanna pay them in a currency that can use anywhere. And so first we start seeing digital online banks for each country, and then now there's online banks that work for anywhere in the world and they help you transfer money cheaper and faster and easier. And so I think we're just gonna continue to see that with, um, cryptocurrency and whatever comes after that, because that's just gonna be the most practical way to pay people.  

Hosts:    00:19:19    It's a fascinating look at, uh, at a what if scenario that is fast becoming more of a reality than just a kind of a what if we all work from home? We are seeing right now during this pandemic that a lot more people are working from home and a lot more companies are saying, you know, we could probably get by without, you know, building that new headquarters. Uh, we can retrofit the old one. And if you looked in your crystal ball when you wrote this article last year, what would be the timeline for this to become more mainstream?  

Kristin:    00:19:53    You know, I wrote another article, I think it was two years ago, about why companies should start adopting remote work now. And it was because it's already been possible for over 50 years. Teleworking has been a thing <laugh>, you know, since the, at the seventies. And so the only thing that has been blocking people from working remotely is the resistance to change by companies. It's just hard to change company culture that fast. So I thought it was gonna take probably 10 years or even longer to get to where we are right now during the pandemic where everybody started working remotely. And that wasn't because it wasn't possible, but just simply because part of the unknown and happened. I had friends who worked at Google and bigger companies and they were just like, yeah, you know, like, remote work doesn't work for us. And they had all of these excuses and then it was forced on them and now they, that it does work and it's gonna be really hard to justify moving everybody back into the offices, especially the longer that they stay outta it. It's like, well, how did we survive for three months or six months or one year without anyone in the office? We really need to justify having that overhead.  

Hosts:    00:21:22    Well, Kristin Wilson, um, we're gonna give you information out there where people can go and find your videos and, and look you up online. Uh, and you also relocate people. So if somebody is thinking, you know, I wanna work remotely, I wanna live the dream, um, they can get in touch with you. But I, I just have to say we are living through an historic time right now with the pandemic going on and everything, but I think as you say, in 10 years we're gonna look back and realize this was the start of a major cultural shift in working and by proxy in, you know, the rest of our lives and how we live and where we live.  

Kristin:    00:21:58    Yeah. And the good news is that people don't have to fear this change. You know, it's something that change is always difficult and it's always a little bit uncomfortable and, and it's completely natural to even have a period of just kind of grieving the old way of life. But the good news is, is that in almost all of the scientific research and studies done by public and private companies, anywhere between 85 and 99% of people try working remotely outside of the pandemic commission, want to continue doing it and would recommend it to someone else. So almost like more than nine out of 10 people wanna keep doing it once they've tried it. And so under normal conditions, it's, you know, not as stressful, uh, for people. So that's something to keep in mind. Like once you try it, people wanna keep doing it. So even if there might be a little bit of an uncomfortable transition, I think the future is really bright for people and there are many more pros and benefits to it than there are downsides.  

Hosts:    00:23:05    And Kristin, as a nomad yourself, this is, this is the lifestyle you've chosen. Where have you been riding out the pandemic?  

Kristin:    00:23:12    Um, ironically I have been in the us which I have not lived here in many, many years, but I decided to take a break from February until May to live in Miami because South Florida is a great time to be during the winter. And so I've been here since February 15th and yeah, this is where I've been. So it's been really nice. I mean, that's another benefit of working remotely is you can kind of just get a snowbird by place, right? Yeah. So some years I choose to go snowboarding, actually I spent January snowboarding in Canada and then February I came to Miami, uh, for winter and then you know, the pandemic happened so.  

Hosts:    00:23:54    Oops, What terrible, what terrible timing on your part. <laugh>, right. 

Kristin:    00:23:58    Um,  It worked out.  

Hosts:    00:23:59    So, uh, a lot of people in the text line are weighing in saying, who is this? How can I find out more about her? What is a good website where people can look up and find out what you do?  

Hosts:    00:24:08    Uh, the best place to find me is Traveling with Kristin everywhere. It's K-R-I-S-T-I-N. So I have Traveling with Kristin on YouTube, Traveling with Kristin, Traveling with Kristin on Instagram. And then I also have a podcast called Badass Digital Nomad. Dunno if I can say that. <laugh>.  

Hosts:    00:24:29    No, you just did. It's okay.   

Kristin:    00:24:31    <laugh>. And so that comes out, um, every, everywhere on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, all of the podcasting apps.  

Hosts:    00:24:40    Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us and, and allowing us to look into the future, which might actually be a lot closer than we thought.  

Kristin:     00:24:47    <laugh>, Thanks for having me.  

Hosts:    00:24:49    All right, thank you. And speaking of traffic, yes, we we're not, we're not all working from home yet. No.  

Kristin:    00:24:56    Wow. Such a timely conversation to have. And I had so much fun speaking with a radio show in middle America about how remote work is turning the world upside down. And I would love to know what changes each and every one of you have been making in your life over the past few months and what you're thinking, what your plans are for the new normal and what you hope to create in the present and in the future, in the short term, near future, in the upcoming years. So let me know over in the Facebook group, Badass Digital Nomads, or by leaving a voice message for the podcast at TravelingwithKristin.com/podcast. Thank you all for listening. Stay safe and see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, you can support the podcast and look cool while you're doing it by checking out our new merch Over on teespring.com/stores/TravelingwithKristin. We have t-shirts, pink top stickers, coffee mugs, hoodies, cell phone cases, bags and more. Again, that's at teespring.com/stores/TravelingwithKristin.