The History of Remote Work

Kristin:    00:00:10    Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Badass Digital Nomads, where we talked to badass digital nomads and remote workers about how they got that way and inspire you to become a badass digital nomad too, so you can have control over your life, your freedom, your finances, and your career. Today we're doing one of those episodes where I just talked to you, so we don't have a guest, but we're gonna nerd out for a minute and talk about the history of remote work and frankly, why it's bullshit that this is even a thing right now. I think if everybody knew what I'm about to tell you, it could be a massive disruption overnight to the mindset of mainstream population. So there's like, this is, this really fires me up. This is really annoying because all of a sudden I'm seeing all of these Google alerts about remote work as if it's some kind of new thing, and it's just infuriating when you find out the history of remote work, how much we've all been held back for decades, 50 years, guys, for 50 years, we have had the opportunity to telecommute as knowledge workers, and for 50 years organizations have had their thumb on top of us.  

Kristin:    00:01:50    Like they have just, it's like this mask, coverup. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but it's just infuriating that there has been this capacity to work from home for half of a century, and we're just now getting around to it as a society. So if you've ever thought that working from home was a pipe dream or working for yourself or having an online business, or having your own business or whatever, if you ever thought that it was too good to be true, you're really gonna wanna listen to this because this will basically remove any, uh, block or hesitation that you've ever had about if you had the, uh, capability to work remotely and if it was like a thing that you could do. So I wanna tell you that it's not weird and it's going to be extremely mainstream very soon. So you might as well take advantage of it now because why waste another year of your life working in a job that you hate or in a lifestyle that you despise where you're living for the weekends if you don't have to, and you're just gonna be really mad <laugh> when you find out that you could have been doing this the whole time.  

Kristin:    00:03:15    So yeah, basically this whole debate around is remote work, productive, and blah, blah, blah is like missing the point. Remote work is a thing, it's possible and everybody should be able to do it if they want to. The only reason that everybody's not working from home already and not doing what they wanna do already is because of fear and control and money. Big surprise, the big three, right? By, basically by corporate America, and I'm saying corporate America, but it's really the whole work culture around the world. So let's go back in time a little bit. Um, in another episode where I talked about what a digital nomad is, I just touched on the fact that humans have always worked from home. Humans have always worked for themselves, and humans have always traveled. So human beings are inherently nomadic. We used to roam around in tribes.  

Kristin:    00:04:19    We used to just work where we lived. This is normal. This isn't our DNA and this is why the concept of being a digital nomad resonates with so many people. But the problem is that, all right, we went from being this, this, uh, ancient society basically with very minimal technology. And then the first industrial revolution hit in the 17 hundreds, and then the second one hit in the 18 hundreds, and it changed the way that people lived and worked. We, you know, obviously evolved because in the past we had slave labor, we had surfs, we had a lot of hard manual labor for thousands of years. And now our lifestyles changed where we went to go work for a large employer. And during the industrial revolution, uh, fortunately we had types of governmental regulation that enhanced the quality of life for many people. And wealth increased globally and there were all of these really great benefits, but there were also some downsides and something happened.  

Kristin:    00:05:33    So after we, we all started living in, uh, cities and driving to work and had zoning and city planning and mass transportation and all of these things, the ability to harness energy, obviously, uh, many inventions, great. We got through that, not you and I specifically weren't alive yet, but in the 1960s, we started moving into this like third industrial revolution, like the post-industrial era. And with the advent of technology, like computer technology, we suddenly got the possibility to telecommute. So this ability to telecommute started in the 1960s and seventies. So if you think about it, why has it taken so long for companies to admit that employees can telecommute? Like why are we still in the same model that people were in in the 18 hundreds, just like marginally better? And it's really because of fear. So the whole telecommuting concept started in like the mid seventies as far as mainstream awareness of it.  

Kristin:    00:07:03    And there was this guy, he, his name is Jack Niles. He was a NASA engineer, and we don't, uh, a lot of us don't remember 'cause we were too young, but in the 1970s, there was like the OPEC oil crisis. So everybody was panicked about the cost of, of gas, basically. And so, uh, Jack, good old Jack, he wrote this paper called the telecommunications transportation Trade-off where he suggested maybe people should work from home and it will decrease traffic, it will assist with, uh, the scarcity of non-renewable resources. And it could just be a new way of life for people who are commuting to work. It could decrease the cost of commuting, it can save gasoline. There's all these benefits to working from home. And people were like me, like nobody cared. Then a few years later, the Washington Post published a piece called Working from Home Can Save Gasoline.  

Kristin:    00:08:05    And then everybody kind of started debating it like, oh wow, there have been a bunch of changes in the nature of jobs. We aren't necessarily needing to go to factories anymore to put things together. Some of us are working as knowledge workers and we're using things like fax machines and telephones and computers and, and maybe we don't have to go to a central place of work to be able to use them. So that was in the 1970s, guys. Wow. So these are some of the reasons that logically people might consider working remotely. In the 1970s, the Washington Post said, Hey, modern day office activities can be performed anywhere. Jobs that used to be only confined to factories or laboratories can now be fulfilled offsite. And the same technologies and equipment that enable paperless offices also exist in the home. And these machines that we have, these sophisticated machines can combine different business functions that used to have to be done by one or more people.  

Kristin:    00:09:17    And now these machines can communicate with one another. So yeah, maybe people don't have to go to work, they can just work from home. And the companies were like, no, we don't care that it would be better for our employees, that they would be more productive, that they would be happier, that they would spend less money on their monkey suits, <laugh> for work and their food and their parking and their gas. And you know, our, our, our company culture is more important than the quality of life and the morale and the mental health of our employees and work life balance. They, the companies didn't care. Companies were like, uh, no. What if, um, what if we can't see what our employees are doing? How are we gonna know that they're working? Or if our employees work from home, they won't be able to do their jobs.  

Kristin:    00:10:16    They'll get distracted as if we're like children, or they said, our employees are gonna be lonely if they work from home. They need to be around their, the team. They need to be around their other coworkers to succeed and be happy. And actually, that one has some merit. I mean, if you're always by yourself, you need to interact with people on online and in real life. So yeah, it's, it's possible that people can get lonely working from home, but that doesn't mean that we have to work at an office 40 hours a week. I mean, that just became like the standard and that we're still doing it. So it's basically the path of least resistance. And there's been this momentum behind the 40 hour work week that has just been like perpetuated, and it's time for that to stop. So there are all these benefits for both employers and employees for remote work, cost savings, higher productivity, higher creativity, um, more output, like just numerous benefits, cost savings on both sides, but still, like companies have been dragging their feet to do it.  

Kristin:    00:11:37    And we've seen companies like IBM and HP who temporarily offered work from home policies only to retract them again later. Um, but I, I think that the main reason why companies haven't gotten on board is just a, a culture of control and oversight over employees. And of course, some people are gonna thrive in different environments, but saying that everyone can't work from home because they won't be able to focus on their work or they won't be productive or they won't know what to do, is kind of the same as saying everybody should work in an open office. We're a decentralized organization with an open office plan, and everybody's going to thrive in one room together where they can talk to each other and communicate every five minutes and distract each other every five minutes. And that doesn't necessarily work either. You know, every human being has a unique set of skills, has a unique personality, and works under different conditions.  

Kristin:    00:12:46    Some people need the structure of going to a workplace, having a very defined, uh, set of job responsibilities and having that social structure of the water cooler conversation or what have you throughout the day. But other people despise that they have to put their headphones on and pretend to be listening to something so that people don't interrupt them. They're getting called into meetings that are usually a waste of time. And there's so much science and so many studies on the amount of waste in organizations, and it's just crazy that companies would intentionally or not be so stuck in their old ways that they don't want the cost savings, the productivity savings, the innovation gains, and all of the other benefits of remote work because it's just not the way it was done in the past. I mean, that's crazy. And this is why small lean startups and companies that are fully distributed remote organizations from the beginning are surpassing these archaic dinosaurs by leaps and bounds because they're more agile, they're more nimble, they can make decisions faster, their costs are lower, their hiring pool is much, much bigger.  

Kristin:    00:14:16    Imagine if you could only choose your employees from within a five or 10 mile radius. And then imagine if you could choose your employees from anywhere in the world and find qualified people for your organization from anywhere. Imagine the diversity that your organization would have. I mean, the options are just like the potential is infinite. So there's some other reasons why, why remote work has kind of been like slow to take off besides the culture and like huge corporations with thousands of employees that are just resistant to change. And it's a social structure. People have identified for a long time with where they work and what their job is. And now we live in the gig or freelance economy where people have more than one job. So it's kind of like the metaphor or the example of people who went to LA to become actors, but they were waiting cables.  

Kristin:    00:15:28    It's like an identity crisis <laugh>. And that's kind of what we have now, but, but in a good way because people might be able to do many different things and monetize many different things. And then it's like, how do you even explain what your job is? And that is a double-edged sword. It's cool because all of a sudden it doesn't matter what you wear, like how nice your clothes are, how nice your car is, where you are on the corporate ladder. It's like there is no corporate ladder. You just are you pure unadulterated you, whatever you wanna wear, whatever you wanna do for work, however much money you wanna make, however many hours you wanna work per week, it's like all up to you all of a sudden. And I think that that freedom really have, has made like the powers that be quite uncomfortable because all of a sudden, like the employees are the ones in control.  

Kristin:    00:16:33    It's not the companies or the supervisors or even the government, like once everybody accepts mentally that they don't need that structure to be able to make a living in the world. That completely upends the entire organizational structure of society today. And so I think that's why remote work has been suppressed for so many years because it gives too much freedom and autonomy to the employees who for so long were given limited options to what they could do as a living. So if you find yourself in a situation right now where you graduated from high school or college, um, or grad school and went to work, and then you were like, this is it, then sleep on it. Think again. Maybe it doesn't have to be that way for you. Maybe, you know, even if you have a good job, a good high paying job, you're still trading your time for money and you're still trading your freedom for a paycheck.  

Kristin:    00:17:50    So what if you could have that paycheck, but you didn't have to symbolically go to jail every day to have it? What if you kept the same job title, but you worked for a remote organization that you don't have to convince about the benefits of working remotely? What if that was just part of their company culture? Because it's logical? What about that? That's possible. You don't have to start your own business. You don't have to be a freelancer. You don't have to strive to be a multimillionaire or a famous startup founder. You could just do you. What if you just did what you were good at and what you liked, but you didn't have to stress out about it so much, you didn't have to work so hard, you didn't have to waste 10 hours per week commuting to work. Like what would your life look like?  

Kristin:    00:18:48    I wrote an article that is about the astronomical amount of time that you can reclaim from life by being a remote worker. And it's anywhere from like 700, 800 hours a year to a couple thousand dollars per year. So if you've ever said to yourself, I don't have enough time, well, that's a, that's a topic for another day. But an easy way to get more time is to add flexibility to your work. So whether that means working from home a couple days a week or getting a new job or asking your boss to let you work remotely, or just maybe you are a small business owner and you have a brick and mortar business, start thinking about ways that you can make more money online digitally and free up some of that face-to-face time. So even if you are, let's say you're a baker and you have a bakery, you have to get up in the middle of the night and go bake bread.  

Kristin:    00:19:59    Like that's a job that you have to be there for. You have to invest a lot in equipment in employees. You have to live at that bakery every morning. So traditionally that's a job you have to be there physically for. But maybe there's some other ways that you can start to expand on your business model to make it more digital. Maybe you take orders online, maybe you have deliveries. Maybe you ship frozen dough around the country or the world and let people bake their own bread. Maybe you start a blog or a YouTube channel about how people can bake their bread at home, or who knows? Like there's always a way to take a physical business and add remote elements to it. So it's not something that you have to do overnight, like go to work tomorrow and be like, I quit <laugh>. You know, but just start thinking about it because the tools are at your disposal.  

Kristin:    00:21:04    The cost of technology has never been lower. The mobility of individuals has never been higher. And yeah, nobody's probably going to tell you that, that you should do it. It's just something that if you get the idea to do it, you should be able to pursue it. If you decide that you disagree with the, the way that your life is unfolding, you can change something about it. Um, and this is gonna change really fast because if you're born today, or if you're in elementary school or middle school or high school today, it's just going to be second nature to work remotely because you can already do everything else remotely, <laugh>, you know, you can communicate remotely, you can do your classwork online. Um, so it's just gonna be an extension of, of regular life. I think that the interesting thing is that many digital nomads are in their late thirties, forties, and fifties.  

Kristin:    00:22:08    So there have been bigger mental hurdles to overcome because it's really going against the grain of mass society and the acceptable way of living. But what if there were no acceptable way of living? What if life was just what you decided you wanted it to be? What if you didn't have to care about like getting a promotion or looking like you're staying late at work or working 80 hours a week or whatever it is? Like, or what if you didn't have to go to lunch meetings with people you didn't like? Like there's so many things that come along with this traditional work model that stress people out. And what if it didn't have to be that way? Start thinking about it. Start thinking about what the, the frontier of remote work looks like for you. What is like the minimum that you could do to start getting a taste of it?  

Kristin:    00:23:07    And what is like the maximum expression of your life if you didn't have to worry about going to work every day? What if you could just work from anywhere? What would you do? Who would you help? What would you create? So it's 2019. We know that offices are incredibly distracting. People only accomplish a few hours of real work every day. Commuting is a waste of time. Commuting affects our mental health meetings suck. Um, and the current work model in the developed world results in mental and physical burnout. We also know that technology has made many things possible that weren't possible 50 years ago or a hundred years ago. And almost everything can be done virtually now, and a lot of jobs can now be done with ai. So that's a topic for another podcast as well. People are going to be forced eventually to find ways to integrate remote work into their lives because their jobs are gonna be at risk by of being outsourced if they're not already, or by being delegated to machines.  

Kristin:    00:24:30    So there's no, there's no reason to stay stuck forever. Um, it's time to kind of break free of the expectation that there's one way to work, and it involves being in one place for 40 or 50 years until you can take a break and getting like a couple weeks off per year, if that. So almost, I think 5 million people in the US already describe themselves as digital nomads. And one of my remote colleagues, an entrepreneur named Peter Levels, has estimated that according to the data we have today, there could be up to 1 billion people working in a freelance or remote capacity in the next 15 years. And if 90% of people who have worked remotely say that they'll never go back to an office, we're gonna have a lot of empty offices. And you can be one of them. You can do it now or you can wait 10 or 20 years.  

Kristin:    00:25:37    But if you're listening to this podcast today, I hope that you start brainstorming now and think about what life could look like for you as a digital nomad. So basically, if you are 40 years old or younger, even older, you could have been working remotely this whole time. If you are 50 years old or younger, and telecommuting has been a possibility for the last 40 or 50 years, you could have been doing it this whole time. So don't let the rest of your life go by accepting the status quo of the past. Embrace this time, embrace remote work. If your company won't do it, find someone who will. Thanks for listening today, guys. And if you like this podcast, if it's helped you out, and if you're inspired by our guests, please leave a five star review on iTunes and let us know what you like about it and what you wanna see more of. See you next week here on Badass Digital Nomads or on youtube.com/digitalnomad.