From the Founder's Desk: On Working from Anywhere

We have written and said a lot about working from home, remotely, etc. Of late, we hear this whole "work from anywhere" phrase used a lot, so much so that like WFH, WFA is also kinda ubiquitous. As somewhat of an aspirational nomad myself and a hardcore believer and practitioner of working from home, I felt it would be interesting to explore this, and hence, here is my take...

It’s WFH, except Home ≠ same city as the office

The more common (and some would say boring) flavour of WFA is one where it's actually just working from home, but it also kind of means that your home is not in the city your office is in. 
 
This phenomenon became very widespread during the pandemic, especially in countries with significant differences in lifestyle and cost of living across cities/ suburbs/ towns. In India, many (especially in Tech) moved from hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, etc., to their home towns in Calicut, Ranchi, Kanpur, Coorg, etc. Some of these started as short-term moves, but people soon realised that the pandemic would take much longer to settle and subsequently broke their rental agreements, put their stuff in storage, or sold them off and moved to their hometowns back with their families. In the US, people sometimes moved closer to their families, and sometimes it was moving away from the hugely expensive Valley to save on living costs and to have a more relaxed lifestyle. 
 
This version of WFA is not different from WFH, so the benefits of WFH are seen here, too - employers are able to hire talent from across, reduce costs on infrastructure, and likely see higher productivity and reduced attrition. Employees have all the benefits of WFH like flexibility, being closer to family and support systems, lower living costs, higher productivity, etc. This version of WFA is also the easiest to implement - in terms of legal, tax restrictions, etc.

WFA = Digital Nomads

This is the more romanticised and aspirational version of WFA - the idea that you could be anywhere, meaning ANYWHERE in the world, and work for a company, say located in the US, or any other country. And that this anywhere could change - you could even keep traveling to different countries or cities and continue working for the same company.
 
Now, one could argue that aren't freelancers doing this already? Yes, and I would agree that freelancers are already experiencing WFA and are already digital nomads (their work also can be done for different companies located anywhere in the world, so more nomadic in that sense). But even freelancers tend to have a home base more often than not.
 
What is truly aspirational is a reality where you can travel between countries and continents and continue doing the best work per your skills and being valued for that work. This utopia is harder to achieve as key barriers remain in most countries' tax laws/ residency laws/ work visas/ immigration laws. 
 
Some companies like Spotify announced this as a policy with you choosing the country/city you want to work from - which is an excellent start as you have an option to live in a different country for a year or so. And some countries (like Bermuda, Estonia, Barbados) are easing work-visa and tax regulations to attract such talent to boost their economies and become talent hubs. 
 
On a personal note, I have experienced small snippets of this aspirational WFA - once, when my husband had a work trip to the Netherlands, we stayed a couple of weeks in Amsterdam, and I worked from there. I had really early hours to match with Asia timings and finished my workday at 3 pm there and then went out to a coffee shop/ park for the evening and did the touristy stuff on the weekends only. It was a very nice way to experience a new city, almost like a local. I enjoyed it and definitely see myself being a very happy digital nomad one of these days!