where to remote work in 2024: from wfh to wfa

A typical remote worker can manage everything with just a laptop and a wifi connection, opening up the possibilities of 'work from home' to 'work from anywhere'

Given the recent remote work revolution and mass adoption since 2020, it’s easy to forget that the history of remote working for knowledge workers goes back a whole lot further than that. Jack Nilles, a NASA engineer, is credited with the term "telecommuting" in 1973, and in 1979, IBM corporation launched a 'work from home' programme. This enabled some employees to work from home or other remote locations for up to three days a week, via special cabled terminals installed in their homes. Other early adopters in the 80s included major employers in the US like Xerox and Amex. It wasn’t until the final years of the 20th century that affordable home internet via existing phone lines started to change everything, and make distance-working an accessible option for most. It's even more recently that the possibility to work from anywhere has taken hold.

For me, it was the impending arrival of a ‘millennium baby’ that was the push to try working from home. A new business initiative made it possible - as well as attractive - at least on a trial basis.

At the time, my office-of-one took up more space in my South London home than the newborn and all her paraphernalia… An array of big beige boxes filled the room, along with the installation of a new phone line specifically for accessing the Internet. Printers, scanners, a franking machine, a fax machine, and filing storage for the huge amounts of paper generated, all meant that the term ‘remote working’ was totally synonymous with ‘working from home.’

Remote Work, Work From Home, Work From Anywhere?

Even back then in the early noughties, I wasn’t always working at home, because most work with clients involved travel and face-to-face meetings. We didn’t collaborate online, we just exchanged phone calls and emails. There were also daily errands to banks, post depots, and of course stationery stores.

It all feels like a million miles from today’s typical remote worker, whose entire office equipment is now contained in a sliver of aluminium weighing a couple of pounds, slid into a tiny backpack. That’s a handy feature now that they can get online one way or another from just about anywhere on earth. Many can probably do a lot of the work on a device which fits in the palm of their hand any way.

Remote work now means just that - working at distance from the source of the work itself. It can mean working from home, and there are some roles which require privacy for confidential data handling or use of special equipment, which brings its own restrictions. Others (like me most of the time!) just prefer it! Or they may have intrinsic needs due to health, disability, or caring commitments.

But working remotely in 2024 does not necessarily mean working at home. The coworking industry is booming worldwide, and many people prefer the social buzz and energy of being around others, combined with the psychological boundary of ‘going to work’.

What about ‘working from anywhere?’

In terms of employment, this remains a rarity in its purest form, as the costs and complications of legally employing someone in a different company remain complex. But many employers are offering as much flexibility as they can in the form of workations and similar schemes. It depends on how badly they want to hire or retain the employee, there’s always some way of doing it compliantly.

As such remote work remains the umbrella term, and work from home, work from anywhere, and digital nomadism, are all subsets of the whole.

Technical Transformations in Remote Work

When I look back at photos of my earliest home office, the technical transformations are indeed the first thing you notice.

Every year, the devices we use to connect, communicate, and collaborate with one another get smaller, more powerful, and more affordable. With the possible exception of the typical home printer, every single piece of equipment on the average remote worker’s desk - if they even use a desk - has changed beyond recognition.

Alongside this has been the way we use and store digital assets and data, transformed by fast connectivity. Back in the day when I had to unplug the phone to retrieve emails, copies of data and files moved around on 3.5” floppy disks. These are now sentimentally immortalised as the save icon, presumably to baffle a future generation of digital archaeologists.  

Some years later, as I grew my first team of remote workers, we dialled into servers and data centres. We had shared assets, but had to check out each file to work on locally. We collaborated serially rather than in parallel, creating lots of fun versioning errors to unpick and argue about, especially when someone logged off early for the night with a file accidentally still locked out to them.

To my mind the ability to work directly in entirely cloud-based applications from any location, and collaborate in real time, is a far bigger transformation than the shiny device we use to access it.

And even though I still work from home most of the time, I love that I can work from anywhere when I want to. 

That includes while travelling, for business and pleasure, and also simply mixing up the mood and mindset. Writing in a coffee shop or taking a meeting in the garden is fun, podcasting in a closet in an echoey Airbnb not so much… but location-independence means different things under different conditions, and that’s the big unlock of remote work for me.

Digital transformation tools like digital IDs and online business solutions have also changed the game. Thanks to borderless initiatives like e-⁠Residency of Estonia, foreign entrepreneurs have another way to work and do business remotely from anywhere:

Cultural Transformations in Remote Work

Most people would point to the pandemic as the big turning point for remote work adoption, but let’s remember that all this really did was highlight and accelerate an existing trend. Remote work was already gathering momentum, and a few facts to bear in mind are:

• By 2019, Zoom had over 50 thousand customers with over 10 employees, a 5 x increase on 2017
• There were over 170 fully remote US companies in 2018, compared to 26 in 2014, according to Flexjobs
• GitLab, one of the largest fully distributed global teams, launched in 2011

When the call came to grab a laptop and go home, most of us knowledge-based workers already did nearly all our work digitally, on cloud-based apps and storage. Now in 2024, 12% of Europeans regularly work remotely, and over 77% of Western European companies are offering more flexible work arrangements post-pandemic, with Sweden leaving the way in adoption at 59%.

My own experiences underline the way that remote work as an idea and way of life has changed completely, from the days when it was a weird curiosity, to an accessible mainstream lifestyle choice. Today I help the 50,000+ strong Remote Work Europe community to understand and embrace the possibilities, of permanently disconnecting work from a specific location.

But the Zipdo research linked above also underlined that many more people want to work remotely than presently can do so - a truth borne out by our findings at Remote Work Europe. The desire for remote work opportunities, particularly in employment rather than entrepreneurship, still massively outstrips the supply.

And therein lies a clue to the final barrier to remote work being more broadly adopted.

The technology has transformed beyond recognition, and the culture is radically different as well. But the thing that is holding people back is the state of the law…

Regulatory Transformations in Remote Work

When I first worked as a remote employee in London in 2000, I had a health and safety inspectorate visit and had to buy a fire extinguisher (because of all that paper). I also needed a poster on my wall when I had people working in my house. But that was the sole extent of the ‘official’ interest in my status, and a standard employment contract worked just fine, at least until I moved to Spain.

That was long before Estonian e-⁠Residency, so I had to contract to my former employer, and it wasn’t straightforward - but it was doable, even if it was unusual.

Today’s remote workers want to pick up their laptops and work from anywhere. The technology and society are ready for this, but traditional legal and statutory systems adapt much slower.

On the migration side, things are moving in the right direction.

For example, there are at least 70 countries in the world who offer some kind of digital nomad/remote working visa - this database by Lily Szabo is one of the most comprehensive I have seen (it’s a fast-moving space to stay across.) Of course, Estonia was the first in Europe, back in 2020!

This means there are a great many countries where you can now legally live and work remotely under various conditions, regularising something which mostly went under the radar in the past. 

This has opened up the world, for many solopreneurs and freelancers, but what about employees? Just because it's not illegal for the remote worker to do their thing in a given location, it doesn’t mean they can necessarily do so under a traditional employment contract from their home country, at least not indefinitely.

The main barrier for employees working from anywhere relates to taxation. Employers want to avoid the tax liabilities associated with permanent establishment created by having employees in other tax jurisdictions. Many companies therefore restrict their employees from working remotely in different countries to avoid the permanent establishment risk.

Remote work only for the rich?

Digital nomad and remote work visas come with their own unique conditions and costs, usually including high minimum income requirements. In many ways, they have done little to erase traditional barriers to migration and opportunity, for anyone born without entitlement to a powerful passport and a developed world educational background. You need to demonstrate success as an entrepreneur or well-paid executive before you can get the permission - so they haven’t made it easier for anyone to go and seek their fortune overseas in the first place.

The visas take their place among an infrastructure of products and services which continue to proliferate, proving that the demand is there. No-one can say this is all a post-pandemic travel backlash. New structures and entities from Employers of Record to Foreign Direct Employment are springing up, to address the clear need for businesses to hire the talent they need, and support that talent to live and work where they are most happy and productive. 

There are now an array of possibilities for both sides to weigh up, at vastly different price points, and offering advantages and disadvantages for each party. When I first moved to Spain, I had to give up the benefits of 9 years of full-time employment and absorb the costs of operating a local limited company. But nowadays, there are solutions which can preserve employment status, and/or preserve the location-independent status of the worker, while protecting them from the unlimited liabilities of freelancing as a sole trader.

Estonian e-⁠Residency: A Powerful, Flexible Remote Work Solution

Consider a case where the costs of an employer of record (typically around €600 per employee per month) are not realistic for an employer. And at the same time, an employee does not want to form their own business in a temporary location just to shield their boss from permanent establishment risk.

In such a case, Estonian e-⁠Residency could be a highly attractive option to consider:

• The remote worker can invoice the hirer/former employee from their own private limited company, without false self-employment risks.
• They can open and operate that company quickly, affordably, and entirely online - from wherever they choose to settle, or live nomadically.
• They can mitigate many of the risks of operating independently which fall on freelancers - such as unlimited personal liability, and lack of access to business services.

Now in its 10th anniversary year, the e-Residency programme is testament to the continued evolution of remote work and truly borderless business - a state many of us dream of, but is yet to become a reality for all.

Remote Work, from the Present to the Future

The rise of remote work, with all its significant technological and cultural shifts, has paved the way for innovative solutions like e-⁠Residency to support a growing cohort of those seeking to embrace this modern way of working.

Estonia's role as a frontrunner in providing flexible, legal frameworks for digital nomads and remote workers worldwide is firmly established. As we move forward, the integration of remote work into our daily lives becomes increasingly feasible and achievable.

Maybe one day we’ll see a future where work can truly be done by anyone from anywhere, unhindered by geographical boundaries. In the meanwhile, the resilient, adaptable, and daily growing remote work community will continue to piece together their own solutions from the available options, as some of us have done for decades. Countries and companies who embrace them will benefit from the independent thinking, originality, and productivity, they bring to their work each day.