Your Business Should Be Hiring Digital Nomads
Remote workers may initially be a little harder to keep track of, but there’s a host of benefits to hiring roaming staff.
If you think freelancing is a modern phenomenon, think again: the practice can be traced back to the 16th century when scribes would travel around offering their services. It was a little different to just bringing in a laptop though: “Scribes lugged [their] desk – or deske – around with them from job to job. The deske was a legless wooden box with a sloping top on which the scribe leaned as he wrote down the words of whoever hired him,” Lucy Kellaway wrote in her ‘Financial Times’ column.
Thanks to modern technology, today’s scribes and other freelancers don’t even have to physically show up to do the work. For businesses, the ability to hire someone without having to make an office available to them can be a considerable asset. Companies can find themselves getting a lot for their money – especially when hiring freelancers who fall under the category of ‘digital nomad’ – as long as they’re willing to get over the fact that the worker may sometimes take a few hours to respond to emails. This is because digital nomads will often do the work while also travelling the world, checking in on work projects from a beach in Thailand one day, and a café in Melbourne the next.
So with a little flexibility in place, working with digital nomads can be great for business. Here’s a few reasons why:
They’re inspired
Working while also exploring the world can be thrilling, and your freelancer will bring that excitement to their work. Think of it this way: rather than showing up to the office in a foul mood after a horrid commute, the worker is somewhere they very much want to be. A happy worker is a productive worker.
They’re results-oriented
In an office, work can have a tendency to stretch out to fill the time available. So if you’re at the office from 9am to 5pm, tasks may often have an uncanny tendency to take just about that long to do. For a remote worker, especially a digital nomad with new places to explore, this is not the case because the clock doesn’t determine how long something takes. For a freelancer, work is no longer a place you go – it’s what you produce.
They work to their strengths
This is a benefit to hiring any freelancer, not just digital nomads: remote staff can do the work at the time of day that suits them best. Some people like mornings and get most of their best work done before lunch, whereas others are monosyllabic before 10am and hit their groove at about 2pm, 5pm or even 10pm! Allowing people to work when their brains and bodies are in the best shape means you get the most from people.
Some businesses have become such strong believers in the idea that digital nomads are an asset to productivity that they actively encourage their staff to roam. “We encourage our employees to spend time away from the office. We also give complete freedom to our employees – no fixed work hours and optional office attendance. As long as they complete their tasks, they are free to do whatever they like,” Jacob Laukaitis, co-founder of deals website ChameleonJohn, wrote on ‘TheNextWeb’.
This sentiment is echoed by MySQL, the open source database company which doesn’t have a single office despite having 500 full-time employees. MySQL’s ex-CEO Marten Mickos told ‘TheNextWeb’: “It is very easy to look busy in the office by attending meetings, answering e-mails and drinking coffee. But when you work remotely, the question you will be asked is: ‘Where are the results?’” This kind of attitude will be popular among staff who value flexibility, and is the kind of thing a company can offer prospective employees as an incentive to join. Not to mention that MySQL, as a San Francisco-adjacent tech company, saves a ton of money on not needing to rent office space.
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