So, you're getting an extra podcast this week outside of the fortnightly rhythm. I just had to share with you my reflections following the Running Remote conference in Lisbon, and I wanted to do so while I was still buzzing happily in the afterglow, of a wonderful event.
The return of face-to-face networking events still feels recent enough to be exciting in its own right anyway, and it’s always such a pleasure to connect with people you either only see online, or who you’ve only met at events like this previously.
Some of those people I count as close friends, and that includes Rowena Hennigan, who not only encouraged me to go to Running Remote in the first place, she recommended me for a panel - Rowena is a true champion of remote work and creator of abundance, and you can hear more from her in Season 1 Episode 6.
It’s not that I didn’t want to go, I hasten to add. it was just that I wasn’t totally certain about the alignment of the event, with my own areas of work.
I started building remote teams over 20 years ago and have published books about the subject and trained and consulted in it. but these days my focus is very much on solopreneurship and freelancing. Looking at the published programme, I saw that many of the speakers were from large, even global enterprises. It felt so different to my own experiences of remote work with startups and independents. So I wondered if it would truly be a fit.
I needn’t have worried.
Remote people are remote people, wherever they work.The energy, the passion, the curiosity - the commitment to push boundaries and solve problems creatively. These are the things we share, whatever the scale. The continual questioning of the status quo and the way things have always been done, distinguishes the remote work advocates and enablers, in every workplace - and those in corporate settings simply have different frameworks in which to operate.
So while I travelled hopefully for the connections and the conversations, the content was incredibly useful and interesting for me, in ways I would not necessarily have anticipated. The passion and curiosity of the remote work community, as well as the genuine desire to enable and support and learn from one another, was inspiring and energising.
All these enterprising operators come together, to share best practice, explore learning experiences, and uplift each other’s efforts in an authentic and empowering way. I have always loved the way so much good practice is freely and abundantly distributed to others in the remote work community, from the GitLab handbook to the Dropbox virtual first toolkit to the Atlassian Playbook.
Remote people are my people!
And over nearly a quarter of a century of working remotely and building remote teams, for me it’s crucial to reflect on the common themes. The way the context has changed so much, yet the core values and thinking underpins so much, when it comes to the self-management and intentionality aspects of remote working.
For this reason, I was thrilled to see the absolute OG of personal productivity, Mr David Allen, on the speaker list!
I almost wished I brought my dog-eared copy of the first UK paperback edition of Getting Things Done along with me because that book meant so much to me back in the day - and it still does.
I was a young Mum, ‘allowed’ to work from home, and struggling with the challenges of isolation, lack of structure, and organising my work and life effectively. All the productivity books (because books were all we had back then!) seemed irrelevant to my situation, either focused on prioritising and targets and a sales environment, or else they were way too abstract and what David Allen would call 50,000ft thinking, that is no help in figuring out my day-to-day.
The GTD fundamental recognition that everything on your mind needed capturing and processing holistically, was a revelation. The acceptance that I might have stuff to deal with around a baby and household and that this occupied mental bandwidth during what was supposed to be work time, helped me integrate my life and work in ways I had never dreamed possible, and make me more productive and effective at all aspects.
His second book, Making It All Work, just underlined this - whatever you have to deal with, in any sphere of life, it’s all just more stuff you need to get done. You can only compartmentalise it and prioritise after you have figured out the verbs involved, and you can only release it from your mind once it’s safely embedded in your ‘trusted system’.
So thank you, Mr Allen, and your work holds up better than ever in our location-independent 2023 world, than I could possibly have imagined in the early years of the new millennium.
Processing my captured open loop of ‘reflect on Running Remote Conference’ then, my next actions included identifying the key content and conversation themes which stood out and stayed with me, and there are 3 main areas I want to discuss here.
Technology for remote
The first is the technology we use to communicate, collaborate, and connect over distance - because this context is everything, and enables all we do.
Of course, it is changing all the time, but the speed of change in recent years is clearly something we must attribute to demand-driven development, and the remote revolution of the covid lockdowns.
There is now such a huge range of tools, that crafting a bespoke tech stack for collaboration is an art in itself - and one reason why we need advocacy for remote effectiveness at the very heart of businesses of every size. But whatever you need to do, the tech is essentially ready.
We have solved co-ordination, communication, and collaboration challenges of remote, in ways we never dreamed possible in the early days of clunky video conference tools. Never mind before that.
There are edges, of course, and the final layer of ambient, spontaneous presence is still a work in progress. We are not quite at the point where personal connection and non-verbal communication is guaranteed - but that’s coming, fast.
I was privileged to participate in a panel led by Tyler Selhorn with Cristian-Emanual Anton from Meet In VR, demonstrating that the spatial internet is creating new dimensions of potential over distance, in truly bespoke digital environment. The spatial internet and all it represents upends traditional spectrums of remote vs in person, and even synchronous vs asynchronous working, so watch this space. I am so excited about the work going on in this area.
Of course, there was one potential tech elephant in the conference room, and the scale of planning for Running Remote meant that the keynote schedule was clearly locked down well ahead of the explosive interest in large language models for artificial intelligence, such as chatGPT, which all of us have been profoundly preoccupied with in recent months.
What will this do for remote work, and how will we integrate these new tools into our digital environments and workplaces?
If the speakers from Running Remote are anything to go by, we will do so with grace, pragmatism, and positivity - putting the AIs to work to overcome the practical challenges that all teams face, while enabling human creativity and intuition to continue to shine.
I loved in particular the example shared by Ryan Chartrand from X-Team in the opening keynote, that AI tools can listen at scale in collaborative tools, in ways that humans simply cannot distribute their attention. We all love to work out loud, but we have to filter the noise, and inevitably insight gets shared in private channels that could be useful outside of that silo.
The example Ryan gave was of a product person sharing feedback from an external event they attended, with their department. A correctly configured bot could instantly identify that this feedback was also likely to be of value to the events and marketing team, and connect the attendee with the right person in a different department, to share what was so brilliant about the thing they went to. Simple but effective.
So, AI has real potential to bridge gaps of distance, culture, expertise, language, and ability, in ways which will only enhance our collaboration potential.
The second theme which resonated for me was
Compliance
We have the technology, to work effectively with anyone, anywhere. To collaborate with the very best person to do the specific piece of work, regardless of their location. But how we contract with them and pay them, that’s a very different story.
This is far from solved, at the time of writing/recording.
There is clearly great effort and resource being applied to these problems, and there was a strong presence among the EOR community supporting the conference. Deel, Lano, Workmotion, Blueback Global, Foxhire, Global Made Possible - all were sponsoring and supporting, and all offer slightly different solutions to this vexing conundrum of hiring and contracting across borders.
Other pieces of the puzzle include Estonian e-Residency, with which this podcast remains strongly associated, and of course the plethora of emergent digital nomad visas.
I am reassured that many great minds are committed to figuring this out for us and finding the right answers which work - lawyers like Tara Vasdani, and compliance tech solutions like Work From Anywhere - check out episode 8 of season 2 with John Lee, for more on what they are building.
The statutory bodies involved, i.e. the various governments and tax authorities, will be the slowest to shift. They always are - tech leads, society follows, and institutions lag way behind. The taxman will always want paying, and most of us want to pay our fair share - we just want to do so in a meaningful way and in a logical place, without incredibly convoluted processes and red tape.
Enterprise will demand clarity, and large employers won’t want to be forced to compromise on working with the best people, simply because they have the wrong passport or tax residency.
So, compliance remains a work in progress, and I have confidence that the future of work community will find a way through in time.
The final theme which stood out for me, was that of
Distributed rather than Remote
This is such an interesting one because as a writer I am always a bit obsessed around language and terminology and semantic signifiers.
Remote is one of those words which implies a vector, a direction - remote FROM where?
It makes total sense in the context of a centralised organisation where some people, even most of the people, work in a home or mobile way. Because it implies a definite central point, from which all other things radiate out and measure themselves against.
The idea of being remote from a centre probably had technological roots too, and the early idea of teleworking was all about dialling in to that middle point, where an on-premise server sat hissing away.
But again, this does not reflect our present day distributed reality.
It’s a bit like when people talk about going 'abroad', or working overseas - we’re all overseas from somewhere! And these terms imply there’s an acknowledged starting point from which we diverge. It was great to see destinations of choice being represented at Running remote, such as Visit Buenos Aires, Costa Del Sol, and of course visit Portugal. But these could all be places to put your HQ as well as your workforce in 2023.
Distributed teams and distributed working reflects the mindset of decentralisation, of power to the edges, to the community... It feels like a fit with how many of the organisations which were first to embrace location-independent working are organised, in agile and non-hierarchical ways.
Furthermore, the term distributed working embraces the concept of HYBRID, and this addresses a source of tension throughout the remote work community.
The fact is, many progressive employers who support and champion remote work, are simply not 100% remote. Maybe they never will be, by preference or design. It doesn’t mean they can’t do the remote aspects of their work well, and for our movement to grow, we need to be inclusive.
A presentation from Jen Rhymer sharing research results from the Asana Work Innovation lab confirmed that there is still no clear consensus on what hybrid really means anyway, and the term reflects a huge spectrum of flexibility along dimensions of location, time, and team-based decision-making.
It’s truly a ‘choose your own adventure’ term, as Jen put it. And it’s also a moving target. Many employers, who are for historical reasons tied in to large office leases anyway, are still figuring out what works best for them and their teams. It’s essential that the remote work conversation does not exclude them.
This idea of inclusivity also extends for me into the contractual aspect of things, and I have been researching and writing about this recently for the Estonian e-Residency department, on the theme of blended teams.
Instead of a dichotomy of freelancers and consultants on the outside, and full-time employees on the inside, we can now consider a broader spectrum of contractual collaboration. From participatory governance via structures like DAOs - now possible in Europe via Estonian digital infrastructure - to long-term senior fractional strategic roles. And we have emergent models offering even more potential, such as the distributed ownership model proposed by Casey Fenton through Upstock.
Freelancers have so much more to offer distributed teams, than one-off gigs and engagements!
With so many highly talented people in tech in particular the victim of recent layoffs, there is so much experience and resource out there to tap - but some of those people will be rightfully wary of committing their income and perhaps visa and residence to another 100% employed position, and might want to explore more flexible options including their own hustles, especially if they’re sitting on a decent payoff.
Any employer facing a hiring freeze could look to contracting those valuable resources more flexibly, instead of losing key functions altogether or relegating them to less senior hands. Not every business role has to chunk out in 40 hours a week full-time contracts, and so I will leave that plea just here, to consider the potential for more lasting and strategic positions to be created on a fractional basis.
Maybe you’re a smaller organisation who doesn’t presently require a full-time head of remote work for example, but needs someone who is more than a consultant on a long term part-time. I’ll just leave that there as well.
So going back to remote vs. distributed, I don’t think that Running Remote will be abandoning their known and invested branding any time soon. But I hope that the many potential directions of inclusivity the term remote can embrace, will form part of this maturing movement going forward.
All in all, Running Remote 2023 left us all with so much to think about and consider, as we return to the places we are able to choose to live and work, and reflect upon how lucky we are to be in this space where so much is happening. The privilege we have, to be knowledge-workers in 2023, who can make choices about where to live and what work to do, and increasingly about exactly how we do it.
I am so grateful to everyone who spoke on the two stages, who networked and explored in the expo, who chatted and connected in the social spaces, in the beautiful setting of Sud Lisboa. It is a privilege to be part of this community, and the most exciting movements in business and society in living memory.
The future is freelance, the future is flexible, the future is distributed. And it’s whatever we make it!
