With the era of remote work, the so-called digital nomads have much more freedom than ever living in remote paradises on their European salaries and for companies based in cities like London or Barcelona.
Vice has spoken about this phenomenon, interviewing people who hide from their companies that they live away from home while their company pressures them to return to the office. By Genebeta We also know of similar cases and have interviewed experts from Spain that they did such a thing and to know their reasons and their strategies to avoid getting caught and caught.
The pandemic has brought us teleworking. And many managers, with Elon Musk at the helm, want to take it from us. Many workers cite compelling reasons for following this trend: fuel economy and other issues (although there are studies that believe more is being spent on other factors), energy use, work-life balance, time savings on transfers… but there are still others who postpone this moment because They live in paradises far from their cities and don’t want to tell their companies.
We’ll see how digital nomads do their chores in front of an Asian beach (to say the least) while their boss thinks they’re at home in a European town or town on their PC. Y the tricks of the pros to avoid telling your life.
Tips to avoid being discovered
Ángela works for a company in the Basque Country. This summer he spent two months between the Maldives and Indonesia. She is not being pressured to return to the office as the agreement between the company and the worker was that if nothing changes, she would telecommute. There are companies that know that if they want talent, they must yield and offer conditions that interest the professional. Angela didn’t want to say that she would go to the other end of the world because she didn’t even know if she would be allowed to do it and because after all it’s her private life.
“I never ran away, I did my duty the same as in Spain,” he explains. Only his schedule has changed: from 3pm (here he starts at 9am and he says it would be much more complicated if he went to America as he would have to work at dawn) and he was scared that his company PCs might suffer an incident… how would you go about the company getting a new computer according to protocol?
How did you manage to disguise yourself in meetings so no one sees you’re sweating when you actually live in northern Spain, where it’s not as hot as the Maldives? asked. She says she never video calls. All meetings are without video. Of course, when he was working from a beach and had a call, he went to a closed place to avoid noise: it could be the room of his accommodation or, if it was far away, the car he moved with from one place to another.
Best of all, says Angela, when she was diving in the Maldives in her free time, her boss told her so He was on vacation with this mission in the Maldives. Come on, they could have been found perfectly. Angela says Bali is a teleworking paradise. “It is full”. Canteens and hotels are offices and afterworks can be held with people of different nationalities and different professions.
Vice speaks a guy named Daniel who lives in Chiangmai, Thailand, and his bosses think he’s in Birmingham, UK, and he has problems at meetings: it’s often night in one country while it’s day in the other, and in many cases it’s cold in Birmingham while in Thailand he’s sweating with a fan at his side cooling the temperature. Or when One of those noisy tropical night storms hits the Asian country that’s also hard to hide. He often checks whether it’s raining in Birmingham or not.
reasons not to say it
In addition to data protection: why For a company, it shouldn’t matter if I’m in Badajoz or in Hanoi as long as I’m doing my job?
Silvia says she also hid her location from her company because she wanted to volunteer for a project she loved. “I was self-employed, particularly bogus self-employed, I made an agreement with my company that I would spend time in another country to cover the information there. As is the case with many journalists, They send us to other countries without any kind of protection or co-payment for this work. I accepted because I was very interested, but I was aware that my labor rights were being violated, so I took advantage of it,” explains Silvia.
Silvia’s boss wanted to send her to Buenos Aires earlier than agreed. She had just returned from Bogotá and didn’t want to leave so quickly. When they previously agreed to this collaboration, there was never any talk of the company being able to enforce the dates. On the contrary, Silvia was interested in a project in Bulgaria to volunteer in her free time. She claimed to have family problems to prolong her move to Argentina, but in reality she went to Bulgaria. He got up early (a lot, says Silvia) to do his job duties and have a lot of work done when his boss came at 9am. Then she volunteered for the project and did her homework in the afternoon. It wasn’t that difficult because they weren’t on a platform that chatted in real time and video calls were rare.
Once, already in Buenos Aires, he decided to go to the north of the country for a few weeks. He didn’t notify her bosses in Spain because after all she was autonomous, although in practice they imposed schedules (not a salary or benefits corresponding). It was carnival time, festive, and not much movement or important events were planned in Buenos Aires.
He spent a few weeks with friends up north, very close to Bolivia, while performing his daily work duties. There her boss calls her: They have to send her to an event in the USA in a few days. The nearest international airport was thousands of miles away. She had to travel nearly three days by bus to get back to the big city in time because flights were too expensive (and inaccessible) to catch up.
Another case is Matt’s, this one was picked up by Vice as Daniels. Wanting to stop paying the high real estate prices in Manhattan where he lived, he made the decision to move to Europe. His company agreed. Over time, wanted to apply for a visa to stay on the old continent because someone from America can’t legally stay here indefinitely if they don’t sort it out.
His company arbitrarily refused. Since there were no compelling reasons for this refusal, Matt lied. Cbought a flight, showed it to his boss, then canceled it and he remained alive in Europe, mostly hiding the light or darkness that surrounded him in assemblies (lest the time difference be noticed). To hide his location he used a VPN and it worked for him. A Genbeta colleague says that a friend recently asked him how to use a VPN to lie about her location and “it seems to have worked”.
Juan works in a public institution. And like the rest of the industry, he has days a week when he’s entitled to telecommute. However, he says they told him that a few days agoIf they choose to telework from home, they must inform the agency the one you work for “He’s not in the agreement and I think he’s acting abusively,” says Juan, who is a lawyer.
Alfonso also cheats on his location. However, not to go to a remote paradise, but because the company forces him to live in the region where his headquarters are located, although he works remotely and prefers to stay in his hometown, which is about 300 kilometers away. “I don’t know if I can work by phone at my mother’s house, it’s not that remote, but I spend many seasons here and don’t tell my company about it,” says Alfonso.
That Managers or managers also sin in it. Explains Sergio, head of a technology department in his company, who often goes for a walk on the beach at work. You only need a cell phone because “It’s what you have to do in all meetings or state how to do something‘ explains Sergio. Most of these phone calls are with clients, and he doesn’t lack the camera. If he needs a video call, he is already looking for a more suitable place.
There are companies that say this is a problem
A survey conducted for HR firm Topia found that up to 40% of HR professionals had recently discovered that employees have worked outside of their home state or country, and that only 46% of male and female bosses were “very sure” they knew where the majority of their employees were. Last year it was 60%.
In the same survey, 66 percent of the 1,500 full-time workers surveyed in the United States said they did not share with Human Resources all data they worked on outside of their state or country, and 94% said they believe they should be able to work wherever they want when it comes to their job is carried out.
From Topia, they say they are aware of the cases of some companies that have already fired employees who have refused return home after the company found out they were working from foreign countries.
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