EP012 - Remote work: the past, the present, the future with Mitko Karshovski of That Remote Life
About the episode
This episode’s main topic is the evolution of remote work. How did we evolve from digital nomads to titles like the head of remote? How did we evolve from solopreneur freelancers to full-time remote workers? What is the future of remote work? How will we solve asynchronous interplanetary collaboration in the next century? I invited Mitko Karshovski for a chat from the That Remote Life podcast.
About the guest
Mitko Karshovski is the host of That Remote Life, a top 2% podcast in the world and one of the most popular podcasts discussing remote work, digital nomadism, and the future of work through an entrepreneurial lens. Connect with Mitko on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
A head of remote is, in its purest sense, a position within a company solely considering how we best run our company and operate and provide, you know, the best service for our customers while working remotely.
If we are remote at scale, what do we need to change in our operations to really get peak efficiency?
If we continue to exist as a civilization, it will become multi-planetary. It will be sad if you move to Mars only to still drive to a Martian office.
-
Welcome everyone, yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we dive deep into asynchronous work and the responsibilities of Head of Remote At Remote First Company. I got Mitko Karshovski fractional head of Remote, and the host of the That Remote Live podcast to chat. Hey, Mitko, how is going?
Hey Peter. I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me on here.
So tell me what are you doing what was your remote journey and how did you end up fractional head of remote.
Well, that's a very long story. So I ended up going remote back in like 2015. I heard the term digital nomad for the first time. And at the time I was working with startups in the United States. I dropped outta college and I was working in like startups and, you know, building business, that kind of stuff and the lifestyle that I really wanted, I couldn't quite describe. And then, I was kinda like, you know, like I really wanna have my own business, but I also wanna have the freedom to travel. Like, I don't want to have like a building in a city that sounds silly to me. And then just like googling or listening to podcasts, I heard this term digital nomad and I was like, what is this? So I typed it into Google and all of a sudden it was like Pandora's Box. Like it really showed me that there were a lot of these people who were doing this. And you know, the four hour work week popped up. And so I read that and I was like, oh, okay there's a title for this. There's people who are doing this sort of thing, and so that's how I got started in, in the remote work space because at the time there was this like idea of like a remote first company or a legitimate quote unquote large company that functions completely online. Like there were some, but they were kind of like hush hush. They, you know, there were like a few people out there that were really visionaries in that space, but most people that were working remotely were actually founders of small companies or some sort of solopreneurs or content creators or where I found my start was actually in e-commerce. So with my entrepreneurial background, I ended. , you know, working with in e-commerce, I had a few, like e-commerce brands myself and then worked for a larger Amazon brand. And so that's kind of like how I experienced remote work for the first time. And that's what really got me passionate about it was like, once I got a taste of it and like really started thinking about, wow, what, what is this thing? And like, why is no one else doing it? And really made me think why this could be the future of work in general. And then that's kind of like where my work started in terms of you know, the website where I've written a lot of content about remote work, even starting as far back as 2017 when it wasn't that popular. And then obviously the podcast, which I started in 2019 under the same name that Remote Life. So that's kind of like how that all started.
Wow. You, you actually started the podcast really early on. I didn't know. How many hobbies episodes do you have now? I think we are closing in on like 200.
Jesus. That's nice. That's nice. Congratulations on that.
Thank you. Thank you.
That's really nice. And it's so interesting to see and hear each other's journey because everyone, I guess when you said that, when you googled the whole term, it was like you went down to the rabbit hole. All deep, all deep, and and you did a whole, you know, four hour work week. I guess you, you started some affiliate business or something around that first and then the e-commerce. And now you are functioning as a head of fractional, head of remote for companies. It's so great to see like the whole learning curve and the journey be behind. And I guess this journey is shared by a lot of other nomads or a lot of other remote workers. And I guess we read all the same resources from Buffer, we no seriously, like, yeah. We, everyone read the remote book from the base camp. And everyone got hooked on on anything that Tim Ferris did during those times.
Yeah, I remember like reading this is like, you know, a little bit further down the road, but I was for several years I was the head of operations for a digital agency and my job was like, Hey, we have a very quickly growing team of people. Like we are basically running this company through like spreadsheets, duct tape together with like slack. How do we make this work? And so my job was like, let's figure out how to make this company that's growing very quickly. How do we make sure that it like works efficiently as it grows? And so I remember like stumbling onto GitLab's Handbook. And I was like, what is this magical place with all these answers? So I remember I went really deep down, I mean, I probably read that entire handbook even before, you know, now Darren is you know, I'd like to call Darren a friend now, who's the, the head of remote app at GitLab and kind of like the originator of that title. But I remember I was like, I talked with like Darren after and I was like, you know, I think I was like the head of remote of my company. He was like, yeah, it sounds like you were, but that wasn't even like a term then. So it's funny.
It's not even a term now. That's what we, we, we discussed before the recording that, that the head of remote as a, as a job title. It's so funny by the way, because when you open LinkedIn, Which kind of like something that follows through major trends, shall we say. And if you open job search, I just checked it yesterday. And you type in the wish title that you want to pursue through the job search in LinkedIn, there is no title like head of remote yet. Yeah. So it's not, not created yet like officially there. So it's super new. I guess obviously within closed circle of remote experts and whatever. We do know what it means, and we do know what it, what it takes but to a larger audience it's a title that's that's probably a little bit unknown or, or sounds a little bit too suspicious or magical even but they don't know what it does. So we will talk about that in a minute. But I want address a question around marketing because, mm-hmm. it's so interesting to see that most of the digital nomads originally from 2000 like middle 2000 tens I guess that's when everything gets like, kinda like started They were usually either developers because they worked through computers anyway, coding remotely. Mm-hmm. and marketers. So the first nomads who actually started anything as a business, shall we say were either, Marketers on their own or worked for agencies and doing some creative work. And it's so interesting to see that open companies that have like a open work culture anyway, they're more receptive to these changes. And it was the case for you, right?
Yeah. Well, so I think that you are touching on a very interesting thing that we're going through at the moment where we're sort of living through this sort of like Nomad 3.0 movement. Mm-hmm. where there's been different iterations of this idea of a digital nomad, right? Like, there's people who've been doing what we do or what I do, at least for quite a while, even before the two thousands. I mean, Tim Ferris and when he four hour work week in oh seven, he talks about the digital nomads that he met. Right? So it's not like they started after that book, even though that book did a lot to popularize the movement. In the beginning digital nomads a lot of times were kind of I, I like to call them like doing sketchy things in back alleys. Right? like there was a lot of this stuff of like, how exactly are you making money? What's going on here? There was a lot of this like, well, you know, I have this like knee, you know, it was kind of like not very clear how stuff was going on. There was a lot of people who were writing, and I had Tim Leffel on the podcast who is one of the I think one of the longest running travel bloggers, one of the most successful and well known travel bloggers who's been writing about this stuff since like the nineties. And he said when he first became a digital nomad, he was a travel writer who's being commissioned by like paper magazines. And he had to, you know, he had this story of like, I like much remember being in Bangkok and having to like fold the article that I had written and then like put in the envelope pictures and like mail it to this editor in New York City to have my article published and like, maybe it's gonna get there, maybe it's not. I don't really know when it's gonna get there. Right. So that was kind of like the first stage of digital nomadism. And there's even like some ways that you can say there's people before that were living in this sort of lifestyle. But I think it's started to differ quite a bit at that point. But then afterwards, yes, you're right. You start getting these people who are in the mid two thousands, you know, 2007, 8, 9, 10, after the four hour workweek comes out. Where a lot of developers, like you said, who their career was already emerging out of you know, a digital work. So developers have for a long time, Been working remotely because they kind of have odd work hours and it just makes a lot more sense for them. And on top of that, they have a very highly desired skill so they can leverage their needs more. Right? If you have a really high quality developer, they can kind of call the shots on what they wanna do because they know they're a very high quality developer, right?
True, true.
But you also have, yes, you have marketers, but also I think the bigger, at least from my point of view, the bigger group that made up that Nomad 2.0 movement were actually founders. They were people who wanted to have this lifestyle and knew that they couldn't get it from a company because the company would kind of hear what they wanted to do and would just be like, yeah, no you're not. What do you mean you're gonna go to Thailand and you're gonna work for us? We're not doing this. That's weird. You're gonna come into the office and that's the only way you're gonna do it. Right? And so they would say things like, fine, then I'm just gonna go start my own thing using my skills. So there were a lot of founders who had a marketing background who knew they could sell on the internet. They just. Find something to sell, whether that was a digital product of some sort, like an info product or in the case of a lot of people in the like 2010, 12, 14 range, that was like really the boom of e-commerce. So you had a whole bunch of these e-commerce nomads. My friend Dan Andrews actually from the Tropical MBA podcast, which is like one of the OG OG podcasts. He, he always says like, you know, if I was coming up now, like a lot kids. I would've never started a business because I would just go get one of these killer remote jobs paying me a hundred K a year, and I would've never gone through the pain of starting a business which is what they had to do at the time. Now we're entering this Nomad 3.0 movement, where because of C O V I D, Companies are far more friendly to this idea of remote work. Despite what you hear in a lot of these like articles nowadays about, you know, companies asking and like forcing people to go back in the office. The cat's out of the bag. There's companies that are no, there's no going back and are more than happy about it. And so now officially we actually have more digital nomads full-time employees than actually freelancers and founders, which was you know, the statistics from before 2020 are a bit murky because there's just not a lot of strong data. Like not a lot of people were doing research on this the way they are now, but that's kind of like the prevalent thesis on who digital nomads were pre 20.
That's one of the best historical summary that I ever heard about this movement. Thank you. Course.
So glad.
No, seriously. And just, just to reflect back when I started in 2014 I actually quit really well paying agency job just because people around me working from their laptops from weird places contributing to a workflow that they do for the agency where I work, wherever. And and pursuing like a more free lifestyle. Not to mention that at that time I was in London and, and you know, rents are kind of high in London. But when I did it and I said that I will have like a job job for another company, everyone looked at me at that time that come on making money out of the internet. Are you like, and people will like transfer money even though they never met you? Is that is it a scam? Sorry, , right? Is it, are you lying? It shouldn't be true. So, but now obviously as you said, I think now more people are actually working, working remotely, so not co-founding, not founding, entrepreneurship, not freelance, but actual like full-time jobs. And it comes down to, that's why we talk, I think, a little bit more nowadays less about remote work and more about the future of work. Mm-hmm. Because that will change everything and I want to tie a little bit into asynchronous workflows and the head of remote. So let's start with head of remote. You are a fractional head of remote, which is even more kinda like weirder than the head of remote itself, right? So how do you provide fractional services for a role or title that doesn't exist on LinkedIn? So tell me what does head of Remote do in your opinion?
It's an interesting question because like you said, that it's a very new job position. Mm-hmm. And the honest answer is, I don't know. Because if you talk to different heads of remote, it's still such a new space. Mm-hmm. where a lot of companies are realizing that they need someone to think about this and to come up with answers for this. But different companies may have different spaces in terms of like, what is this person gonna look at? Right? So, is head of remote going to be more of an operational role where they're trying to figure out, you know, how do we project manage this? Are we creating, you know, internal documentation in Wikis on how we do things within the company? Or is it gonna be a role that plays more in the HR and like, People space. Right? So that's why I say you don't know because it can flex depending on the company's needs. A head of remote is in its purest sense, a position within a company that is solely considering how do we best run our company and operate and provide, you know, the best service for our customers while working remotely. Right. Because you sort of have to rethink things once you start from this idea of we're not all next to each other together. We are actually separate from one another. Mm-hmm. . Even if that's, I think it's important to consider, even if that means that you're working in different offices spread out around the country, you maybe even different floors, you're still working remotely. You may be, you know, not in the sense that we like to think about remote work in pop culture. But you are working remotely. And that simple shift, actually, if you want to scale in that way, there are things you need to rethink from the basis of the way that you operate the company. One of the most important things, and kind of like the one that I have the most experience with the one that I think is the most important place to start. And this is from my experience as the head of operations at the agency back in the day was actually an internal documentation or wiki or a handbook similar to what a company like GitLab has. And the reason why that it's really important and why I think it's one of the very important spaces to focus on and in which a lot of heads of remote focus in is because, You and I are not next to each other in an office, and I have a question and I need to approach you and ask that question. I can technically do that in an office. However, I can't do it in a remote setting. And because of that, it's a really good idea to have an internal repository of knowledge, sort of like you can imagine, like the company's second brain, right? That contains all this information. And what I always say is like my motto is 'search first ask second' , right? So this way if I have a question for you, if we're working together and I have a question for you, the very first thing that I want to do is enter this second brain of our company and search for the question that I have, and find out if there's an answer already recorded so that I don't have to reach out to you. Because if we are remote, you may be in another time zone, or you may be on a call or you may be doing something else that may not be able to respond to me right away. And so this is what I'm saying is even we work in offices, but separate it's actually a far more efficient way to work because then I'm not taking away from your time. There's a separate repository of knowledge there. And so that's one of the really important areas of ahead, of remote. But like I said, there's also, there's these varying levels of like communication and HR and people and culture that all can kind of like overlap with this head of remote space. So it really depends on the company and the company's needs.
Sure, sure, sure. You said so many interesting insights and I want to reflect to a series of them. First of all I think I do agree with you by the way that head of remote is kinda like a mix between, well, I should wouldn't call chief of staff, but like, or head of HR or something, but like a HR related role on how to manage people and provide a remote culture as well for them while everyone is working remotely. But it's a little bit more than the HR because it is also rooted deeply in the operations. So some people usually phrase it by, it's a happy marriage between a COO and the head of hr, and it depends on the company where is the balance between the two? Where do they trying to focus More on operations maybe, or an hr?
The reason why I say I don't know is because it's such a new role. Yeah. And I think it's really, I think it's really like we can all say that we know what ahead of remote is, but in reality it's been a, a role that's mainstream, even though it's not mainstream yet, but it's been entering the mainstream for two, three years, right? Mm-hmm. And so I think there's still so much that even us in our small bubble of remote work, right, are still trying to figure out what is actually gonna happen with this. So I do think that the honest answer is that we don't know, and we're figuring it out at the moment. And that's why it's so exciting, right? Because like we're literally in the midst of like, There is no person who has 10 years of like, head of remote experience. Do you know what I mean? And so, yes, it's very exciting in that sense.
Yes. But also on, on, on the other hand it head of remote also have like legacy history in previously existing roles. So it helps. Mm-hmm. definition, I think. And also when you mentioned internal wiki One of the things that I personally teach to, to everyone is that when you think about like remote first operations or remote leadership or whatever around remote is that it's not new. So most of the stuff that we are talking about had of remote internal wiki, everything was already there 30 years ago as well. It was just called internal hub for the company or intranet, if someone can remember. Mm-hmm that, that term at all. And the chief of staff or, or a head of HR already there. It was a well-defined term even way before that most of the stuff that we are talking right now, I think they're not completely out of the box, not completely new, which is really amazing because it makes it approachable for others, or it is easier to adapt to your needs. The only difference is that we, we need to think a little bit more about how to do that by not having any kind of office or having the office is optional. And I love that you said also the other thing that even, even though that most people don't consider that they worked remotely before they did. Mm-hmm. . So, so when you are working for an enterprise company and you receive a report from a sister office via email, That's working remotely also
And working and working remotely in a very inefficient matter, right? Yes. You just, you just had never stopped to think about how if we were to expand this at scale, what would we have to change in our operations in order to make it efficient? And that's the big key that ahead of remote does is says, okay, if we are remote at scale, what do we need to change in our operations to really get peak efficiency?
I can promise to, to, to our audience that we didn't discuss this before the recording, but you actually said a very important keyword here. Efficiency. And I think this is super, super, super, super important is I think for every remote work consultant or every, everyone who is active in this space, I think the main job for us is to how to make everything work more efficient remotely. And handing over to you. You talk a lot about asynchronous workflows, so that's one of the ways that you can, you can do to increase efficiency, right?
Yeah. So asynchronous is this idea of being able to provide people the ability to work on their own time, right? Instead of it being sync where we're working all at the same time. We're working asynchronously within our own you know, timeframe of like what works best. And this is actually something that again, developers have been doing for a very long time because I don't know how much you've worked with developers or people listening have, but developers are weird in the best way possible that they might work best, pulling like a 12 hour all nighter and cranking out awesome code and they might not work for a day. Right? And then they may again log in and do something quick. And because of that, they've always kind of had this background ability of like, How do we do this independently of one another and then sync up occasionally to make sure everything clicks together. And so that's that idea. Being taken out of the development space and then applied to the rest of the company operations. That's what asynchronous means is that if you are in Hungary and I'm in Mexico, we're still able to be efficient even though we're separated both by space and time. Right. And we may be able to sync up only one or two hours in in the day. So that's the idea of asynchronous and why it's so important for a company is asynchronous really unlocks the potential of remote work. For me, remote work, the real beauty of it is that it decentralizes opportunity, it allows you, if you're a company, to hire the best talent possible for that role no matter where they are located in the world. Because it's kind of a silly idea that the best person for the job lives within a 30 minute you know, driving range of your office. So this way you could, maybe the best person for this job actually lives in South Africa. And if your company is set up in a way in which it's async friendly, that means that you can hire that person who will be the best person for that role. And a lot of times that can also, you know, bring a lot of like financial benefits to a company if you're hiring somebody from another country. Now I'm not somebody suggests or supports this idea that you should hire people because, you know, they charge less because they're born in like another country. To me, that's silly. Like value is value and you should pay based on like the value that the person brings no matter what passport they hold. But you know, it's the reality of the world that we live in. So that's what's so important about that. But it can also. In a smaller, kind of like, if we bring, if we like reduce the size of the scope here, it means that you can reduce your company overhead by saying, okay, well you know, we're a company that, you know, needs to have offices. Well, if we can work async and actually you know, Janet from accounting wants to live in Alabama instead of New York City, that's still asynchronous. You know, there's still like a separation of time. They can go do that and now you don't have to pay for that office and maybe Janet has a lower cost of living, you know, so it makes life on her better as well. So it's kinda like a win-win for the employer and the employee. And we can talk about, actually, I think there's some really exciting case studies of companies that kind of, even in quote unquote, like blue collar or trade spaces have actually recognized this and are using it to dominate that space now. Mm-hmm. . But that's what's really exciting about Async
Quickly reflect to the, to the prices and the cost, by the way. Because again, I've been in this remote workspace really long time now and it was the case as you said, that most companies hired people from countries where they charge less, of course. Right. But in, especially in recent years I want to be sharing some I want, I want to share some optimism here. I think the prices are not the same now, but they're getting closer and closer.
They're equalizing.
Equalizing, yes. Still not, we are not there yet. But, but but the situation is so much better now, and I do believe that will create a situation when everyone is able to charge what the value they generate.
Well, on that, on that note, I think. Let's look to the future because one of the things that I'm very excited about is like I'm a huge sci-fi nerd, and so when people started asking me, you know, kind of going back like in 2017, like I said, I was writing articles about why cities should have a remote work program and why they should sort of invest in these spaces and how remote workers can actually help smaller Midwest, US cities, for example. And at the time people were. This is weird, like dismissive. But then post 2020 and now there's like amazing programs like Tulsa Remote, and people would ask me like, well, yes, well why were you, you know, what, what made you think about this? Like, why were you already like writing about this? And the thing that I'd often say is, as a sci-fi nerd, I completely believe, and you know Like, I think that it'd be a sad world if this doesn't happen, that we as a civilization, if we continue to exist, will become multi-planetary. Whether that means, you know a base on the moon or a city on Mars, like that would be incredible. And to me, I would just look at that future and I said, if I believe that the future will happen, which I think based on our nature, if we as a civilization continue to exist, will happen. It would be a really sad reality if you move to Mars only to still drive to an A Martian office like that to me, just sounds so silly as like a concept. And on top of that, if we're going to have a highly functioning multi-planetary economy, we would have to have figured out asynchronous work and remote work because if we're gonna have an economy that spans space and the time difficulties that come with that, we must have figured that out, right? That must have been something that we figured out before we achieve that. So I said, okay, great. I believe that's gonna be eventually true. Now, I don't know if it's gonna take 20, 50, a hundred years, but eventually, I'm gonna be right, right. My ego will be, you know, told that I was right. And so that's why I started writing about that. And so if we go back to the point that you were saying in terms of price, equality of talent, the reality is that talent will soon be dealt with in this way on the blockchain. And there's already projects that are doing this. And the beauty of that is that on the blockchain you have your proof of work, even if you're anonymous. So the reality is, is that, and this is kind of like also we can talk about why fractionalization becomes an important role of that, but the reality is that like 10 or 20 years, we will most likely be hiring talent that is anonymous. On top of the blockchain that we can be very confident in their ability because we can see everything else that they've done. And because they're an anonymous, if they want to be person, we wouldn't know where they're from, whether they're from India, Bulgaria, Japan, or the United States. What's gonna matter is their work. So that is the future, and that is why we're going to continue seeing this price equalization of talent, because that is simply the direction in which we're heading.
This is so inspiring. God, I need to imagine the time zone nightmare of interplanetary work, by the way, but that's right.
How do we even deal with that? Yeah, we'll figure it out.
Implementing more asynchronous workflows helps to to address this issue. And one thing that I think some people truly miss is there is no asynchronous company in a sense that it is a hundred percent asynchronous, or at least yet, well, there might be some whatever but we still need synchronous connection for work. But there are some other processes that can be a synchronous. So let's talk a little bit about synchronous, mm-hmm. Work. What do you think?
I think synchronous work is very important. You know, you see some people in the like remote workspace talking about like, no meetings, never meetings. And I actually don't agree with that. I think meetings when they're needed are important and they're a very good way to have team morale and to get people to know each other. And I really, really suggest the companies do that. What I kind of like talk about is that if you speak with a lot of people who work remotely, they will tell you, you know, you hear this idea of zoom fatigue. Mm-hmm. , and they constantly feel like they're on calls. And the reality is, is that if you just stop and make it a little bit more difficult to have a call, like if you put a few breakers there, A majority of meetings can probably be cut out with like a simple asynchronous methodology and can be figured out without forcing everyone to adjust their schedules in order to sit down on a meeting. I really like Time Doctor which is a company that's been remote for a very long time. They have a rule. Mm-hmm. 10% sync, meaning that their goal mm-hmm is for every employee to only spend 10% of their work hours. So if you're working 40 hours a week, that'll be four hours on calls the rest of the time they want to do asynchronous. Now, that may not happen every week, but that is their goal, right? That is the, the happy space that they found, and I really like that as well. So I do think synchronous work is important both in terms of calls and like, you know, if you have like, Hey, we need to sit down and like creatively hash this out, we've, you know, we have an agenda for the call. We've already done everything we can asynchronously, but we need to sit down to figure out this exact space to have some back and forth. I think that's amazing. I think there's also like, Half sync measures, which are, you know, like there's a lot of these voice call, mm-hmm. apps that are coming out now, which are sort of like a halfway barrier.
I really love them by the way.
Yeah, me, me too. I use WhatsApp voice all the time and Instagram voice all the time. And especially, it's really nice now that some of them offer transcriptions so that you can kind of like scan the notes. I think that's really important. And On another level up I think even meeting in person is very, very important. You see companies that have been doing this for a very long time, like Doist, like GitLab. Mm-hmm. , like a lot of these other companies, that to them it's very critical and very important to have time together in one location. Now obviously during covid that became more difficult and some companies are more careful with that than others at the moment. But I am also a big proponent of that you should meet together from time to time in person. The big thing here is I think what's really important there is to strike a balance that leans more heavily on social interaction, team building, these sort of things and not so much, okay, let's sit on a table and work on our laptops together, cuz that is silly. That's not a proper use of that time.
That looks weird.
Yes. Yeah. Also, like if you ask someone, if you ask a bunch of people to fly from all over the world to meet in one place, to sit and work on a table from their laptops, which they could be doing on their own, that's silly. Use that time for the highest sort of benefit activity when you are together in real life.
That's so true. And what do you think what keeps companies and leaders away from implementing any kind of remote environment or operations?
So I think we need to be, as a community, we need to be more understanding of companies. If you actually pull large companies both the employees and the leadership staff, the people who are the most resistant currently are actually the leadership staff. And the reason for that, I believe, is because we look at startups and we see smaller companies being able to adjust very quickly to these realities to like remote work. However, a big ship difficult to turn, right? Mm-hmm. it takes time. And so these things will take time. And also, the thing that's really important here to remember is that a lot of these companies only taste, true taste of remote work was covid induced. So they were put, you know, put yourself in their shoes. Here it is, February, March, 2020. You've maybe never worked remotely. You have a large company now, you're being told you must work remotely without having done any sort of research. There's been no education, no training, nothing put in place for your company to do that well. That can be scary, that can be challenging. You don't know what you're doing. And so a lot of people, not only maybe in leadership, have like a sour taste in their mouth because mm-hmm. They felt like they were losing. And so because of that, I think it's really important for us to be understanding and to know this is gonna take time and education from our part of, okay, well you had this experience for X, Y, z reason, right? I think eventually we will come to a place where all companies will adopt some level of remote work. I don't think all companies have to be remote. But I think that's the big thing, is that like a big ship, a big company, even if there's people within that company, Supportive of remote work, it takes time for that to catch on and for that idea to spread. And also because of the reality that people were put, you know, there was remote work or no work. Right. And so it's just gonna take, I kind of always thought that there's gonna be a pushback after this initial remote work craze as some company leaders push back after a possibly negative experience, even if that negative experience is only in their perception and on paper, actually, a lot of companies had the best years on record. Yes. With remote work.
Yeah. Fully, fully, fully agree. How I usually frame it is that the leadership view this whole going remote style as a crisis and not as an opportunity.
I mentioned earlier, just because you said a crisis instead of an opportunity I mentioned earlier of about a case study that I read of a Chicago based construction company, which during covid was forced to go remote Uhhuh. And instead of, you know, seeing it as a crisis and being upset, they let's see what the opportunity here is. And so what they did was they actually pulled their entire back office completely remote. And because they had to then think through, okay, if everyone in our back office is remote, how do we function? They were able to completely standardize and document and create a second brain for the company that has now allowed them to actually expand into new parts of the country, far quicker than their competitors. So they've seen record growth because they're far more able to expand into new parts of the country far more easily than their competitors because all of their documentation, everything they need to do is actually available digitally and their support staff is remote and able to help people in Chicago just as much as Indianapolis or Seattle or, or wherever they may be located.
It's so great and it's a construction company and most of the back office is all about organizing stuff scheduling stuff planning stuff, and yeah. This is truly great. The audience might not notice, but it's early in the year but what do you see in short term what do you think will happen within the remote workspace future of work? How we work this year?
So it's difficult to talk about small lengths of time, right? Mm-hmm. like if you want me to predict what will happen in the next three months, I would tell you, I have no idea. I think generally speaking, we are kind of going to go through three stages in terms of the future of work which are where, when, how. Right where we work, when we work, how we work, and currently we're sort of in the middle of this where we work battle, right? That's where we're fighting right now. You're seeing all these articles coming out about, like this company is saying you can work remotely. While Twitter is saying you must come back to the staff. We're kind of in the midst of that where we work battle. The next battle is when we work, right? This is gonna be the big asynchronous conversation where we're gonna be talking about, you know, we, we are seeing some trickle of this with the, you know, four day workweek. Research that's being done in England in the moment in the uk. We're seeing companies that are more and more adopting asynchronous work, and we're gonna start to see that way more. And I suspect that over the next three years, three to five years, that's gonna become the battlefield. Of like when we work, right? Mm-hmm. in terms of asynchronous time, that kind of stuff. The next battle is actually the how we work, which is I think, gonna be the one that's really, really interesting and where the fractionalization of the workforce is gonna become far more prevalent. There's a 1937 Nobel Prize-winning paper called The Nature of the Firm, written by Ronald Coase. And in that paper Tries to answer the question, why does a firm, why does a company grow to the size that it does? And by size he does not mean like profit or anything like that, but like actually people in the company, like how many people work within the company? And what he found was that a company wants to stay as small as possible in terms of workforce because it allows it to be nimble and it allows it to be profitable and able to change and adapt to the market far more easily. However, that company grows in size when it, the transaction cost of working with outside talent becomes too great. Right? Mm-hmm. when it becomes too much of a pain in the butt to work with people outside the company, they will bring those people inside the company. Right. And you can think about this through 1937 Eyes. Can you imagine how hard it was to like work with freelancers back then? You know, there was no remote work. There were any. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to like, you know, fly people in. They probably had to come with their family. It was a big pain in the butt. That transaction cost that he identifies as the main variable is decreasing by scales of magnitude every year, and it's only going to decrease in scales of magnitude. So what I think with that third stage that you talk about, you know, what do we see in the future where it's, where, when, how is actually, I think we're going to start seeing companies stay smaller and work far more with contractors who function as solopreneurs in many way. Mm-hmm. there's already so many movements around solo entrepreneurship. We're seeing record level of freelancers. We're seeing record level of people who have side hustles who may have a full-time and they're then working, freelancing with the skills that they have, you know, really gained through that job. We are seeing movements like Overemployment where people have 3, 4, 5 jobs because they realize they're efficient and they can have five full-time jobs, even though that can be a bit sketchy on the legal side of the companies and, and they may not like it. There's a 120,000 person subreddit all dedicated to this Overp employment movement. And then on top of that, we also have you know, this idea of a portfolio career or a portfolio of small bets where people are essentially saying, Hey, I don't want one main job. I'd much rather work part-time for three, four companies because it provides me security. If I get, you know, laid off at one company, I still have three or four other ones. So I think how we work is really gonna be the very interesting battlefield here in the next 10, 15 years as like the workforce becomes more fractionalized.
Truly, truly agree. And this truly inspiring to hear this. Mitko thanks. Thanks for coming. This was a really great conversation. I truly enjoyed it. Where people can find?
Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me. This is super fun to talk and, and I enjoy being on the podcast. And yeah, if people enjoy this conversation and they want to hear more of me you can find everything on that remote life.com. And I have a podcast there, like we said by the same name, that Remote Life. You can find it anywhere you listen to podcast. 200 plus episodes probably by the time this comes out. And on the website also, you can sign up for my newsletter called Remote Insider, which comes out every Monday morning. And it's essentially like a very quick read on everything you need to know in terms of like, what's going on, what you need to be prepared for the week in this space.
Perfect. Thanks for sharing. I hope we can see each other synchronously, by the way somewhere between Eastern Europe and Italy. When you're here.
I'm sure we will. I'm sure we will.
And again, thanks for coming.
