At the height of the pandemic there was much speculation about how our lives might change when it was over. There were many heartfelt assertions that this was an opportunity to mend out ways, to change the way we live for the better. The arrival of the pandemic coincided with a string of extreme weather events which served to emphasise the fact that something was badly wrong and urgent action was required. Familiarity and complacency, however, are powerful forces, and as the sense that the worst is over begins to take hold, so we begin to slip back into our old ways, but not all of them.
Remote working, which became a life fixture for so many of us, is one of the covid-wrought changes that we are still coming to terms with. This change in our way of working brought with it some clear advantages. Suddenly our clogged roads were emptied, our skies cleared: mornings were no longer a frantic dash to the daily commute. We got to spend more time with our families. Some of us moved out of the city to the space and clean air of the countryside. And, to the surprise and delight of employers, remote workers proved themselves to be more productive, more focussed, not less.
A recent News Update article looked at how the Silicon Valley giants are waiting until next year before starting to bring back tech workers into the office and how the belief that communal workspace engenders innovation, is starting to be questioned. Might this be the start of us all becoming digital nomads? It was a term first coined back in 1997 and it has since become synonymous with man buns and beards, beachside laptops and floppy hats. What we’re now starting to see is this aspirational lifestyle luring the ranks of the once office bound employee. Belgium, for example, has seen a 25% rise in the number of employees working for Belgian companies, but living abroad.
Having spent so much time confined to our homes, many of us are asking ourselves, ‘Why aren’t I living and working somewhere nicer’. Key ‘somewhere nicer’ factors are, sunny, safe and cheap, and when it comes to European destinations, Portugal is the country which ticks all those boxes. Despite the pandemic, Portugal has seen its resident number of foreigners increase by nearly 14% since 2018. Madeira has set up ‘digital nomad villages,’ and the Lisbon Digital Nomads Facebook group has nearly 19,000 members. Google has a base in Lisbon and its presence has served as an additional attraction to a location which offers 300 days of sunshine a year, one of the lowest costs of living in Europe and an average download speed of 25 Mbps. Lisbon’s attractive property sector has exerted such a pull that two thirds of Portugal’s foreign population have chosen to settle there.
Covid has given remote working, a road test that might otherwise never have happened, it seems likely that now it has been proven to work and work well, companies may start to think about repurposing that expensive city office space and setting their employees free.