Remote Work Europe: Why The Future Is MORE Than Freelance

You're listening to the Remote Work Europe podcast, the show formerly branded as the Future is freelance. The name has changed, but our values have not. We're still the podcast for solopreneurs, digital nomads and slowmads, consultants, remote workers, e-residents and everyone living a life without traditional boundaries. We're here for people who defy categorization, those who make a living and a life their own way. We're here for people who are open beyond. Fortnightly on Fridays, we're serving up expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing and the remote work revolution To help you achieve success with your borderless business and liberated lifestyle, whatever success means to you as you live life on your own terms. It's wonderful to be back in your podcast feed again for the first time in 2024. Thank you for bearing with me and the break I needed to take in order to refocus this show a little bit. What I want to share with you today is a bit about our rebranding and the new directions for what was the Future is freelance and is now the remote work Europe podcast. Why I believe truly that the Future is more than freelance. Don't worry, we're going to be bringing you more of the same show that you have come to love, but even more, even better. We're going to start by looking at how work has changed, and really that's the heart of how, why I wanted to rebrand and why my work has changed in focus a little bit since I started doing this show nearly two years ago now. So obviously we've come a long way from the traditional work model, the nine to five office jobs that dominated the workforce for decades, and not much is good about that time, I have to say. But one of the things that people enjoyed back then was the clear expectations and their stability, that work and a job involved and offered maybe a job or a career for life. Since that time we've obviously seen the rise of freelancing and many of us have come to enjoy working as independent operators and really found that that lifestyle suited us much better. Freelancing grew as an alternative to traditional employment, but remember, it's always been there. In fact, arguably freelancing definitely in almost medieval times, before that, predated any kind of fixed exchange of time for working for other people. There's always been people who wanted to work independently and who've enjoyed the freedom and flexibility it offered. It's obviously a lot more recent that the kind of knowledge, work, jobs that many of us do today have been available on that basis. But while we've had those traditional office jobs on the one hand and freelancing for independence on the other, what I'm observing now and what I want to really focus on in 2024 and beyond is the blurring of that line. The technology and the cultural changes that have blended traditional employment and freelancing in remote work particularly the long term contracts, the fractional roles, the flexibility for freelancers that have really transformed everything and started to bridge that gap. It didn't just come out of COVID, but obviously the pandemic and the lockdowns had an impact there. It made a lot of people question not only where they worked obviously we've seen the remote work revolution is still playing out but for all of other people it made them question how they worked and really changed their perception of work-life balance. We're at a state now where industries around the world are decrying a lack of talent and a hiring crisis in many cases and in fact, states around Europe and beyond are questioning the number of people who've left the workforce altogether and simply decided economically that it doesn't add up anymore to go back to that traditional workforce. So there are a lot of people who are exploring something more flexible, something more blended, something more self-directed in between. And, of course, all of that is underpinned by the technology that means that we can work from anywhere and it means that we can design and integrate our own work model, not just in terms of who we work for, but the work we do, where we do it. There are so many options now. That's what I want to explore with this show going forward. So we have people within the remote work Europe community who have made that switch, made that pivot, and I'm going to be unpacking some of their stories with you. People who've moved from traditional employment to freelancing. People who've taken a well-paid, traditionally employed career and managed to build in the flexibility and the location independence that they really crave. There are challenges along the way, but the ultimate success that unlock of being able to decouple work from a particular place or a particular set of synchronous hours is so powerful and life-changing that those who have achieved it would always say that it's worthwhile. My own journey I went from briefly working in somebody's office a long time ago to working in a location, independent way, but essentially as an employee, growing a team internationally and finally transitioning to freelancing to unlock that flexibility. That was what I really wanted. I seem to be growing a team again. So it just proves that this is a constantly fluid and dynamic thing and of course, we're going to be bringing in more examples and different case studies from our own community as we move forward with the future as freelance rebranding, as the remote work Europe podcast. So that's really the reason for the rebrand. I want to take the story beyond freelancing and reflect the changes in our evolving work culture to recognise that it's not a dichotomy anymore. There is so much choice. There are so many styles. It's truly a spectrum and that brings in a wider audience. Not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. Not everybody wants to be a freelancer. There are people who've built up a great deal of security and comfort from that employment contract. They've built up great benefits and again there might be other ways of achieving those benefits in the blended workspace in the future. We'll be exploring that too. From digital nomad visas to employers of record and everything beyond that can give people what they want. It's a case of becoming a bit more self-aware. In many cases, I think you know, going back a couple of generations people entered a career maybe straight from education and their pathway professionally was fairly clearly dictated for them. Of course, they make decisions about which jobs to apply for or which training courses, but if you had a career whether that was as an accountant or a surgeon or something, it was fairly the path was set out for you, whereas now, in knowledge work, there's a great deal more owners on people to define their own, to come up with ideas, to figure out their next moves, and some people find that scary and challenging. Others truly embrace how exciting it is and that's what I want to do with this show to become more inclusive and really embrace not just freelancers, but also remote employees, entrepreneurs, digital nomads, fractional executives, people with a part-time job at a side hustle. People with a full-time job that's taking up every waking hour, but they dream of doing something else. They dream of freeing up a little bit of time and flexibility. People who are trapped in the paradigm of exchanging time for money, often at a very high level, but want to start something else that's going to be a little bit more sustainable, a little bit more passive and flexible. There are so many possibilities out there and we're going to dive into all these diverse work arrangements and really figure out ways to work, even on an interim basis. Consulting is another huge area, temporary project management jobs. Basically, what we found in building the remote work Europe community is that it truly is a global perspective. It sounds like it's focusing just on one part of the world, but Europe is a bit of a melting pot, a crucible for things that are going on and showcasing the remote work cultures from different parts of the world. One of the things I love about living in Europe and working globally is that, even in terms of the time zones, you're positioned really well. I can work with people on the West Coast of the US. I can work with people in Asia and Australasia. For me, that really symbolizes how flexible Europe is for remote work lifestyle just being plumped in the middle of the time zones like that, even if it means somebody has to get up a little bit earlier or stay up a bit late. Europe also leads the way in regulation in many ways. We've got so many remote work visas, things like marketing and regulation of digital services, data management. Europe's a long way out in front and really I think it's a great place to be examining different remote work cultures and policies and practices from different parts of the world, even though we have a regional focus in the name, if you're listening to us from further afield, I hope you'll still feel really, really welcome in remote work Europe, our rebranded podcast. We really do intend to stay globally relevant, because that's the whole point of remote work. Right, we're not all digital nomads and many of us have a home somewhere that we've chosen. But when we disconnect work from having to show up at a particular place or even at a particular time of day, then we're free to explore wherever we want and to tell the story and spread the word about remote work wherever we want to go. So please don't be concerned about any lack of continuity with the previous seasons, one to four, and all of those episodes still remain available to you. We've got some amazing interviews. The interesting thing is, looking back at the catalogue of past episodes, there's nothing that isn't relevant to the remote work Europe theme. So you know, even though a lot of that focused on freelancing, these are all values that you bring into your own self-directed work and career anyway, and it means that we can reflect a quality of content that you've already come to enjoy and appreciate, and we're going to expand on that. We're also going to bring in more community feedback, more connection with the remote work tribe and invite feedback and suggestions and really emphasise that this transition is a collaborative journey that we want you all to be part of because, above all, we all have a stake in that future, in the dynamic spectrum of work. Whether you're a full-time employee, you can still work remotely. You can still influence your company culture. You can decide about your own career progression because, frankly, nobody else is going to own that for you or have your interests at heart in the way that you can. You might have an HR department, you might have career development departments around you, but essentially they're interested in what's best for the employer and not for you, and we want to help you think about career progression in a remote setting and really considering how your work fits into your life, because so much more is under your control now. It's not about being seconded to another city. It's about choosing where you want to make your home, where you want to raise your kids, where you want to spend your leisure time, and then finding work that enables you to do that. We're also going to be continuing to explore many of the themes of digital nomadism and particularly embracing the issues where digital nomads meet remote work, because it's a fascinating thing that's happened over the lifetime of this show so far. In its first two years it's been the rise of digital nomad visas, or so-called, because what we're finding is many of them. They're labeled digital nomad visas but truly they are remote work visas and what they offer doesn't really support a truly nomadic lifestyle. But it does enable people to make choices about where to live and to relocate, to experience local services and lifestyle, and whether you want to change that up every year and really continue a kind of a slow-made lifestyle, you can definitely do that, particularly if you can take the work with you wherever you go. But many digital nomad visas are also a path to a longer term settling in a new area and the services and skills and attributes that you need. That might be a bit different from somebody who's planning to move on every few months or so. So everybody's welcome and we're going to be also looking at Just the kind of practicalities around that the support living and working in a brand new place. Whether you're there for two months or two years, you still need to figure out how to manage time zones with clients in different countries, how to find reliable wifi, how to find affordable data roaming and accommodation and so on, so all these same things still apply. I want to look at what's often described as we need a better word for this part time freelancing people who are really creating a more portfolio approach to their careers as well. I think again, we need to throw out with the nine to five paradigm, this idea that an employer gets to own you and that you have to give 100%. There have been so many trends that are converging on this one now. The amount of layoffs and redundancies that we've seen over the last couple of years often in the tech sector, which is where I do a lot of my work with startups I've seen so many places where they literally talking percentages and we over hired by 12%, so we've got to do layoffs and people are you know all the individuals that are caught up in that people who relocated their family to another continent on the strength of a visa and they're just kind of slashed in a spreadsheet exercise where they over hired. Those people care about you in your future, so why should you give them 100%? Why shouldn't you keep something back for yourself In terms of your professional development, your long term plans, even if it's just keeping your knowledge and your training, going in your own time with one eye on the future, building your social media profiles, building your network and remote work. Europe is all about networking. You have to keep a little bit back for yourself and employer does not get to own you. Another trend we're seeing is the legal challenging of non compete Agreements, and often people in the past were able to get away with trying to lock up employees, not only to. I mean, it's completely reasonable that you should not disclose people's contractual information and their intellectual property and so on, and and that you can't work for a competitor if you're working full time somewhere, but people trying to lock people up for the future and get on gardening leave for a year. All of that's got to go because we are individual entities and if people want to keep you working for them, they need to do that with the carrot rather than stick, and I truly believe that's a trend we're going to see in this war for talent. We need to make sure that people are making conscious choices and not just getting seduced by a great offer and finding themselves in golden handcuffs. Whether those handcuffs are in the form of a shengen, visa or a great offer, you know, it's important that people do commit to jobs, to careers, but that should be for positive reasons and that can include financial reasons like long term vested equity. But that should be with eyes wide open and because you believe in that shared vision. Otherwise, the only enterprise that matters is the enterprise of you, and that can mean entering into very intense, very private often you know very confidential arrangements with people. But if they're the startup, they're the owners, they're the ones with all the skin in the game and you're not. They cannot expect to hold you to the same level of commitment without that reward. And if you're a freelancer, you need to balance multiple commitments and Some of that. Sometimes those might be conflicting. Sometimes you have to make a choice where your loyalties lie. You have to be very, very clear about non disclosure and about information that's come to you in different directions and how you Can and cannot ethically use that to advance your own career. But it's simply a case of maintaining that bandwidth for the headspace to keep the overview and, at the same time, keep one eye on the future more. What happens if they turn around next month? And I have only worked for me because I don't actually have any Accrued redundancy here. I don't have any long term relationship that I can fall back on. Last year, coming up six months ago now, I lost my biggest freelance client completely out of the blue. It was a client for whom I relied say I relied, but I did rely on them for nearly 50% of my income some months and when they turn around and said to me that they didn't, they couldn't continue the arrangement, it was a huge blow and it was immediate as well, because they were obviously Slashing costs left and right and the first thing to go is the freelance budget, because they don't have any contractual agreement. They paid me for my work up to date, probably, but then that was it, and the people who gave me that news were losing 100% of their job, not just my 50%. So it can be brutal and it's really important, therefore, to make sure that you you've got that safety net, that core of you, that you're keeping an eye on the future, and it's easier in the remote space to do that because you're not tied to an area or a location. And it is a shift that we're starting to see in the remote space that people who are hiring fully remotely are attracting more entrepreneurial employees and they're not expecting them to make for life. Necessarily, they're expecting them to come in on an interim basis to have an impact and then discuss whether there's a long term future there. Otherwise, make sense to simply bring together remote team on a temporary basis. You all collaborate, you create something great together, you learn something together and then you move on and you go on to whatever your next big thing is still part of that network, still part of that great experience. Maybe some of you are Going to hook up again on another project another time, or you can recommend each other. You know and trust each other, so there's an awful lot of great things to be said for these kind of arrangements in truly remote and flexible work. I'm not talking about hybrid work, by the way. This is something that we need to bust a myth about in the remote work space, particularly recruiters. I'm looking at you, the places that say that they offer remote working and then the small print says, oh, but you have to show up at our office in London or Barcelona two days a week. This is not remote work. We will not be advertising those vacancies on remoteworkEuropeeu. We will not be amplifying those shouts, because real remote work is what we care about. So often hybrid models are. Basically, they reflect a sense of a lack of trust that we don't really want you to go remote because we're not quite sure what you're doing or we're not quite confident in our teamwork model. We want to kind of get everybody in room and look at them. We don't believe our remote work culture is strong enough that it can work without regularly getting everybody together in the same space and essentially what it means and this often applies to people earlier in their career who aren't on brilliant salaries, because the higher execs can often negotiate complete flexibility when they want it. So for people who have the lowest salaries, what we're saying is you have to maintain rental accommodation on the fringes of some of the most expensive places in the world to live and somehow accommodate an office within that apartment in the suburbs or on the edge of the city as well, and bear the costs of commuting. So it really is the worst of both worlds. We are not going to be talking about hybrid, never mind the kind of discrimination that you can get, where some of the workforce is in some of the time and some of the people are not. So that's not what flexibility is about. We want to talk about real designing of your own life and work around your personal commitments and preferences, including your own peak productivity and when you're best at getting your work done. So we're going to be looking at remote first leadership, heads of remote organizations, people who are truly having an influence at the highest level and driving that principle that work is what we do, that we measure results rather than presentism, that we allow people that autonomy to create their own life within that. And we're going to be talking to remote work advocates and consultants, people who really highlight the role of remote work and advocate for companies to transition better and then truly thrive in a distributed setup. So these are the kind of trends in remote work that I want to look at include. Obviously, we'll be going back to AI and automation, virtual co-working, all the new jobs associated with that, but we're going to be doing it through the remote work Europe lens. So what's going on with remote work Europe? It's time we had a quick look at that because, just like the future is freelance remote work, europe has changed and evolved. We don't stand still in this space. We started off as a Facebook group, remote Work Spain, which actually started about 18 months ago. I started answering some questions online from people who were coming out of the lockdowns and wanted to go on working remotely, and I put together a local community and it grew and grew and grew and it went beyond the demand of what I could satisfy in a Facebook group. Frankly, it went beyond Spain too, and what I was finding is that we were getting people joining us from other parts of the world because they couldn't find what they wanted In our Facebook communities, which are now plural. We have very, very strict guidelines about the kind of content we will accept, about the filtering on real remote jobs and opportunities. We have zero tolerance of network marketing and multi-level marketing. It's going to be an episode about that coming up soon, I promise you. We don't allow posts where people say I need a remote job, can you help me? Because we know that that attracts spammers and scammers. Instead, we collate all of those into a single monthly thread, which we then amplify and share with recruiters across our social media. For example, we don't allow endless advertising. Instead, we partner with people who can provide real services in local areas and we aim to create quality content that gives people the information they need and empowers them to make a choice. So this podcast is now part of that content creation mandate. I was looking at going down the road of working with a sponsor, but I couldn't find the right sponsor to truly align with what we were doing Not that I'm rolling that out for the future, I hasten to add. So don't hesitate to hit me up if you share our values and you really offer something that is going to be exceptionally useful to the remote work Europe community. But what I didn't want to do was be reading out a sponsor ad for something that wasn't quite a fit, while at the same time trying to promote high quality content and information. So I'm entering the season without a sponsor now and treating this basically as the extension of that content which is helping to feed that community with really high quality information. Because we've gone beyond Spain now we have thriving Facebook communities springing up all over under the direction of knowledgeable local people. Because I cannot answer questions about the rules for self-employment in Sweden or the best co-working spots in Brussels, I'm working with people who live locally. They might not even be nationals. It's interesting we've gotten people from different parts of the world who have relocated, often bring a kind of a naive facilitator or they see somewhere through the eyes of a remote worker settling somewhere, because they face those same questions, rather than people who maybe grown up somewhere and they can't see the water they're swimming in. So you definitely don't have to be somebody who's grown up in a particular country to be a great country admin for remote work Europe. We have really strong groups in the UK now and in Sweden, and we have smaller communities growing in. Where are we up to now? Wow, we've got Ireland, italy, germany. We need a new country admin for. So please shout if you're a remote worker in Germany. We have new communities in Cyprus, belgium and Turkey come online this year. In fact, there's last three. So we are growing this network and we are definitely looking for new country administrators who are a bit of a Facebook savvy, because Facebook is where it all grows and starts. But we have templates, we have guides to set you all up. All you need to do is promote that community locally and then engage with it as people come along, and there's plenty of upside too. So do hit me up if you're from a country that I didn't just mention before and you might be interested in bringing remote work Europe to where you are and being part of that and being part of a great community where we support each other and can grow our communities together. We're also taking social media beyond Facebook, because obviously that's just one small part of it and you will start to see remote work Europe popping up. We're bearing a strong presence on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is so important for remote work seeking, both as freelancers and entrepreneurs and everything in between that we were talking about earlier. We're also popping up on the likes of whatever Twitter's called these days and its various competitors TikTok. I believe we're even on TikTok. Essentially, I'm being supported here by Diana Berryman from Social Butterfly, who is also the country admin for remote work UK, and she's taking care of all that side of things while I focus on the long form content. So, yeah, even this dedicated freelancer is truly starting to work as part of a team again. It's quite exciting. What else is going on at remote work Europeeu? Well, we have jobs now, thanks to a collaboration with EU remote jobs we have on each country page we have a feed of jobs which are open to residents of that particular country and they are completely remote vacancies. This is so important because so often, when we look at the big jobs board we might find something that's completely remote, but they actually just want to hire in a certain state in the US or something. And the reason we've partnered with EU remote jobs is because they've already done that due diligence and they've already broken down their feed. Because it's not easy for hires, let's face it. It's not just people being discriminatory or lazy. Often it's very awkward for people to hire across borders and they simply don't have any way of doing that, or it's there are ways of doing it, but there are ways that make sense for them in terms of their logistics and costs. So it's much better that you apply for a vacancy that's actually already open to people who are resident where you are. And it's the same in our newsletter. Every Friday we put out a newsletter with over 30 vacancies beyond the ones from EU remote jobs. We curate them from all over the place, including direct tip-offs which are open to hiring people who live in Europe. So do make certain you are subscribed to our newsletter. I will put the link in the show notes. Make sure you're signed up there. It's completely free. You will get updates about this podcast, about other events and new content going on at Remote Work Europe, but we know from the heat maps that a lot of people scroll straight down to that list of opportunities because that's gold dust. There's at least 30 in there. We make sure at least 10 of them are freelance opportunities and of course they're not necessarily going to be the next match for you and your next remote job. But what they are are links to places that are hiring. They're links to niche job boards and communities, to connections, and we strongly suggest you basically use them as your jumping off point to finding that newest connection, to finding that next step, to building your network. Because finding remote jobs is hard. We're not here to pretend that it's easy. If somebody can truly hire the best person in the world, possibly for a given vacancy, or at the very least they're open to hiring the best person in a country or an area, then they have a huge amount of choice. If your last job that you applied for was in a local city, then you know that you were up against everybody who could easily travel to that city centre, who might be qualified to do that job. Now scale that up in a way that's exponentially larger and that's what you're up against. So it's hard finding the right remote vacancy somebody who's actually going to hire you, possibly without even meeting you, somebody who's going to shortlist you for an interview on the strength of your online presence and your application alone is really tough and we're not going to pretend it isn't, and we want to help you. We understand everybody involved in remote work here has enjoyed the benefits of being able to do that, whether as a freelancer or an employee, and most of us have worn lots of different hats. So at that time we recognise how valuable it is and we want to help more and more people enjoying that. But we also want to get real about it. We have a free ebook, for example, about the scams and the people who are out there trying to pretend that it's easy just to capture your information or places where you are the product as part of their downline or sales funnel. We are not into that at all. We are into true, genuine remote work where you get paid because you are the best person for that job and you're in the right place, working for the right person on a fair basis. So we create content to help you do that. We share vacancies with you to help you achieve that. We can work more deeply with you. Both Diana and I do one-to-one consulting and, while recognising that that's not going to be in reach of everybody, we've also recently launched remote work Europe Connected, which is our premium community. It's very low cost it's less than the price of a coffee a day for you to get not one-to-one support but one-to-few where we can work through anything from your freelance positioning to a job application to a resource figure stuff out together in a small groups. We have weekly AMA there where we will really talk about anything in our small group and where we are seeing people really transforming their futures. So that's what's going on in remote work Europe now and we've got such an exciting year ahead. So what's coming up? New country, new country groups. We need new country admins. If you're listening to this and you would like to talk about bringing remote work Europe to where you live, then please, please, get in touch. I would love to discuss that with you and what we can do for each other. We have new training courses and events coming up this year to help people make that transition, to help people use the latest technology to connect with the experts who can help them, and we have events to simply network and connect with one another. We're hoping to do some face-to-face events this year in different regions. Again, these take a huge amount of organizing. I can't do it all on my own, but as the network grows, the potential grows, and that's what's so exciting about it. And finally, the LinkedIn book is about to be updated and re-released for 2024, along with a LinkedIn challenge. Again, we did these twice last year. They were really successful. It's where we come together as a group, as a cohort, because we already have that in common that they're wearing the remote workspace in a particular region, how we share and amplify each other's content and engagement, and engagement goes through the roof and it truly builds everybody's network and connections. And this is the kind of thing that I mean when I talk about networking. It's an infinite process of continually growing and nurturing and expanding your influence and your reach, because this is the thing that's going to enable you to achieve the work-life balance of your dreams and enable you to create, design, the lifestyle that you truly want out of this one life that we all get to enjoy. It's such a privilege. So I want you to reflect on this after listening today, to think about what you want, how your approach to work has changed in the last few years? And, if not, should it? What would a perfect work-life vision look like for you? What would you be doing? Where would you be doing it? On what terms? Would you need to do it Five days a week, from nine to five? Would it be something more flexible? Would it involve travel? What kind of tools, processes, skills, activities would that work involve? And start to build that vision in your own mind. Then we can start to help you build a bridge to that from wherever you are, starting from now and come and join us in the remote work you're at community. Find us on all the socials. Find your local Facebook group or get involved and start it up if it doesn't yet exist, because this is where we're going to help you to build that bridge and then share your success, tell your story, be part of the network and the community. If you can make one change this week, what would it be? What new remote practice would it be? What step to take you in the direction of that dream? Even if it's simply signing up to an email list like the remote work Europe newsletter, there's something you can do for yourself. Figure out what it is, take that first step and then you're starting to journey incrementally to where you want to be. Why not reach out to somebody within that community for a chat, build a new connection, figure out a different perspective on what you're doing. If you're feeling stuck and in a rut, ask a question in our socials. Join remote work Europe connected if you want to work through something a little bit deeper. We are so excited for the journey ahead with remote work Europe and taking this podcast beyond freelancing. The future is freelance 100%. We're never going to stop believing in that. But the future is also more than freelancing. We're so glad to have you with us for this exciting journey. Thank you for your continued support and subscription. We would love your feedback on this rebranding, on our new approach. We would, as ever, love your reviews, your ratings, particularly as we rebrand, a fresh round of reviews would make a huge difference. Actually, I'll ask you very, very frankly about that. If you find value in this content, then please tell somebody. Tell somebody about it publicly, write us a review or simply share what we're doing. If you're listening to this podcast in an app right now, then just grab a screenshot and share that on your socials. People will find us. It's going to take a little while for all the branding to sync up, but the thing about podcasting is that it's quite a self-selecting group of people. In fact. You're listening to this right now means you're actually pretty special and it means you care about remote work. It means you care about your future. It means you're being a little bit more proactive than many people about what your own future looks like. So I want to support that. I want to help you do what you're capable of and achieve what you deserve and, once again, thank you so much for listening and being part of Remote Work Europe. You've been listening to the Remote Work Europe podcast brought to you by remoteworkeuropeu. We bring you community information, training, coaching and more to help you achieve your location and dependent lifestyle in Europe and beyond, as an employee, entrepreneur, freelancer or whatever you want to be. If you enjoyed the show, please like, rate and comment and subscribe to our feed wherever you get your podcasts. If you really liked it, we'd appreciate a review as well. Here's to your remote work success in Europe and around the world.