Tag Archives: remote work

Global Mobility, News, Remote Working

Best “Workcation” cities in the world for Brits: Tbilisi, Chiang Mai and Bucharest top the list

Since the end of the pandemic there has been a shift in the mentality for many desk workers in the UK. A study found that 43% of Brits said they would NOT apply for an advertised job if the description didn’t explicitly state that it was flexible and 37% of Brits asked said they would like a hybrid role so that they could work while they travel for a portion of the year.

The idea that the office can be any place along with the practice of working from anywhere has grown in popularity, with UK Google searches for “digital nomad visa” increasing by 130% over the past 12 months.

But where are the best cities around the world in which to work remotely as a Brit? A recent study by computing and tech retailer Currys analysed 268 cities around the world and ranked them on their monthly rent, basic utility price per month, broadband speed, safety index, and the length of stay allowed for UK citizens. These were each scored out of 10 to give a total score out of 50, with the highest scoring city being the best location for digital nomads from the UK.

When it comes to the best city for a ‘workcation’ gothic haven Tbilisi in Georgia takes the top spot. The biggest benefit of Georgia is that with a digital nomad visa, British nationals can spend up to a year in the city working remotely, and there are no taxes for six months. For the first 183 days you don’t pay any taxes. After that period you become a tax resident and pay 20% of taxes. Aside from the legalities, it is also a reasonably priced place to live and safe too, meaning it’s even an option for solo travellers looking for a change of work scenery. Tbilisi features a picturesque Old Town, eclectic architecture and superb eating and drinking opportunities, giving it the reputation of South Caucasus region’s most cosmopolitan city, scoring 37.68 out of 50.

One downside however is that the city scored low for broadband speed with an average of just 26.9MPBS. A good broadband speed starts from 11Mbps for a standard broadband connection, although faster speeds range between 11-50Mbps. These are usually Superfast Broadband packages- so while it may be speedy enough for work related tasks, it might not be fast enough if you’re a gaming streamer.

Chiang Mai in Thailand comes a close second. Visitors are met with a wonderful metropolis full of exceptional food, hip live music venues and a deeply Buddhist population. The city scored high for reasonable living costs, with rent coming in at £179.84 on average for a one-bed outside the city centre and average utilities around £44.31 per month. Not only that but the broadband is fast, and it scores highly in the safety department too, earning a score of 37.45 out of 50.

In third place is Bucharest in Romania, scoring 36.16 out of 50. Bucharest is known for its vibrant cultural scene, with numerous theatres, museums, galleries, and performance venues. In the study it scored highly for cheap rent, fast broadband and a decent safety index score.

The top 20 cities in the world for a workcation*

Rank City Country Score out of 50
1 Tbilisi Georgia 37.68
2 Chiang Mai Thailand 37.45
3 Bucharest Romania 36.16
4 Quebec City Canada 36.07
5 Taipei Taiwan 35.79
6 Madrid Spain 34.53
7 Tokyo Japan 34.45
8 Penang Malaysia 34.31
9 Merida Mexico 34.29
10 Galway Ireland 33.13
11 Yerevan Armenia 33.08
12 Reykjavik Iceland 33.07
13 Budapest Hungary 33.02
14 Jeddah (Jiddah) Saudi Arabia 32.94
15 Christchurch New Zealand 32.78
16 Kathmandu Nepal 32.67
17 Abu Dhabi United Arab Emirates 32.50
18 The Hague (Den Haag) Netherlands 31.86
19 Bursa Turkey 31.70
20 Seoul South Korea 31.53

*Only featuring one city from each country.

It is important to remember that in many places it is not permitted to work on a tourist visa, so it is vital that digital nomads check the restrictions in the countries they plan on visiting and obtain a work or digital nomad visa.

News

WorkMotion appoints Maarten Dermul as Chief Revenue Officer

Leading provider of HR-tech for global employment announces new appointment following rapid company growth and recent funding round

 WorkMotion, a leading HR-tech firm for global employment, today announced the appointment of Maarten Dermul as Chief Revenue Officer. Dermul’s appointment builds on WorkMotion’s continued growth, including the recent Series B funding round of $50 million and the addition of Pieter Manden as Head of Trust and Employer Compliance, earlier this year.

Dermul joins the company with a wealth of leadership experience, having built Hewlett Packard’s SMB team in Northern Europe and grown Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Inside Sales HUB from a handful of sales representatives to a team of over 400, driving about $1B of discrete quota. Dermul was most recently at Nutanix, where he gained expertise at managing remote teams while leading their Inside Sales and Customer Success teams.

“We are delighted to welcome Maarten to WorkMotion as our Chief Revenue Officer. His expertise in developing high-performance teams and expanding the business make him a perfect fit for this crucial role,” said Carsten Lebtig, co-founder and CEO, WorkMotion. “Maarten will be a key player in WorkMotion’s hyper growth, helping to further accelerate our global sales momentum and cement WorkMotion’s position as the leading European global talent operating system.”

“I am incredibly excited to be joining WorkMotion at such a pivotal moment. Today’s organisations need flexible work policies that help attract and retain talent, and WorkMotion helps organisations do just that – easily and compliantly,” said Dermul, CRO, Workmotion. “WorkMotion is leading the way when it comes to facilitating global employment, and I look forward to working with our teams to provide our customers the best experience and develop long lasting partnerships as the company continues its growth trajectory.”

News

Research finds remote work could be key to Britain’s ‘Levelling Up’ plan

Remote work could enable over 13 million Brits* to seize the opportunity to live and work outside the major cities, helping to spread economic opportunity across the UK, according to research released today by ClickUp, the all-in-one productivity platform.

The research found that 45% of the UK workforce believe working remotely from wherever they’d like on a permanent basis is a realistic option. More than half (53%) of Brits believe that living in a major city is important to their career advancement – however if they had the same career prospects living elsewhere as they do now, only 15% of people would choose to continue living in the city.

The UK government recently announced its Levelling Up plan, which aims to bring gigabit broadband to 85% of the UK, and £1 billion to deliver 4G coverage to 95% of the country by the end of 2025, amongst other measures to reduce regional inequality. The new research from ClickUp suggests that remote work could play a major role in helping the government achieve its key objective and level the economic playing field across the country.

Amber Coster, VP of Operations, EMEA at ClickUp, said: “The key to spreading economic opportunity across the UK could be staring us in the face. The country has already adapted brilliantly to remote working, and there is a huge demand to live and work outside of the main economic hubs. There are still some productivity hurdles to be overcome but with the right approach and tools, combined with the government’s commitment to improving connectivity, remote work could play a major role in bringing economic opportunity to everyone.”

However, remote work does not come without its challenges; ClickUp’s research revealed the top areas that need improvement to make remote work a permanent reality, according to the workforce:

  1. Ways of communicating (19%)
  2. Managing employees (17%)
  3. Managing workloads and projects (17%)
  4. Too much importance is given to face-to-face meetings (17%)
  5. Software and tools (16%)

Managing and measuring productivity becomes even more important with distributed workforces, yet less than a fifth (19%) believe their employer’s ability to do this well. In fact, data shows there is significant room for improvement with close to half (44%) of Brits rating their employer’s ability to measure productivity as average or below average.

*The Office for National Statistics’ most timely estimate of payrolled employees indicates that in December 2021 there were 29.5 million employees in the UK

News

LogMeIn Refreshes GoToConnect To Support Permanent Shift to Flexible Work

LogMeIn, Inc., makers of remote and flexible work tools enabling the work-from-anywhere era, has released major updates to its Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) product, GoToConnect. This includes a refreshed mobile experience, updates to its Cloud Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions, new native integrations with Microsoft Teams, bundling options that bring together other LogMeIn products like LastPass, GoToWebinar, GoToAssist and more. Also, many GoToConnect options are now available as an ecommerce purchase to better enable customers to quickly and seamlessly empower their flexible workforce.

GoToConnect’s customer-first mentality makes it a market-leading solution in UCaaS based on independent review sites like G2, Consumer Affairs, Google, GetVoIP and others. Through its simple, economical and robust cloud UCC platform, it’s the tool for employees to connect and collaborate from virtually anywhere, how and when they choose, while driving businesses forward. A pandemic has forever shifted the way businesses think about where, how and when people work. No longer are employees tied to the same desk in an office working 9-5, five days a week. Now more than ever work tools need to be flexible, cloud based, secure, and easy to buy, deploy and use. As business leaders and workers look to a post-pandemic world, it’s easy to envision a further shift from a fully remote workforce to a workforce truly capable of remaining productive from virtually anywhere. With that shift comes new challenges in balancing a hybrid experience, and businesses need to evolve their tech stack to keep up with the shift.

A Refreshed GoToConnect Experience to Enable Productive Work From Anywhere:

As companies look to balance long-term remote work with those who will be returning to the office, it’s easier than ever to use GoToConnect to provide safeguarded communication with layered authentication and encryption networks to support employee’s UCC needs across devices. Whether they are at home, in the office or on-the-go. GoToConnect has launched new features and integrations based on customer feedback collected as businesses shifted from full-time office work to full-time remote work with the expectation that hybrid work models would become the new normal. New GoToConnect features to help support this new way of working include:

An updated mobile experience to make employees more productive: With the expectation that many employees will continue to work remote much of the time, GoToConnect enables these employees to receive and make work calls on their mobile device without using their personal number. The refreshed experience, as robust as the desktop application, offers improved features such as Find Me and Follow Me, Advance Call Flip, Shared Extension, Voicemail Transcriptions, and much more.

Enhanced contact centre options to make agents more productive: Cloud contact centres are crucial to maintaining business productivity and continuity, and with GoToConnect Support Center’s latest updates, users are given access to Configurable Permissions, Customised Pause Reasons, and a new 60-day free trial offer. Coming soon, GoToConnect Support Center intends to launch Customisable Dashboards, Auto Queue Call Back, Intelligent Call Routing as well as a new product, called Revenue Center. Revenue Center will provide outbound calling functionality, primarily focused on Sales organisations. Revenue Center includes all the functionality of GoToConnect Support Center, released in 2020, plus Outbound Dialler, Pre-recorded Agent Messages, and a Coaching Assistant.

A unified admin experience to make admins more productive: The new GoTo Admin is designed to deliver a single administration portal from which to manage users, licenses, and settings for multiple products. With a user-centric focus, Admins receive full control over their system in a way that they don’t have to be retrained when purchasing and adding other GoTo portfolio products. It features an advanced UX design that is intuitive to use and navigate for first-time or expert admins, with additional features and functionality coming soon.

Native Integrations with Microsoft Teams to Simplify and Improve Workflow:

Updated GoToConnect Teams Connector: The GoToConnect Teams Connector provides a seamless and native integration for end-users with Microsoft Teams, thereby allowing users to continue to use Microsoft Teams with GoToConnect powering their telephony service on the back end with direct routing capabilities and advanced features like Click to Call and User Presence without leaving the Microsoft Teams application.

Microsoft Teams Edition – High quality, reliable cloud phone system from GoToConnect that fully connects with Microsoft Teams: With the Microsoft Teams edition of GoToConnect, businesses already using Microsoft Teams are able to combine the high-quality audio of GoToConnect with the collaboration solutions of Microsoft Teams. This offering has been tailored to be a simplistic, voice-only version of the GoToConnect product. The Microsoft Teams Edition comes without GoToConnect’s Messaging and Meeting capabilities, to pair with Microsoft’s internal-team focussed product.

New Choices to Support Customer’s Flexible Working Needs:

GoToConnect has launched options to cater to the unique needs of each customer. These now offer the ability to add-on additional LogMeIn products to consolidate communications, collaboration, security and remote support from a single vendor. Options Include:
GoToConnect Basic – Simplified cloud telephony, messaging and meetings: Includes high quality and reliable PBX from GoToConnect and basic meeting and messaging features. Includes integrations with platforms like Outlook and GSuite. Designed with small business in mind.

GoToConnect Standard Plus – Cloud telephony, messaging, meetings, password management and virtual events: GoToConnect Standard adds advanced features to its core voice, meeting and messaging capabilities. It’s designed to make it easier to stay connected to each other and includes 100+ award winning features such as Visual Dial Plan Editor and real time analytics. The Plus tier also adds password management with LastPass Teams and Basic Events with GoToWebinar Lite.

GoToConnect Premium Plus – Cloud telephony, messaging, meetings, password management, video enabled rooms, virtual events and remote support: Premium Plus gives businesses the tools needed to empower their entire work-from-anywhere workforce. This plan offers an enterprise-grade unified communications platform plus GoToConnect Support Center to help create better customer service outcomes, from the home, office, or on-the-go. It also includes GoToRoom to turn huddle rooms into video enabled meeting spaces, GoToWebinar to equip organisations to host virtual events, trainings and companywide town halls, GoToAssist to identify, diagnose and solve issues remotely, as well as LastPass Enterprise to protect and secure your organisation’s devices and access points.

Supporting Quotes

“Students left for the holidays, and then couldn’t come back due to the stay-at-home order. We had parents and students calling, asking what to do with their belongings still in their dorms. This would have overwhelmed our traditional PBX phone system,” said Lawrence Altomare, Manager, IT Networks, Saint Mary’s College of California. “The beauty of GoToConnect is in a matter of hours we had it figured out. We didn’t have to spend thousands of dollars on phone updates, we simply needed to change the call flow. It meant that all these people calling us could still reach us without interruption.”

“During this past year it became very evident that many businesses were ill-equipped to support a remote or flexible workforce and the need for tools like GoToConnect skyrocketed. Now as we prepare for a life post-pandemic, one thing is clear, employees do not want to go back to the office full time and business leaders need to support that desire in order to retain talent. Employees want flexibility to work from home, collaborate in an office, or travel. And they need their technology to move with them,” said Paddy Srinivasan, Chief Product and Technology Officer at LogMeIn. “Since its launch, GoToConnect has been a trusted customer favourite for its simplicity and ease of use. With today’s announcement we are expanding that value not only to build upon the already great user experience, but to add additional options to couple GoToConnect with LogMeIn’s other products like LastPass, GoToAssist and GoToWebinar or to simplify a user’s workflow by integrating with Microsoft Teams to further enable our customers to get work done on their terms.”

GoToConnect is available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Croatia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and Mexico.

For more information on GoToConnect please visit: www.goto.com/connect

For more information on how LogMeIn can help solve your work-from-anywhere and security needs please visit: www.logmein.com

News, Technology, Work from Home

63% of IT executives say at least a quarter of their employees will continue to work remotely permanently

With the Covid-19 pandemic forcing mass remote working across the country, 63% of IT executives say at least a quarter of their employees will continue to work remotely permanently. That’s according to research from the creator of the experience management (XM) category, Qualtrics.

The research, conducted with more than 200 IT executives from France, Germany and the UK also shows 70% of organisations increased the frequency of employee listening since COVID-19 began, and 74% of respondents said they’re currently taking action on IT transformation projects in direct response to employee feedback.

IT executives and senior technology leaders in Europe are playing a critical role in helping their workforce navigate the global pandemic and driving employee engagement, enablement, and productivity.

“Our data shows us that 63% of IT leaders believe this new model is permanent, and the role of IT in improving the Employee Experience will only grow in importance,” said Jay Choi, EVP and GM of EmployeeXM, Qualtrics. “That’s why we believe technologies such as Qualtrics EmployeeXM for IT will be critical in supporting IT leaders and their teams rethink how they listen to the needs of their employees and act on their feedback to deliver world-class technology experiences.”

In addition to the study, Qualtrics has launched EmployeeXM for IT to help organisations deliver technology experiences that create and drive more enabled and productive workforces. The solution empowers IT teams to measure and improve technology experiences of employees by closing day-to-day technology gaps and understand where to strategically invest in the future.

EmployeeXM for IT closes employee technology gaps in four areas:

● Provide IT and HR leaders with a holistic understanding of employees’ everyday technology experiences
● Improve IT support processes, quality, and perception
● Ensure new vendor implementations and project rollouts meet employee needs
● Use employee insights to make the right investments and drive continuous improvement

To learn more about EmployeeXM for IT and request a demo, please visit qualtrics.com/it-demo. To see the full report findings please visit this page.

About Qualtrics

Qualtrics, the leader in employee experience and creator of the Experience Management (XM) category, is changing the way organisations manage and improve the four core experiences of business––customer, employee, product, and brand. Over 13,000 organisations around the world are using Qualtrics to listen, understand, and take action on experience data (X-data™)––the beliefs, emotions, and intentions that tell you why things are happening, and what to do about it. The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action that helps businesses attract customers who stay longer and buy more, engage employees who build a positive culture, develop breakthrough products people love, and build a brand people are passionate about. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com.

Business Research, Coronavirus, Home Working, Technology

43% of UK SMEs switched to remote working within a week

Capterra, the leading B2B software search website, has revealed the results of a study analysing how small and medium-sized businesses in the UK are adapting to new requirements due to COVID-19.

The findings showed:

  • 43% of SMEs adopted a new process quickly, installing new software to facilitate remote working within just a week after the lockdown, and 96% of employees have received guidelines on different aspects of working from home.
  • Teleworking Attitudes Shifted: More than half of employees (52%) said they believe their company could function at full potential with permanent remote working flexibility.
  •  Transformational Leadership: Most businesses have provided remote working guidelines to employees, but communication is by far the biggest challenge.

While 43 percent of small and medium-sized companies had to buy or install new tools for remote work, a further 26 percent are still planning to do so in the near future. 70 percent of respondents who had to work with new software reported that the new software was easy or very easy to learn.

Based on this survey, 60 percent of SME employees reported they previously worked exclusively from the office and this the first time they were asked to work remotely was in response to COVID-19.

Most of the respondents have received guidelines from their employers regarding working hours, team meetings, communication, and remote working tools. Dress code has been the least addressed aspect. The opportunity to dress casually for work has been listed by the employees as one of the main benefits of remote work.

The sentiment of SME employees is largely positive as only 8 percent said they dislike working remotely. Furthermore, almost 9 in 10 employees would like to continue this arrangement after the lockdown either fully (32 percent) or on some days (55 percent).

Matt Mullarkey-Toner, Sr. editor at Capterra comments:

“Although the majority of UK businesses weren’t prepared for the current work requirements, they managed to adapt very quickly. It can be seen that businesses didn’t have a big problem adapting their team communication and collaboration which is in big part due to the ease of use and affordability of the current software solutions available.

Considering the employees’ satisfaction with the current remote work arrangement and businesses’ fast adaptation to provide services virtually, we can expect this major shift to be partially preserved even after the current lockdown.”