What is a remote job?
You may be a job seeker wondering on how to get a remote job or a company owner who is looking to adopt remote working, or you may be a recruiter scratching your head on how to deal with upcoming remote working nature. Regardless of whether to which group you belong, we are certainly sure that the term “remote job” is something that you like to know more and understand clearly what aspects are related and how to be a champion in this new remote work culture. Then the most straightforward definition of a remote job is any type of a job that one can accomplish from anywhere given that necessary facilities exist to communicate and deliver the service.
According to the above definition, you can clearly see that there is no location requirement which binds you to a city or country when working remotely. However, there can be restrictions placed on some jobs as moving from country to country can change the jurisdictions or tax status which may affect the company. But even given that you will get a great advantage of living in an area in a country where living cost is low, but receiving the same salary which helps you to save a considerable amount of money.
‘ There is no location requirement which binds you to a city or country when working remotely ‘
The other aspect that you may have probably noticed in the definition is that the communication and deliver of the service. Since you are not physically located in an office building, there should be some way to communicate with others which is mostly happens through collaboration software such as Slack, Skype or any messaging service. You may also frequently be using fi le sharing services and other knowledge sharing platforms to collaborate with your colleagues who will be living in the other end of the world.
The other important aspect to note here is that many of you may be believing that remote working is only applied to software or tech jobs. However, this is not true at all. You may be an artist who is living in a remote village in Italy and your company may be located in San Francisco. In sub settings, you will get paid through online payment services such as Stripe or PayPal. Such remote work arrangements are very common these days as it allows a lot of great talent in remote areas can now showcase their talent and earn money while enjoying their normal life. This is the great opportunity that remote jobs bring to us, where we can enjoy what we love by staying where we want with people we like to be with while doing what we love and earning the same salary regardless of where we are.
Remoteness of a remote job
Remote jobs can come with various levels of remoteness. In general, a remote job should comply with the definition we provided above. But in recent times we also started noticing certain remote jobs advertised as hybrid.
A hybrid job which allows remote job can be either you are required to come to an office for a selected period in a month (e.g., two days a week) or you may be given passes to a close shared workspace where you can meet other co-workers. Either way, hybrid work arrangements can make remote work less flexible and hard to manage. This is the reason why most remote workers only take fully remote jobs.
In Remote Sonar, we strongly advise you to focus on fully remote jobs as hybrid jobs can reduce your flexibility or introduce some uncertainty on your flexibility in the future.
Working remotely
You may have seen some remote jobs are advertised with restrictions where candidates are required to be located in a specific region, country or in a time zone.
Such geo restrictions are applied due to various reasons. In certain cases, the tax conditions and or company formation can cause a company only have its workforce in a certain region. In some other cases, the company may need its employees in a region or country to help its strategic behavior as employees can help how to expand the market based on cultural and geo knowledge. However, such cases only applies if the company is focusing on a specific market where it wants to excel at.
Timezone restrictions can be associated with a remote job to help its employees to better collaborate or communicate if it is required for the job. For example, a remote product manager role will need to communicate to a number of teams in an organization to develop the product roadmap. Working in a different timezone can be challenging for them as they get only limited time to collaborate with other teams working on a different timezone.
Salary, benefits and negotiation
The remote positions can come with various salary and benefit options. In general, there are certain things that you should know as a remote worker.
Salary = job type * seniority * experience + location
In the above formula, the job type is the base salary that you receive which is multiplied by a base multiplier focuses on seniority and another multiplier focused on experience. The location is an additional allowance based on your location. If you are working remotely from a country where living expense is high, then your location based additional allowance will be high. If you are working from a country where living expense is low then this allowance can be low and sometimes may even be zero.
Apart from the salary, you may also get opportunity to get equity from the company you are going to join. This equity is distributed through Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOPs) which will specify how your stock options are vested. The offer of stock options does not mean that you can sell those shares at any moment, nor that it means you own all the shares you are offered. A vesting plan associated with your ESOP specifies how stock options are vested which will enforce certain time based conditions (e.g., each quarter 10% of your stock options will be vested) or conditions based on business based situations (e.g., when the company reaches $500 million value, 10% of your stock options will be vested).
We recommend you to have a closer look at the employee agreement and seek legal advice when signing such agreement to make sure you understand everything that you agree with the company.
Remote Work: The future of work
Remote working has reached pretty much every fi eld of work. This has caused remote job positions to appear in various fields.
However, recently we noticed IT, Sales, Design and Consultancy jobs have increased significantly as they have the inherent ability to work remotely. But if you are not working in any of these fields, you should not be discouraged as the world is moving to a more remote working culture, there is obviously an opportunity that you will be able to accomplish the same work remotely.
Originally published at https://remotesonar.com.
