Remote Jobs Can Change the World

Work is changing. As the society is increasingly shaped by technological advances, the traditional workplace is taking on a new shape as well. Nine to five lives where workers come in to their cubicles to get work done are no longer a reality.

Instead, more and more people are abandoning their offices in favor of remote jobs. Whether as digital nomads or simply working from the comfort of their home, workers across the globe are ditching the office life.

It’s not only the employees who prefer this change in lifestyle. The work-life balance and the increased freedom appeal to employers as well, and more and more companies across the globe are switching to working remotely, either on some days or in the form of a completely distributed team.

Today, you’ll be able to find out things such as:

• The perks of remote jobs
• The not-so-good sides of working remotely
• The difference between flexible and remote jobs
• Examples of remote jobs
• Why remote jobs will change the world

First off, let’s see what you can actually do from the comfort of your home.

What are Some of the Most Common Remote Jobs?

The truth is, if you can do your work from a laptop and not be physically present, the job can be done remotely. Here are some of the most popular remote jobs:

• Remote IT Jobs
• Remote Marketing Jobs
• Remote Design Jobs
• Remote Project Manager Jobs
• Remote Recruiter Jobs
• Remote Writing Jobs
• Virtual Assistant Jobs
• Remote Accounting Jobs
• Remote Customer Support Jobs
• Remote Medical Coding Jobs
• Remote Sales Jobs
• Remote QA Jobs
• Remote Transcription Jobs
• Remote Non Tech Jobs
• Online Teaching Jobs

And many, many others.

What Kind of Job Can You Do from Home?

The only jobs that cannot be done from home are those where it’s necessary to be physically present to get it done. If it can be done from a PC, it can be done from anywhere in the world, and most definitely from your home.

However, certain types of jobs have started emerging as increasingly popular for doing remotely. Here’s a few of them along with who can do them.

Virtual Assistant

Are you extremely organized? Do you know how to prioritize and juggle multiple tasks at once? Know how to book meetings, arrange accommodation and transportation? You just might be an excellent fit for a virtual assistant.

As modern-day businessmen are increasingly busier, virtual assistants became a great solution to outsource some of the most tedious tasks in their everyday jobs. Ranging from answering emails, all the way to doing SEO and content for company websites, the job of a virtual assistant is one that can be done by a lot of tech-savvy people with no specific skills. However, the more skills you bring to the table, the higher the wages and likelihood to land a job.

Remote Customer Support

What’s the secret of great brands? Besides having an excellent product and investing into improving it over time, truly successful companies value their customers. If you want to be on the forefront of this initiative, you want a job in customer support.

Working as a member of remote customer support, there’s several things you need to have, but in the first place, you need a strong desire and willingness to help customers. You need great communication skills, excellent knowledge of your product/service, strong empathy, and last but not least, reliable internet and quiet surroundings to do your job properly.

Remote Project Manager

Often underappreciated, project managers are the backbone of every successful company dealing with multiple stakeholders and clients. Project managers handle clients, projects, deadlines and make sure that both the employers and clients are happy.

As a remote project manager, you need perfect communication skills, superb attention to details and most of all, you need to be a people-person. This demanding position is incredibly rewarding and great project managers are always in demand as remote workers.

Writer

Ever dreamed about being the next Ernest Hemmingway? Now, you can do it – sort of. Writers are always in demand, albeit not for fiction work in such an extent. As a writer working from home, there’s many specialized routes you can take – copywriter, content writer, technical writer, script writer, you name it.

While some people may think that great English is enough, a knack for writing and some formal education are great assets that you need if you want to excel in this job. You don’t have to be a native English speaker (or whichever language you use), but it helps greatly when looking for a well-paying job.

Online Teacher

Do you have a skill that you excel at and the willingness to share it with others? If you don’t care for classrooms and the commute, the job of an online teacher could be a great fit for you. There are many things you can teach, from languages to guitar lessons, all the way to programming.

Among digital nomads, the job of an online English teacher is one that’s extremely popular. First reason – there’s a high demand. Online schools in Asia are filled with students looking for English teachers. Second – it doesn’t require many qualifications. If you’re a native English speaker, all it takes is an application and a few rounds of interviews to land a job as a teacher. For non-natives, things are slightly more complicated, and you will be required to have certain qualifications.

Developer

If you want to know one profession that is always lacking skilled workers, it’s programming. As time goes by, developers are the most sought-after remote (and office) workers around the globe.

There’s a variety of languages to choose from, such as Java or HTML, and you can choose what suits you best. Of course, you need the technical knowledge to get the job done, which is why this job requires quite a lot of learning and self-development.

As many employees are struggling to find great developers, it’s not a difficult task to get a remote job as a programmer. They will be highly motivated to give you an option to work from home, if it means getting a great performer.

Digital Marketer

Not only technical jobs are in demand when working from home. As many brands focus on their online presence, they need skilled workers to take care of their marketing efforts.

As a digital marketer, you can be tasked with creating landing pages, ads, tracking website analytics, doing SEO, paid ads and many other tasks.

Formal education is beneficial, but the top-most requirement for a good marketer is to stay up to date with the market at all times, as the field of work is changing rapidly.

Social Media Manager

There’s over 3 billion people on social media today, and brands are doing their best to get their piece of the pie and attract new fans and followers. However, it’s much more than posting a status or two and a dedicated person is a necessary asset to get the job done.

Social media managers are the experts for turning cold leads into followers and followers into fans. Their job is to keep social media profiles active and brimming with new content, while engaging with brand followers.

Just like with digital marketing, it’s crucial to stay up to date, as rules in social media can change from day to day.

Transcription and Data Entry

Besides the job of a virtual assistant, these two have the lowest barrier to entry. There’s no formal education needed, all it takes is willingness to learn and get your hands dirty.

As a data entry specialist, you’ll work on a range of projects, entering data from one location to another. As a transcriptionist, you’ll mostly transcribe interviews and various audio files.

Key skills for both jobs include excellent precision and attention to detail, as well as being able to type fairly quickly and accurately.

SEO Specialist / Consultant

We’re talking about search engine optimizers, people who do SEO – not the process itself. As SEO quickly turned from “nice to have“ into a must-have, companies are hiring experts to boost their online presence and help them rank better in search engines.

An SEO working from home needs the basic knowledge of site structure, SEO best practices, as well as knowledge on link building.

Sales Development Representative

If you love talking to people, you have a great personality and you’re naturally persuasive, there’s no better job than a sales development representative. These workers dial numbers, chase leads and close sales. It’s as exciting as it gets for working from a home office.

While a good command of English (or some other language) is a necessity, you will also need some negotiation skills, as well as some sales training.

These are just few jobs where you can work from home, but the options are practically limitless, and there will be more options in the future, as companies and CEOs open up to working remotely.

Flexible Jobs

In the middle ground between standard office jobs and working from home, there are flexible jobs. These are positions where you can do one part of the work in the office, and another part working from home.

Just as the name says, the jobs are completely flexible in terms of how much time is spent at which location. Some companies allow only one day working from home, while others require employees to come in only on certain days for meetings with their team and management.

Many remote companies started out as flexible in the beginning, and after a while, everyone involved learned the benefits of working from home. If you’re currently working in a traditional setting, it’s worth asking your employer to consider a flexible schedule for your position, with hopes of it turning into something remote.

In more conventional offices, flexible and remote jobs are only given after spending a certain amount of time at the company. This means that before asking your superiors to make the switch, you should earn trust by doing great work and respecting your deadlines. This will make the decision to go flexible or remote much easier for your employer.

The Bad Sides of Working Remotely

Not everything about working remotely is perfect, and we’ll be the first to admit it. Some employees perform great at their jobs, but they just cannot embrace the remote lifestyle. Here are some of the downsides of working from anywhere except an office.

No socialization. I have worked in half a dozen remote companies in the span of the last five years. Some were good, some were bad, but they all had one thing in common – you don’t really get to talk much to anyone, unless it’s in your job description.

Part of the traditional work environment is not only the work, but the workplace, the colleagues and the moments spent between doing the actual job. Commonly named watercooler moments, this is something that’s lacking in the remote world, as there’s simply no physical bond to those you are working with.

Remote teams around the globe rely on other methods of communication to get a feel of the workplace atmosphere. Tools such as Skype, Slack and Zoom have replaced the watercooler and have become places where remote workers come to talk about work, life and chit chat in between work tasks to pass the time.

However, not everyone is accustomed to these methods of communication and they simply can’t adopt them. Many times, I have heard colleagues saying that they simply cannot do remote jobs, because they need someone to drink their first coffee with at 9 in the morning.

The way to solve this is to have small talk, even if there’s no watercooler involved. Teams such as Balsamiq set up Slack rooms where you can discuss sports, current world events, what you had for lunch, your favorite way to spend your free time, the meaning of life – whatever comes to your mind. It’s beneficial to chat about non-work-related topics, even it’s just a Slack channel.

Work culture is harder to establish. You know how Google and all the hip startups pride themselves with awesome experiences at work, such as slides, ping pong and foosball tables, video game rooms and much more? That’s not exactly so easy to pull off with a remote company.

Culture is one of the big buzzwords in the modern HR world, and it’s for a reason. Culture is created not so much by the employer, but the employees together and it’s one of the reasons why applicants rush to one employer instead of the other.

Culture is what makes you work for a certain company, besides the whole needing to pay the bills part. It’s the feeling of belonging to a great team, and it’s built much more easily in a traditional work environment.

At Toggl, they’ve been able to establish culture by doing regular standups where everyone talks about themselves or presents a topic of their interest for a presentation in front of the entire team. The presentation can be around whatever they like, as long as they’re passionate about it.

Additionally, there are retreats that happen once or twice per year. Seeing how Toggl saves money by not renting lots of office space, they use it to have the entire team meet up once or twice per year. This way, everyone gets to meet the whole team in person, instead of just looking at the faces on a screen.

Overworking. Remember how I said that those who work from home are actually more productive than office workers? There are extreme cases, and they’re not that uncommon, as it turns out.

With remote jobs, it’s hard to physically separate your “office“ from the rest of the home. This means continuing work long after you’ve clocked out on some occasions.

For instance, you finish at 5PM and get that one email at 6PM and you reply to it because it simply cannot wait until tomorrow. Then you catch yourself replying to work-related mails during dinner and checking your inbox before going to bed. Before you know it, 8 hours at work easily turns into 10, simply because you cannot separate work from the rest of your life.

The way to get around overworking is to find a way to separate your work station from the rest of your home. This can be a simple hack like a work desk in the corner of your living room, or a dedicated room just to work. Whichever the case, you need to physically and mentally separate your work space from the rest of your home so that you’re not in work mode once you punch out.

Establishing discipline. On another note, remember the work-life balance mentioned earlier? For some people, this means a lot more life than work. Doing actual work at work is really a no-brainer, with your boss and co-workers noticing each time you go for a coffee break. If it’s your 12th one for the day, someone probably is tipping off the boss.

On the other hand, when you’re working from home, what’s stopping you from watching another Game of Thrones episode instead of tending to your work emails for the day?

Staying disciplined as a remote worker demands a high level of organization and commitment to getting the job done, even with little to no oversight. You are your own boss, which can be both great and scary at the same time.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way of solving this one except for sticking to deadlines and goals established by whoever is in charge and being consistent in your work.

The environment. Nope, I don’t mean the nature. The work environment in offices is conducive to actually getting work done. Everyone around you is busy pursuing their goals for the day and there are no distractions to get in your way, besides your coworkers showing off the latest cat memes they’ve seen on Reddit.

When you work from home, there’s plenty that can distract you. This can be your children, your noisy neighbors, your roommate, a dog barking in the hallway… The list goes on. There’s only so much you can influence, and the distractions can come in all shapes and forms.

As mentioned before, you can solve this problem by physically isolating a dedicated space for work, ideally with minimum noise and distractions. You can also pick up a set of noise-cancelling headphones which can help you tune out.

Why Remote Jobs will Change the World

You may be thinking, this is all fine and dandy, but what’s so life-changing about remote jobs? Here are a few things that really are revolutionary.

We’ll Work when We’re Most Productive

Here’s a news flash – we’re all different and we do work differently. Some of us are the most productive at 8AM on a Monday morning, others get bursts of productivity at 10PM on a Sunday night.

Trouble happens when we’re boxed in 9-5 lives and we’re forced to do our best and most productive work on certain days and within the office environment.

For example, if I just can’t seem to find any inspiration on that Monday at 8AM, I can take a few hours off and complete my work in the evening. On the flip side, if I get extra creative on 9AM on a Saturday, I can just sit behind my laptop and get my work done for the week.

Bottom line is – we won’t be forced to stare at the clock, watching and waiting hopelessly until 5PM comes on. We will be able to do work on our own schedules, at those times that suit us best. Not only will this benefit our work/life balance greatly, we’ll also be able to do better work in general.

We’ll Be Happier

Put simply, being able to work under your own conditions and when you’re most productive is bound to make you a happier person. There is far less stress and you know that you can work when you’re at your most efficient. There’s less micromanagement and it’s a healthier atmosphere to be in.

It takes special kind of management to run a remote company successfully (more on that in our upcoming posts), but if you have a manager that values your work and fully trusts you to do the tasks set out ahead of you. And with happier employees, companies will perform better too.

Remember a decade or so ago when we all heard about J.K. Rowling writing Harry Potter from her local coffee shop? Or Carrie Bradshaw who wrote her columns everywhere from coffee shops to her apartment and wherever she found fit?

Today, jobs like those are no longer dreams to most of us. As long as it can be done from a laptop – it can be done from anywhere on the globe. Everyday common folk like us can experience what was science fiction up until a few years ago. Granted, while this may not make everyone happy, the mere possibility of taking your work outside the office is thrilling to workers today.

We’ll Have More Time for Ourselves

Work/life balance means different things for all of us. However, for most of us, we’d prefer it to be more life and less work. By eliminating commute from the equation, we’re all getting at least half an hour to an hour per day that we can devote to bettering ourselves and spending time with our loved ones – or really doing anything with the extra time we’ve been gifted.

From a practical standpoint, think of it this way – the only thing you have to do to get ready for work in the morning is to put your clothes on and open your laptop, preferably with a large cup of coffee. Even if you work just a block away, you’d have to get up, get dressed, prepare your lunch, walk there, get in 10 minutes early to get ready, turn on your laptop, pour some coffee, chat with your coworkers…

While mini rituals like these are what makes work interesting, they also add up to your workday. With remote jobs, you get to save on minutes that add up to hours over time.

Browse Remote Jobs Today

After reading this, you’d be hard pressed to find a reason NOT to work remotely. It’s the future of work and more companies are embracing this lifestyle every day. However, finding remote jobs is not easy.

There’s very few remote-only job boards, and with those that do exist, the situation is far from perfect. You have to sort through companies (often just a handful of them), find those that are legitimate and then apply, hoping it works out.

At Anomadic, we created a job board for remote workers, built by remote workers. Find remote jobs easily, with verified employers and a large selection of jobs to choose from.

Are you ready to join the future of work? Sign up today and find out why remote jobs are the way forward!