Emerging remote work trends for 2024
Hey,
I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋
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Last week I told you about these 4 key mistakes from remote job seekers, that I see repeated again and again. Make sure to do them on your own job search.
Today, I'll tell you about these 3 remote work trends I've seen growing in 2023, which you should keep an eye on for 2024:
1/ Return-to-Office vs Fully remote
A couple years ago, almost all digital workers in the world worked remote, simply because lockdowns and regulations forced companies to do it. As such, companies went remote because they had to, not because they wanted to.
In 2023, it was probably the first year that felt like business as usual. As such, companies were purposeful in announcing their work culture of choice.
While some were very vocal to announce Return-to-Office mandates, many other were purposeful in bragging about their fully remote culture. There seems to be a clear divide, with many companies in either end of the spectrum, and many others somewhere in the middle with some form of hybrid setup. Curious to see the dynamics of job creation in 2024.
2/ Asynchronous communication
In those companies that went fully remote, there also different approaches:
• Companies that only hire locally in their country (the infamous US-only remote jobs).
• Companies that hire in nearby time zones (eg: US companies hiring across LATAM).
• Companies hiring globally across the world.
This latter group is growing, especially among startups, agencies and small businesses. Companies realised that remote work allows them to hire oversees, in many cases pushed to seek lower headcount costs.
This pushed many companies to continue growing up their processes to allow async communication, and make the team work with people in multiple time zones. Important things like documentation, async standups, async feature plannings, professional code review and QA processes are becoming more top of mind than ever before.
3/ Location-indexed salaries
Companies in high wage countries like US, UK, etc are hiring more people abroad than ever before. And regardless you like it or not, one of the main reasons for that is seeking lower costs of employment.
They know that a Senior Software Engineer in India, Portugal, Brazil, Nigeria, etc will accept a much lower offer than a similar profile in the US. That could be unpopular for some, but it's also a great opportunity to start one's remote career.
In any case, it seems that location-indexed salaries is emerging as the standard salary policy for most remote companies, especially larger ones. This means they'll pay a lower salary to an employee in India than they pay to another employee with equivalent role who lives in the US.
4/ Employers of Record
With remote work going more and more mainstream, many Legal and HR departments in companies around the world have struggled to adapt their contracts and regulatory compliance to this new reality of having employees in many countries.
Most of those Legal and HR processes were built in the past couple decades, in a reality where a company's employees would all live in the same country as the company's headquarters. It's tough to change such established processes.
These challenges have opened space for Employers of Record (EOR) companies to enter the market. These companies setups local entities in many countries around the world and hire employees locally on behalf of their clients. This allows companies to hire employees around the world in a fully compliant way, and it's growing a lot in popularity.
I find this growth of remote work very exciting, and I love to see people from around the world finding remote jobs. I speak with them on Twitter and on the Remote Jobs Braintrust, where we are closing down on the 100 people, with a diverse bunch from 30+ countries. I love it!
If you're looking for a new remote job, of if you're thinking this will be your New Year's resolution. Then you should join the January cohort. It will be tailored to Asian and European timezones, with live sessions at 11am UK time. Grab you seat here.
Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.
See you next Friday,
Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover