Remote control: Meet the ultimate remote workers

James Cooper, head of strategy at branding agency For the People, works remotely from Ubud, Bali. Photo / Supplied

It's estimated by Statistics New Zealand that during the national Covid lockdown 40 per cent of people spent at least some time working from home. Some of those people have never gone back to the office, and working remotely is the new glide time. But not everyone discovered the practice during lockdown

James Cooper, head of strategy at branding agency For the People, is an old hand. "It started with a motorcycle trip through South America in 2017," says Cooper. "I was working for myself as a creative strategist and writer and thought I'd take my work with me and see how it went. I went on to sail from Colombia across the Caribbean and there was a lot of adventure. My partner is from Germany and we settled in Europe for a while. And then eventually, the remote work took us to Bali, two years prior to Covid." The pair set up in Ubud which Cooper describes as "home to a thriving culture of creativity and wellbeing in the heart of nature".

Not everyone can point to such an adventurous conversion experience. Sydney-based freelance design director Sarah Gladwell is more typical of today's remote worker. The Aucklander was working in a Sydney office when Covid hit. She went home and has stayed home, working with clients in Australia and New Zealand, including Here magazine, because she has found she prefers it.

Bureaucracy set Lisbon-based Hamish Jackson-Mee on the remote path. He is now director of design for Paramount, "primarily on their sports media products".

When his US visa ran out, the New York company he had been working for wanted him to stay on, so he relocated to London, setting up his own design agency there, and freelanced for them.

Hamish Jackson-Mee and Rose Langbein work remotely from Portugal. Photo / Supplied

His partner, Rose Langbein, who works helping clients with branding, had a job in New York which ended with Covid. She managed to find other work that she continued remotely when the pair moved back to New Zealand, basing themselves in Wanaka. The move to Lisbon was partly prompted by a desire to base themselves somewhere that was the best of all possible worlds, including surfing, for which they share an enthusiasm.

Langbein, daughter of food legend Annabel, was used to flexible working styles: "When I was growing up my mum had an office attached to our family building. I could see working from home gives you a lot more flexibility because you can have mobility and freedom. I think a hybrid model would probably suit me best."

For Cooper, Covid meant that the ability to work remotely suddenly became a selling point.

"I was getting calls from calls from places like New York, Berlin, and San Francisco [e-commerce platform] Shopify, eBay and Rocket Lab in New Zealand."

This led ultimately to the For the People position, running their strategy team from a cabin at the top of a deer paddock in the Southern Alps. "They're recognised as one of the top five design studios internationally. They're based in Sydney, I'm based here, and we've got team and clients around the world."

For those of us who struggle with resetting our car clocks at the beginning and end of daylight saving, it sounds like an organisational nightmare, especially if you are in one time zone and clients are in another – or several others.

Jackson-Mee agrees: "I try to base myself on East Coast American hours, which means around midday to 11pm. But I've also got employees in South Korea, Australia, on the West Coast of America and in London, so there's a lot of different time zones going on."

For Langbein, it means being always available. New Zealand connections are the most challenging because we are as far away as it is possible to get from Portugal.

"It's annoying because it's often the clients that I speak with a lot. I'll be able to reply as soon as I wake up in the morning, and then I'll reply up until I go to bed at night. So I'm on for the most amount of that time that I can be."

Cooper says different activities suit different times, and he organises his schedule accordingly. Home is now on the outskirts of Queenstown, which is a couple of hours ahead of his Australian team, and he makes that time work for him: "It is really great to have a conversation like this interview, or to do really creative tasks, when there isn't the dings and buzzes of notifications. The other side of it is using that time to make sure you get in the walk or the exercise, because once the work starts it can be hard to stop."

Freelance design director Sarah Gladwell was working in a Sydney office when Covid hit. She went home and has stayed home. Photo / Supplied

Remote work is not an option for those who can't discipline themselves.

"At first I wasn't sure about it," says Gladwell, "because whenever I'd work from home I would just procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate. But I was forced into it and have adapted and now I much prefer it."

Remote working doesn't mean working alone. Jackson-Mee and Langbein share a workspace.

"I've got really good noise-cancelling headphones because Hamish is on calls for about 10 hours a day," says Langbein. "We were in a New York studio apartment when Covid happened, so we were really on top of each other. I'd have to go onto the fire escape or into the bathroom to take calls."

They have only just organised a dedicated workspace in their Lisbon dwelling. "We thought, if we can concentrate all our work energy into one room, we can create more of a boundary around it. Because when you are working remotely, you often end up working all the time, because you can. Your computer's just there and when you wake up you grab it."

Gladwell says "I am definitely part-hermit" but is keen to dispel any suggestion that she has wider antisocial tendencies – an accusation often levelled at people who prefer remote working. "My partner works from home as well. So, I'm not on my own. I do have someone to have lunch with and have a drink after work with."

Freelance design director Sarah Gladwell was working in a Sydney office when Covid hit. She went home and has stayed home. Photo / Supplied

The lack of same-space contact with other human beings is often described as a major drawback of remote working. But where there's a gap, there's a business opportunity to be filled. Air BnB has a whole section of remote experiences designed for working-from-home teams to enjoy. Zoom quiz nights organised by remote providers such as TriviaHub are increasingly popular.

Langbein says she misses the human contact, a feeling exacerbated by having only recently moved to Lisbon where the pair don't have a network. "Usually you have work as an opportunity to meet other people, but we don't have that yet."

Cooper echoes those sentiments: "It's important to find people around you. In Bali, it was good to have access to a co-working space when needed, as a way of creating social connections around work."

He schedules regular check-ins with his team. They even have a book club on Zoom.

"Sometimes it can be hard to have a consistent routine in remote work, but I find remote rituals like a daily walk, writing, or playing music can really help. Otherwise, it can be hard to find the boundaries between the personal and professional life."

This is not too much of a problem for Cooper, who has found time recently to complete meditation teacher training, and co-found a wellbeing start-up with his partner, focused on the relationship between creativity and rest.

The remote workers in this story all agreed that – even in cyber space, their physical location affects how they work.

"When you're in New York, you're in this New York mentality and mindset," says Langbein. "You're working so hard, and that's your entire identity and way of existing, and then you go to other countries, were work is less of a priority for people and you go into the streets, and feel the energy, and you're like: why am I really wound up?"

"It can be way more intense over here," says Gladwell of her Australian work. "Working from home means I'm not ordering take-out to the studio at 9pm or having to expense an Uber home."

Bali, says Cooper, is "a deeply spiritual place with some of the kindest and happiest people I've ever met … which feels different from being in the grind. That sort of contrast, particularly in creative work, can really help things."

It's all possible only because the technology exists to support it. But you also have to know how to use the technology to control your life, and not let it control you.

"Scheduling is good," says Jackson-Mee. "You can schedule an email or message to go out at a point in time where the message makes sense: at the start of their day or the end of their day or whenever. Then the momentum stays within everyone's time zones."

There's also what might be called TikTok for the office: "You can send short videos of yourself, where you're doing something on the computer and take the other person through a presentation or describing a problem. It creates a continuous movement, like working together, regardless of your time zone."

And that only works if the basics are right.

"We've only now got really good internet," says Langbein. "That' s really important when you're meeting a client and you want to come across as professional as possible. We were working out of Mexico for a while and it was just not viable. You're showing up to work and you're all pixelated."

"We're always on [interoffice chat system] Slack," says Gladwell. "And we also use a cloud platform called Miro, which is like a whiteboard where you can share work in progress."

Scheduling lets you control where and when messages of any kind are sent and received. After all, one of the advantages of remote working should be that any random can't stroll by your desk and start telling you about their latest great notion. Admin must also be affected. How did Cooper keep track of submitting his work, invoicing, and making sure he got paid while on his motorbike in South America and beyond?

"My partner has some funny photos of battling to find WiFi," he says. "On the bike, I'd just wait for a more stable connection in the next town to send things out." And multitasking becomes an art form: "You're the finance guy, you're the writer, you're the strategist, you're the administrator trying to find the best flights, and you're the meteorologist trying to figure out what the weather is going to do on the road ahead."

Although everyone appreciates the advantages they get out of working remotely, they're never saying never to going back to the old way.

"If it's something that I really want to do," says Gladwell. "If everything's right with it, the project is good, the team's good, the money's good, the timing's good, then yeah, it'll be something I'll consider. But I don't see myself at this stage accepting a long-term role in the office. I'm fortunate to have enough work - and remote work - to sustain me."