The Suitcase Office: What Digital Nomads Can Teach Us About Location-Independent Work

By Koen Blanquart

Once upon a time, working from home was rewarding, the way to maintain our work-life balance. But then came Covid; working from home became the norm and, for many, the very thing that gets in the way of a balanced life. All back to the office then?

Specialists agree that tomorrow's workplace will be location-independent and even transnational. Location-independent work offers numerous advantages. It answers employees' demand for more autonomy and creates unseen opportunities in the war on talent. And what's more, it makes companies more agile and competitive because the limitations of office space, national borders, and the traditional (and local) 38-hour week disappear.

In The Suitcase Office, digital nomad Koen Blanquart shows that rather than location-independent work, people and processes get in the way of a healthy work-life balance and smooth cooperation. He shows managers how to set up their operations so that agendas and projects are managed efficiently and effectively, even in a transnational context. He sets companies on the path to generating more flexibility, time, and satisfaction among their teams without skimping on results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9780997759686

Book preview

Introduction

Please, don’t ask me where I live

Wanderlust is not an officially recognized disease. However, it has been a driving force for most of my adult life: a quest to be exposed to new cultures. Not only because I am inquisitive but also because my creative side is always triggered when I can take in fresh impressions.

It was, therefore, not surprising that I evolved towards a nomadic life.

Fortunately, I found assignments and clients as a consultant who agreed to let me play a strategic role in their organization, even if I wasn’t in the office daily (or weekly): visionary business leaders who allowed me to work partially remote.

A nomadic existence sounds like a dream for many, and I must admit that there are many attractive aspects to that life. Who wouldn’t want to work and live in more exotic places? At the same time, it can put you firmly to the test. The social fabric of family and friends that we can fall back on in our homeland is suddenly non-existent. And while the good days in this life can be extra lovely, the opposite is also true: the more challenging days are often extra hard. Combining travel and work has been one of the most extraordinary experiences. Many unique experiences and some (more than one would like) unexpected challenges. Like going on a first date and finding out that a fairly typical question like, So, where do you live? suddenly requires an unusual and somewhat complicated answer. Can you imagine that such questions suddenly become difficult to answer? How do you tell someone you just met that you’re voluntarily homeless? Preferably without them running out the door in the next second!

I traveled around without a home base for much of my traveling life. But it gradually became clear to me that it gave me inner peace to have a place where I could return whenever I wanted. And for me, that place has been in New York for over a decade.

Why this book (and why now)

Although I oversaw a global territory earlier in my traveling days, my boss wanted me in the office in New York every day. He believed my example of traveling and working on the road would create the wrong impression on the team. The ensuing discussions made me realize that this debate was not about giving employees the best place and conditions to get work done and generate value. It was a game of control, aka butts-in-seats management.

When I can see my employees in their office or cubicle, a butts-in-seats manager thinks, I am making sure they deliver their best. The butts-in-seats manager ignores the possibility that employees might dislike their office setting. He forgets that their technology at work may be inferior to their home technology. While the manager can show he managed to get the team into the office, managing presence does not guarantee outcomes and output.

Creativity, or a person’s daily rhythm, cannot be forced like an on-off switch. I, for example, do my best work early in the morning. A routine of meditation and (not enough) sports after waking up gets me ready to be productive long before the classical working day starts. From the perspective of a butts-in-seats manager, these activities are not valuable. Butts-in-seats managers expect staff to be creative and productive between 9 am and noon, pause their brains for lunch and have another uninterrupted stretch of productivity between 1 and 6 pm.

Creativity, or a person’s daily rhythm, cannot be forced like an on-off switch.

Since that discussion with my manager, I’ve lived an increasingly transnational life. Sometimes, career changes motivate my next move, like an opportunity to start consulting in another country. It could also be for personal reasons like having enough of the lousy weather somewhere or hearing about a group of friends who moved to a lovely location. These moves evolved in 2015 into an almost permanent life on the road. By 2016, I found myself that year in 46 different countries. I get inspired by arriving in new places, but that rhythm was too much inspiration.

While traveling, I started researching the concept of Digital Nomadism. I had two reasons to pursue this research: I wanted to learn more about this phenomenon, who these people were, and what inspired them to live this lifestyle. And, since I was a digital nomad myself, I wanted to understand how to make the most of this lifestyle.

I learned that individual motives for becoming a nomad differ. Most of these location-independent workers showed a common desire to control their work-life balance and be the master of their work environment. They told me they didn’t have to make difficult choices to prioritize the things in life they held dear: building a career and having an exciting life of seeing the world.

I found that these people perceived their lives as happier and more balanced than their office counterparts. They felt in control and, therefore, more responsible for delivering the best possible outcomes. I saw that the results and output generated by a remote workforce were not inferior to the work outputs generated in a classical professional environment.

I was about to finish my research and write a book about digital nomads when COVID hit. Suddenly, I saw butts-in-seats managers scrambling to adapt to a new way of working. But rather than adopting the best practices remote workers could have taught them, they focused on ensuring everyone had a laptop and some (video-)conference tool. But I felt they failed to understand that the times they were entering allowed them to go beyond a digital project. Their organizations would benefit far more if they addressed the differences in organizing work around a more distributed model, rather than transposing office life to a home working situation.

That’s when I started shifting my research, focusing on what business leaders can learn from digital nomads, who have been location-independent workers for years. There is vast potential and momentum to shift organizations’ ways of working to survive the COVID period and prepare for the next normal.

That shift requires more than just deploying technology. It means reevaluating processes, success metrics for teams, and work organization.

Therefore, this book is not a survival guide for the COVID crisis. It is a compass for a post-COVID era.

How did we get here?

The novel coronavirus did not wholly change the way we do business. We are not living in a branching timeline like a science fiction novel. What COVID did change was the time horizon. The shift that happened in 2020 was already underway. The movement from analog to the digital workplace was re-situated from comfortably in the future to just around the corner. Suddenly, it was no longer the next generation’s problem.

By an analog workplace, I’m referring to the nine-to-five, clock-in and clock-out, chat-by-the-watercooler setting that is a defining characteristic of office life. This setting was codified in movies and television. However, just because something is set in stone (or celluloid) doesn’t mean it will always endure. Times change, and the jokes and setting of The Office will become as alien to people of the future as the whaling towns of Moby Dick‘s New England seem to us.

Our current transition period matters because many have made and will continue to make missteps along the way. There are clear fundamentals of office culture that have no one-to-one counterpart in a remote work environment. These techniques will require a total reevaluation and rethink of what it means to be a worker, what it means to have a corporate culture, and even what it means to have an HR or management department.

This book is about being in the middle. Being in the middle feels awkward because no one likes to be in a place without resolution. Most pundits, consultants, and historians like to think of beginnings and endings. Specific dates and events are anointed with particular relevance as the mark of a new age: witness 476, the last year of the Roman Empire, or the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible, which birthed a new era of mass literacy and modern intellectual culture. But history is a poor scriptwriter and rarely has such tidy bookends. Rome continued for at least a century after its fall and was falling for at least a century prior. And since the Gutenberg Bible, an entire history of bookmaking spans the uncomfortable growing pains from handwritten craft to a mass-produced products.

In the case of the COVID pandemic, many will mark the Events of 2020 as The Beginning of the Remote Workspace, or perhaps, The Death of The Traditional Office. The beginning implies an exciting uncharted frontier of new and untried ideas. In contrast, the death narrative suggests the old ways are not only past but fossilized. Neither is true. The seeds of this new period were sprouting from the internet’s earliest days. The Gutenberg Bible analogy holds: we are in a similar awkward and clunky period, that historical uncanny valley sometimes called incunabula where printers still outline their books for a scribe to illuminate, and televisions and radios are sold in wooden cabinets as furniture. Much still needs to change in the legal and technological business climate for the transition to reach maturity.

When we read history, we often only get the greatest hits, with the tried-and-true work of decades compressed into a transition so abrupt it seems as though it occurred overnight. Humanity went to sleep in the simple religious fields of the age of faith and woke up to find himself a new factory job in the industrial era. But history is never that quick or straightforward. The road from one period to the next is often winding, with many dead ends and false starts. You may think you invested in the new Model T, only to discover your investment is closer to the new Betamax or a 1970s video phone.

Certain technologies will falter because they are too far ahead of their time to be helpful, like Blockbuster’s attempt at a digital streaming service back when Netflix was still just sending DVDs through the mail. In addition, there will be stopgap and temporary technologies during a transition period. Early consumer electronics weren’t bulky for their own sake. However, homeowners were still uncertain about the place for their radio and televisions. It was easier to incorporate them into their lives as pieces of furniture than as the sleek plastic designs we are accustomed to now.

Because we are in a transitional era, we need to approach our world with clear-headed humility about both the past and the future. We should learn from the past and be mindful of the future, understanding that many of our reforms, changes, and techniques will only be used as stepping stones. And we must be mindful that we, too, are stopgaps. Generation X and Millennials have a foot in both worlds, paving the way for future generations that will never have seen the old ways. We cannot expect to set the model for all future work. Still, we will set a precedent. Even if we don’t get everything right, the way we manage problems will allow others to build on our efforts.

This is why I think it is helpful to look at the past when grappling with institutional changes. Either you attempt to make an impact on the future, or someone else will make you change to meet the present. History is filled with examples of companies and governments that saw the writing on the wall and attempted to change themselves before others altered the landscape for them.

Even if we don’t get everything right, the way we manage problems will allow others to build on our efforts.

The Hays Code was a set of movie-making codes established by the major Hollywood studios in the 1930s. As movie-making evolved from Edison’s little gadget into a major industry producing films viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, many became concerned with the influence studios had on their children and society. In response, governments sought to impose heavy regulations. They began to interfere with filmmaking, creating boards that would monitor and censor films to ensure they maintained the proper ideological and national character, often to the