How Remote Work Helps This New Brunswicker Build A Global Career From Home
SAINT JOHN – Many people have been working remotely since Covid-19 shut down office spaces, but for Hilary Smith, working from home is not new. In the last three years, the arrangement has allowed her to travel the world, and later, return to live in New Brunswick while maintaining an international career.
Smith, who lives in Quispamsis with her husband, is currently the growth and marketing lead for Roger, a growing fintech startup headquartered in Denmark and the U.S.
“There are two offices, but there really is no difference between being in the office or being remote, there’s a huge portion of remote workers,” she said. “As long as we have a good internet connection, and as long as we have the capacity to be in a place that’s going to let us work for that seven-to-nine hour period every day that we need to get our tasks done, then we’re good to go.”
She says Atlantic Canada is “the perfect spot” to work with both markets.
“You’re four hours from the west coast where a lot of startups in fintech are based, and then you’re about five hours from central Europe, that’s where another huge portion of tech companies are based. So you’re in this perfect time zone where you’re having your meetings at 11 [a.m.] instead of 7 a.m. or 6 p.m.”
Smith went remote after working in a corporate role in Montreal for a few years. That job in Montreal had led her to leave New Brunswick. But wanting more flexibility to travel and become “a digital nomad,” Smith and her husband decided to look for remote jobs.
“I was really looking to leave office life, looking to leave corporate life and really getting into high growth startups,” she said.
PODCAST: Are Digital Nomads The Future Of The Maritime Workforce?
She says applying for remote positions means you’re competing with the whole world, so applicants have to “go above and beyond” and it’s especially important to showcase communication and organization skills.
Smith found work at Jungle Scout, a tech company offering Amazon sales platforms for entrepreneurs, with offices in Vancouver, Austin, TX., and Shenzen, China. Her husband also found a remote job. Soon after, the pair left Canada to travel around the world for six months.
“It was an amazing experience and I certainly wouldn’t trade it,” she said. “But something that I really did learn while traveling the world is how nice it is to have a home base in a place like Atlantic Canada, where the cost of living is low enough that if you have a good job, you can still combine travel and homeownership in the same place.”
Smith says while the living cost in Montreal is affordable for a renter without a car, she didn’t think she would be able to afford a home there. Besides, with their families based in New Brunswick, the couple wanted to settle close by.
Still, she says being able to work remotely for multi-national startups was “instrumental” in their decision to return to New Brunswick because they didn’t find as many opportunities like that for marketers at home. She says often, the impact of marketing is still overlooked in traditional industries in New Brunswick and so they don’t offer the kind of salary Smith was looking for.
“If I didn’t have a remote job, I probably wouldn’t live here. Because living here and working remotely still enables me to have the kind of job and career that I want, but also the kind of lifestyle that I want,” she said.
“I want to live in a place like New Brunswick where I’m close to my family, I can own a home, I can really be close to nature,” she said. “But I really didn’t want to have to take a low salary, essentially. So having a remote job allows me to work for these global companies that have these growing customer bases and really value that kind of work.”
In addition to the flexibility of location, working remotely also allowed her to save money on wardrobe and gas, as well as cut commute time. Because she has more time, she also spends less on lunches or dinners outside.
“When you’re at home you might be able to, during your lunch break, slice up a few veggies for dinner. So that kind of flexibility really saves you a lot in terms of time, in terms of cost, it’s really a savings overall in terms of efficiency,” she said.
Smith says she’s a social person in the office setting, and at first, she thought she’d miss the social environment. But she found a similar connection with her remote teams.
“If you go into a remote company where people treat you like you’re human first, and not just a couple of pixels and a microphone, then you really still feel like you’re getting that human connection,” she said.
Her employers also offered corporate retreats or visits to their offices as part of onboarding and team-building, although this was before Covid-19 restricted travel.
For instance, Smith was able to go to Budapest, Hungary, with the whole Jungle Scout team two months into her job there. At Roger, staff are allowed its staff to go to the offices and meet everybody face-to-face.
At home in Saint John, she’s a regular at the co-working space U Station and local cafes.
“Throughout the pandemic I’ve maintained my subscription to U Station…it has the benefits of being a place where I can meet people that do the kind of thing I do, and it’s also a really nice, beautiful space and it’s a way to get out of your home,” she said.
An Opportunity For Atlantic Canada
For former New Brunswick Premier and current Deputy Chairman of TD Bank Frank McKenna, the fact that Covid-19 has pushed more businesses to allow remote work is a “huge opportunity” for the region. McKenna himself is a remote worker at the moment, working from his home in Cap-Pelé.
“I don’t think working remotely is a permanent feature for everybody in every circumstance, but I think it’s going to be part of our lifestyle in some respects going forward for a long time, in fact forever,” he said in an interview for Huddle’s Home Office podcast.
“All of a sudden, jurisdictions like ours here that are remote, remote from the towers of New York and Toronto, provide opportunities for people to live remotely and work in challenging occupations. That’s new. We’ve never really gone to the extent we have before.”
He says many of the staff at TD’s finance office in Dieppe are teleworking during the pandemic. Allowing remote work means workers can have “the enviable quality of life that come with living here in Atlantic Canada,” which includes low housing and living cost, and access to nature and tight-knit communities, while working their preferred jobs.
“That is a huge win for places like ours. In order to supplement it, we have to make sure we have the best in class, in the world, high-speed broadband so that people can do whatever they want from the region.”
PODCAST: A Conversation With Frank McKenna From His Home Office In Cap-Pelé
Atlantic Provinces Economic Council senior policy analyst Fred Bergman sees similar opportunities for a region that, before the pandemic, was facing labour shortages and an aging population.
He says remote work could give more options not just for younger people like Smith and her husband to stay in the region, but also flexibility for older people who may not want to live in urban centres to find work.
“If you have unique skills and there are limited job opportunities for you with that skillset…the only other option is to move. So what better outcome for Atlantic Canada than to keep them here and them being able to find a job for their skillset. It’s a win-win in that sense, it’s good for the individual as well,” he said.
“During the current environment, in a pandemic, it also gives you the ability to work around some of the restrictions around interprovincial mobility, for example.”
Even if they’re not doing work for local companies, the fact that they still live in the region means they’ll spend most of their income and pay taxes in the region.
For businesses, opting for remote work could save them the effort of ensuring physical distancing at the office, and some money. However, Bergman says employees and employers may have to negotiate the expenses that fall on workers as they use power, Internet and other utilities in their own home for work.
“If you’re not renting or buying office space for example, you don’t have to pay that rent or monthly mortgage on the building. No lease cost. Maybe you don’t have to pay property tax now. You don’t have to pay for utilities, electricity and heat, or the water bill,” Bergman said. “So there are options for savings there, assuming you can adjust.”
‘Natural Barriers’
Not all jobs can be done remotely, though, and it’s still too early to assess the larger economic implications of teleworking in Atlantic Canada, says Bergman.
“It could help address some of the labour shortage issues, but the ability to work from home is higher in some industries and lower in other industries, so that solution’s not going to work for all sectors,” he said.
Those working in sectors like finance, professional services and education, for instance, can likely do their work remotely. But those in retail, manufacturing, tourism and aquaculture are less likely to be able to do that.
According to a Statistics Canada report in May, the sudden transition to working from home could serve as a catalyst for a new way of doing business in the coming years. Overall, 38.9 percent of Canadian workers are in jobs that can possibly be done from home. As of the last week of March, Statistics Canada’s survey showed around 39.1 percent of workers were teleworking.
In contrast, between 2000 and 2018, the percentage of employees usually doing any work from home varied between 10 percent and 13 percent, suggesting that “there was unused capacity in the economy for telework before the pandemic began,” the agency noted.
Still, there are “natural barriers” to remote work arrangements besides from the type of jobs, Bergman said. For instance, a lack of good IT infrastructure, including high-speed internet and equipment like printers and laptops, would hinder someone from doing their work remotely.
Remote work capacities also vary across provinces. For example, Statistics Canada noted that Newfoundland and Labrador has low telework capacities because there’s a relatively larger share of workers in mining, oil and gas extraction. For P.E.I., the inability to telework in the agricultural industry may help explain its low capacity. Workers who are more financially vulnerable also appear to have the lowest telework capacities, according to Statistics Canada.
Work-Life Balance
Statistics Canada expects the increase in remote work arrangements to have far-reaching social and economic implications, including less traffic and air pollution, for instance. But, the full effect on workers’ productivity, work-life balance and mental health are yet to be seen.
Bergman says, in general, he’s heard that people are more productive because they have more time. But during the pandemic, with daycares and schools being closed, parents who are working from home also had added stress.
For Smith, it’s important that she keeps strict boundaries when it comes to work-life balance. With a high-pressure job and a lot on her to-do list, she says it could be very easy to work 14-to-15-hour days. She tries not to start her work day before 8 a.m. unless there is something urgent. And she tries to finish around 5.30 p.m. and check in with her team a couple of times in the evening.
“I always try to do something to separate my day from my evening, and going for a walk seems to be the thing that helps me,” she said. “Just being a good project manager for your own life is really important – being able to decide what you need to get done, when you need to get it done, whether your have an app or some kind of system, just making sure you block off good time to do deep work and then maybe the rest of the time for those back and forth communication and meetings.”