Remote Year's New CEO Sees Opportunity in Changing Global Work Habits
Skift Take
"There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen," Lenin once said. That seems true for the concept of remote working. Decades of talk about a revolution in remote working suddenly became a global experiment. So how will Remote Year adapt for workers hopscotching destinations?
It's hard to think of a company more affected by the pandemic in both good and bad ways than Remote Year, which announced a new CEO and debuted a new website on Tuesday.
When Remote Year launched in 2014, working remotely was a niche concept that fewer than one out of 20 full-time employees had experimented with. Remote Year, which handles the logistics so that workers can hopscotch from place to place worldwide, has merely served 3,000 customers since its start.
But the pandemic has prompted a global test of "distributed workforces," with many companies adapting systems to make remote working commonplace. Remote Year's market appears to have scaled up dramatically. In the UK alone, the number of job postings that allowed remote working rose about 300 percent year-over-year, to 80,700 in November 2020, according to the recruiter New Street Consulting Group. If there are expanded armies of remote workers, can this U.S.-based startup help supply some of the infrastructure and services?
Yet in the near-term, the pandemic has made international travel unpredictable and often impractical. In a sign of the times, Israel on Monday hermetically sealed itself from tourists for at least the rest of the month.
Remote Year had to suspend its operations in March 2020. Selina, the l
