Let's Talk CPF

Is remote work for you? The realities of remote work from a digital nomad

• Let's Talk CPF • Episode 38

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Working in an office or from anywhere in the world– Which would you prefer?

With the introduction of more digital technologies, hear from our returning guest, Jeshua Soh, Principal at Decacorn Capital, entrepreneur and filmmaker on how he balances work while travelling, the challenges he faced and how remote work has changed his view on the future of work.    

Unknown:

Hey and welcome to Let's Talk CPF a podcast where we bring conversations on CPF to your years, brought to you by the CPF board. This podcast will answer common questions, offer tips, and feature interviews with industry experts on CPF and financial planning. Thanks for listening, and let's get straight into today's episode

Hari:

Welcome to another episode of Let's Talk CPF. I'm Hari from the CPF board. After two years of adapting to the work from home lifestyle, we have gradually been asked to head back to the office. For the lucky ones. They follow a hybrid arrangement such as leaving to go back to the office on a certain number of days and working from home for the rest of the week. However, as compared to before the pandemic, we see a surge in some companies becoming more remote. In the previous episode, we had Jeshua, an entrepreneur investor and an avid traveler share money saving tips while planning for your next vacation. We have him back here again today to share his experience working remotely while traveling as a digital nomad. So Jeshua, you mentioned that you were an accidental entrepreneur, tell me more about yourself and your businesses.

Jeshua:

So I'm a filmmaker by training, an accidental entrepreneur, investor, and also an avid traveler. I started my journey very much like most Singaporeans, you know, growing up in Singapore, going to school trying to get good grades. And I would say that along the way, I decided that my first deviation from the standard journey was dropping out of school. So going to study filmmaking at the age of 17, with nothing more than a PSLE certificate that kind of came along with working freelance and contributed to an accumulation of some equipment for filmmaking that I started my first company to rent out. And that company, again, why it is accidental one was because along the way, some of the friends and associates of mine also realized that he had a lot of equipment sitting around and collecting dust when they weren't using it. And we started a platform to allow people to rent this equipment to each other. So it's kind of like an Airbnb for the media and events industry. Along the way, I started another company, which was called Startup media. So that was because I had no formal background in business or in starting businesses, per se. And I wanted to learn more about this field. So rather than going for a university degree, or paying for courses, or consultants or advisors, if I could involve the expertise that I have in media with the subject matter that I was interested to learn, that was like getting paid to go to school, right, I spend more of my time working with startups in the ecosystem, to help them with their marketing with their videos, photographs, pitching to investors, and so on and so forth. These companies did quite well for themselves, and we eventually needed to hire people. So that's how I started my third company, which was cross works in Myanmar. And why I did that was because I couldn't really find people that were good enough and was willing to stay, the turnover rate was very high and unemployment rate in Singapore is very low. So going with freelancers, they may choose to leave after a certain period of time, because they have a better opportunity or because they want to do something else with their time. And I eventually thought I needed to build a dedicated team that was offshore, but only working for me. So that again, drew some interest from some of my other associates and friends who saw what I was doing. And then they said, you know, can I put some people in your office, and then we accidentally again became more of hiring as a service staff platform. So today, they act more like an extension of the HR team for more than two dozen companies to help them to solve, find remote employees, and manage them to provide a conducive environment for these remote workers to contribute to the Singapore companies and reduce the costs of local companies as well.

Hari:

So previously, you mentioned that you're also a principal or investor at a venture capital fund, what is venture capital?

Jeshua:

So venture capital basically means we try and take a small stake in a company that we hope will grow into a very large return. But of course, this being risk capital, the chances of failure are also very high. And basically, we are looking for what could really change the world in the next 10 or 20 years, rather than how we can make a quick flip or how we can get a stable you like real estate or bonds or things like foreign exchange investments.

Hari:

Interesting. From what you've mentioned, so far, you've been keeping very, very busy. So very curious, apart from managing your businesses when you were overseas. How did you manage to work remotely in that job while you were traveling?

Jeshua:

I think part of it comes to this being something I've been doing even before the pandemic having companies both in Singapore and Myanmar, when I was in Singapore, I will have to be working remotely for the Myanmar company. And when I was in Myanmar, I have to be working remotely with If that Singapore team to manage these two companies, so I was already quite used to the idea of different time zones, different tools that I could use online. And that adjustment wasn't one that I had to make. Obviously, it was to a much larger scale, given that I was crossing maybe more than 10 20 time zones, eventually, throughout that whole that demands duration. But the fundamental thing was to stay flexible, right to make sure that I organized the travels around the work, knowing that there's some priorities that I have to make, if there are certain high priority meetings, important schedules that I need to keep, then other things have to be planned around that prioritizing those affairs and organizing my personal plans around that is the starting principle. And then, of course, making sure that in every of these endeavors, all of the time that I allocate to each task is also efficiently spent. So I think being on the road also gives you a bit of clarity, in terms of how you want to spend your time, because if you are doing things just for the sake of doing it, and you know that you would rather be spending looking at beautiful scenery or exploring a new city, then you will probably not do the things that are not worth doing, right. Because you just want to do the things which are the highest impact and most value for your time. That kind of also helps add a perspective to me in terms of the work that I'm doing, traveling and working actually reinforces what's important to you.

Hari:

Ah, that's an interesting take on how working while traveling gives you clarity and kind of forces you to prioritize what's really important. So the eyes of some, people may consider you as a YOLO person, but that's certainly not true from your calculated thought process at every step of the trip. You know, you're far from Yolo. So what were some of the challenges you faced while traveling and working? And how do you deal with timezone differences?

Jeshua:

timezone wise, I think I didn't have that much of a challenge given that we were interfacing a lot with our counterparts in Europe and US. So actually being in Singapore would mean that we had to stay up really late or wake up really early for some of the US calls, I was quite thankful to spend a lot of time in the Central Eastern European timezone, where it's like sitting nicely in between both Asia and us. In terms of practical challenges, I think the ability to find consistent and strong internet connection or Wi Fi connection was definitely a pressing issue, given that a lot of these places had never been before. And even if they had advertised on their website or in the booking platforms that Wi Fi was available, you always had to go down to the location and see on that day, whether it was available then or something happened, you know, the router was out or there's a local outage of the substation, and electricity wasn't there. So there were times where I had to actually cancel bookings upon arrival, because they didn't have the facilities that they stated in the website. And it was very important for me to have these facilities. And then other times I had to rely on hotspot, especially when I was cycling up from South Africa to Zimbabwe and living in tents. And that was another unexpected experience because I was supposed to be taking a bus there. But the bus was canceled because of COVID. And then the trains had few 100 kilometers of power lines stolen by mafia. So I had no other choice but to cycle up. And along the way, a lot of these guest houses were not open and I had to stay in at 10. So in those trips, of course, to work with my hotspot and buy a lot of data, but knowing that it will be a temporary thing. And it was kind of a good adventure for me as well. I just did it anyway, another challenge would definitely be looking for reliable transport. Sometimes we are used to things coming on time and turning up according to schedule in Singapore. But I faced a situation in Egypt where the bus came five hours late. And so I was stranded at a bus stop on arrival at 2am with no places open. Thankfully, I didn't have to do work on a weekend. But you know, if that had been a workday and I had to do a meeting, then probably I had to check myself into a really expensive accommodation channel 24/7 reception instead of the regular hostels that I would frequent. But these are prices that you have to pay some time

Hari:

remote work, you see there's something that's attractive these days. What would you recommend to someone who's looking to land a job that allows them to work remotely as

Jeshua:

I think I can only speak for myself from my experience. well. The easiest way to find a remote job is to be your own boss. Because if you are the business owner or the founder of the company, obviously you set the culture and you set the rules. Even if you work for a company that today might allow you to work remotely or semi remotely. Tomorrow, the restrictions could be different next year, they could require you to come back to the office. But then of course there are companies that have today remote first mindset and culture whereby they are open to having you work from anywhere as long as you fulfill your KPI or you're in a role that can be done remotely anywhere. So looking out for those forward looking environments and roles that can be done in such a fashion is definitely extremely important for someone who wants to travel and work at the same time. I will say that typically telltale signs of such companies are smaller in scale, you know, with maybe less than 10 years of existence, but these are more like symptoms right? There could be some old companies which are very forward looking and you know, like to embrace change and take into account the new developments or working arrangements that could benefit them as an organization. But finding a job is also as much about the individual, right, how the individual is ready to work in such an environment, which is less structured, less supervised, having less oversight, and more results oriented rather than process oriented, to sitting in the office from nine to five every day, and just going through the motions, even though there's no work, I'm sure there's a lot of people who can relate to that. But working remotely is like you're on the clock, whenever there's work, at least for me, because I don't see such a clear line between work and life. I work when there's work. And if there's no work, then what's the point of being on my screen pretending to work and wasting time. It's a very different lifestyle, I think the individual has to also be ready for it as much as the company needs to be ready for it.

Hari:

So how is being on the road change the way you view the future of work and travel?

Jeshua:

I think he has reinforced my belief that remote working is here to stay. And it's a growing trend. A lot of the jobs that we want to do these days has been taken over by robots and AI. And that trend is only going to continue to increase people who want to be ahead of that curve. I think we need to learn how to use this AI how to use these robots. How to Become one with technology and use it as an application rather than be the robots of the people doing the repetitive tasks. If not, we will soon find ourselves to be out of a job. That being said, I think a lot of the essential workforce laborers and frontline staff, these are still going to be necessary to be done in person for some time to come. That really sort of revealed to me that we need to be on the right side of change to help more people to see that technology is a huge disrupter and is going to be here to stay and how the ones who are sort of not able to harness all of this disruptive technology power be part of that remote workforce can make meaningful contributions.

Hari:

I like what you said about being on the right side of change. With the introduction of more digital technologies. The remote work culture is definitely catching on. While there are perks being a digital nomad, it also presents its own challenges, such as keeping up with changing restrictions in different countries and getting a stable internet connection to get work done. being disciplined to prioritize important work while being flexible is also very important. Jeshua, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your experiences on how you manage working remotely while traveling. If you have not already done so, check out the previous podcast for money saving tips while planning for your vacation. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Hari and you're listening to Let's Talk CPF

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