“This week, I telework.” While the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the daily lives of all of us, it has significantly changed the lives of the majority of employees. Companies that allow their staff to work from home are increasingly attracted to this new organisation, finding that it even has a positive impact on the productivity of their employees. But what happens when these same companies understand that, no matter how many kilometres are needed, what is done remotely can be done on the other side of the world? The arrival of telemigration, accelerated by the increasing use of teleworking, is already disrupting the economy and the international labour market. Deciphering this revolution, which fascinates analysts around the world as much as it worries.
How is telemigration defined?
The term was created in 2019 by Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics in Geneva, in his essay “The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work”. The economist recounts the impact of globalization and technological advances on employees and workers. Referring to globalization 4.0, he defines telemigration as people belonging to one nation, and working in the offices of another. It is no surprise that this new era that we are going through today has largely been accelerated by the health crisis and the expansion of teleworking, coupled with videoconferencing tools and increasingly powerful machine translation.
Some advantages of telemigration
Cost savings:
On the one hand, both employers and employees can save on travel costs associated with daily travel (whether local or international) and daily expenses of employees during their working days in the office. On the other hand, this also means savings for companies which save on office rental and infrastructure costs. (see below)
Improving skills:
Working with colleagues and clients from other countries can improve employees’ language skills and help them better understand the other cultures they are dealing with. This can benefit them in their professional as well as personal development.
Employers also have access to a wider range of skilled workers from around the world who meet the hiring criteria, and can more easily find candidates with specific and in-demand skills.
Flexibility at work:
By allowing telemigrated employees to work from home or another location of their choice, they gain a high degree of flexibility in terms of work and organisation, further improving work-life balance.
Reduction of carbon footprint:
It should be noted that telemigration also indirectly contributes to the reduction of traffic in urban areas as well as greenhouse gas emissions, as employees reduce their physical travel required to get to their workplace.
How is telemigration disrupting the global labour market?
Is remote migration so advantageous for companies? The financial and fiscal incentives are not negligible, to the point that one might wonder why this new form of relocation did not spread earlier in our countries. Indeed, since it is no longer necessary to force its employees to go to the office, why not relocate these positions abroad and thus make substantial savings (premises, canteen, etc.)? By transferring a position in a country to labour ten to twenty, or sometimes even thirty times less expensive, the company already saves in labour costs and productivity. If we consider that on average nearly 37% of jobs are tele workable in Europe, this is a game changer.
Remote work is now acquired within most companies and it has even become an HR argument for some. Employers are less suspicious, and recruiting abroad is becoming almost a trivialized practice. The relocation of jobs is scary but it is no longer as taboo as it used to be, and so much the better if it is virtual!
The tele migrant, this new player in the labour market
Another point that challenges economists is the profile of tele migrants. They are engineers, accountants, programmers and architects, i.e. highly qualified profiles who find themselves in direct competition with talent and freelancers from emerging countries. Tele migrants in 2021 are able to adapt to jobs requiring a high level of education, or even to occupy strategic positions in a company. Language barriers are no longer a barrier to employment, in a world where machine translation competes with human translation.
We then realize how thin the line between teleworking and relocation is. By relocating executive jobs abroad, we are also witnessing more significant spin-offs than they seem at first glance. Thus, taking a liking to teleworking, many urban managers have preferred to settle in rural areas, quieter and with a better quality of life. Did they really still need to stay in the big cities? This demetropolisation injects new dynamism into the small and medium-sized towns that local authorities have been looking forward to. In short, it is an indirect way of reducing spatial inequalities in certain countries.
In conclusion
Our societies and economies are changing, both in their structure and in their organization. But this small revolution on the move should not be seen as a threat. It opens us up to a new way of understanding globalization and may be an opportunity for certain sectors and services to make themselves more accessible and therefore ultimately create more jobs.
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