HOT DESKING

As the pandemic moves into 2021, countries are offering options so you can set up your remote office somewhere more appealing

- NIGEL TISDALL

Are you reading this at home? Perhaps in the spare room/kitchen table/garden shed “office” that has been your improvised workspace for most of this year? Poleaxed by the pandemic, many of us have had to adjust to a strange new era of business travel – one abruptly shorn of getting on planes and going to offices and where the business day is now conducted almost entirely via electronic screens. The trend towards remote working has been rapidly accelerated (even Zoomed) by Covid-19, along with the dreamy thought that we might as well do this somewhere warm and uplifting – a lifestyle change that is now being encouraged by exotic destinations ranging from Anguilla to Georgia, inviting us to up laptops and “work from paradise”.

Doing so is worth considering, given that the technology exists to allow work from almost anywhere and that Covid-19 isn’t going away. As Professor Sir John Bell, a leading immunologist and Regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, has put it: “There’s going to be lots of this virus around for a long time, probably forever.”

At the same time, working remotely is going mainstream. Microsoft has said it will allow staff to do this permanently, even from another country if approved. Germany plans to make working from home a legal right, while the Welsh government wants to see “around 30 per cent of the workforce working remotely on a regular basis”. Pontypridd or Bora Bora? Now that is a question.