‘Location-based identity is no longer valid’: Firms say remote working has eroded geographical barriers

By Jessica Davies

The rise of working from home has meant that people are working from anywhere and everywhere. As long as deadlines get met, invoices get paid and Zoom backgrounds are sufficiently professional looking, geography has come to mean very little to some bosses — which is why places like 80-degrees-and-sunny Miami have become such hot destinations in the pandemic.

As a result, companies once inextricably linked — in identity and in spirit — to centers of industry like New York and San Francisco have essentially become firms from nowhere.

“I don’t think it matters where our team members are working from,” said Jonathan Hanson, co-founder and chief creative officer of the agency Unconquered, which has done work for brands like Nike and Lululemon. While the agency’s home base is in New York, where Hanson lives, his people are scattered across the country. Living in the city “has an effect on my personal identity, but not the business,” he said, adding that his company was created “around a clear set of brand values, not a physical city. This has given us a genuine understanding of who we are and what we are about while opening up a larger talent pool.”

“The pandemic has brought with it a renewed sense of globalization,” noted Thomas Hogebol, founder and executive chairman of The North Alliance, a group of marketing agencies based in Copenhagen which has done work for Scandinavian Airlines and the Stockholm subway system. “Everything is now just a video conference away,” he said. “International brands need no longer limit themselves to local talent alone.”

While being dispersed has been challenging at times for his teams, they ultimately have embraced versatility, he observed, finding that “location needn’t be a barrier to turning the new normal into the new remarkable.”

While still maintaining its home office across the Hudson River from Manhattan in Edgewater, New Jersey, Daniel Snow, co-founder and CEO of The Snow Agency, illustrates just how little location matters — he relocated to Miami during the pandemic and is opening an office there. “Like many, we were scattered, working from home and feeling disconnected and unsure of how things would pan out for us, but we turned that into a positive,” said Snow, whose company has worked with brands like the athletic-wear maker Alpha.

“The honest answer is that tech companies, unlike many others, can work with a remote workforce and work well. This has been the case many have been making for the past several years — it’s just that the pandemic expedited the shift,” said Deepu Prakash, senior VP, process and technology innovation at software developer Fingent.

But the story is very different for those companies just starting out. “Startups very much need a headquarters in one of the tech meccas, as they have more venture capitalists [to meet] and it does make securing funding easier, even in this day of online meetings,” he explained. Startups also benefit from their proximity to the tech giants – companies like Google that can invest seed …read more

Source:: Digiday