Working remotely: ‘I was secretly working abroad for a month — my boss found out only on Zoom’

With remote working a more reliable feature of many jobs, people are finding it easier to travel without taking time off. Photo / 123rf

When Sam (name has been changed), 26, spent a month in Spain this summer, he didn’t plan to let his manager know he had left the country. That was, until a colleague let slip on his whereabouts a week and a half in, during a Zoom call. Sam says his manager “just told me to make sure I got all my work done”.

He certainly did. Between an hour of yoga and meditation every morning, an hour-long walk after lunch, more yoga in the evening and dinners out with friends at night, Sam reckons he did about three hours’ work a day — but says this was more than enough time to make sure he pulled his weight.

“I had a lot less to do than usual, so I did a lot less,” he says. His manager made no complaints.

Sam is untethered to an office. Before the pandemic, the company he works for was headquartered in a large British city, but now he and his colleagues work from home fulltime, meeting only once or twice a month at most.

He has now taken three on-the-clock trips abroad since Covid — two weeks separately in 2021 and 2022, and a further month this year — all without the go-ahead from his boss.

“Fundamentally, I looked at the company and I just thought, we don’t have an office and we all work from home all the time, so there shouldn’t be a reason that I can’t navigate working from abroad,” Sam says.

On the second of Sam’s trips, his manager cottoned on to his whereabouts only when he expensed a round of drinks for himself and a contact in the same industry.

“My manager asked what was going on, and I said I took someone out last night,” says Sam. “He asked what I was doing abroad, and I told him that I was working from there for the week. He was like, okay, but don’t expense anything that’s just a jolly.”

“We have a very international team,” Sam says, with lots of senior staff working from holiday homes or while visiting family in other continents. “I thought that if I asked permission then [my manager] might say no, but if I don’t ask for permission and he isn’t happy, then there’s not much he can do,” he says. “I’m there, and I’m getting my work done, and I’m not coming back early.”

As Sam’s case makes clear, there can be little recourse available to managers whose remote-working staff decide to dial in from a more glamorous location, especially for those who find themselves struggling to hire.

As many as 6 million Brits are planning to work remotely from another country in the near future, according to new research from MoneySupermarket, often utilising a fully remote schedule — or the obligation to surface in the office only once or twice a week — to log on from wherever they please, without fear of backlash. Or, as in Sam’s case, without even bothering to ask.

The same MoneySupermarket research found “work from anywhere” policies — which allow employees to spend at least some time abroad on the clock, as long as they have a laptop in hand — made staff more likely to stay at a company longer. A third of workers are now employed by companies that make such an allowance, the survey found.

‘People think because it’s physically easy, it must be legally okay too’

Not all make these allowances of their own volition, however, says Juliet Carp, a lawyer with expertise in international employment regulations. “Especially after the Covid pandemic, employers were under pressure to offer things that seemed new and attractive,” Carp says, “a bit like when companies started offering ‘flexible benefits’ or ‘choose your own working hours’.”

But such a plea for loyalty from staff, who are more confident than ever in their demands for work perks, can turn into an almighty legal headache — for employers and employees alike.

“Your employer might be liable to pay taxes in the jurisdiction that you’re working in, or they might be required to set up a payroll in that country,” Carp says, even when it comes to workers who decide to spend their three remote days a week in a Eurostar-linked city.

There could be corporation tax implications too, says Carp, as well as extra taxes levied on employees, though this can vary greatly depending on the country they choose to work in. On top of that, “people can be deported, and employers might lose their ability to secure immigration permission for other staff in the future”.

This is often true even where employers explicitly give their consent for staff to work abroad in a place of their choosing for part of the year. Companies might tell staff they have a work-from-anywhere allowance, but “employers don’t write policies for immigration or tax authorities”, Carp says, “and compliance with them isn’t optional.

“If you work abroad for any length of time, then at the end of the day you are still working abroad, and your employer has all the same legal obligations,” she explains. “There’s this myth that as long as you’re somewhere for less than six months that you’ll be okay, and really that’s complete garbage.”

Apart from legal nightmares, employees "working from beach" can cause conflict within companies, too. Photo / 123rf

“People think that because it’s physically easy, it must be legally okay too,” Carp adds. “But there’s a real lack of awareness. If managers explained why things are the way they are to employees, then they might be happier to follow the rules, but even most managers aren’t aware of the risks.”

Apart from legal nightmares, employees “working from beach” can cause conflict within companies, too, whether such an arrangement has been pre-agreed or not. Such an opportunity might be attractive to the young and unattached, but many other staff might feel some fury when their hungover teammates log on from Ibiza or Tenerife.

MoneySupermarket’s research found a quarter of employees believe those dialling in from hotel lobbies or poolsides struggle to keep their productivity up to their usual standards. The same number believe team members working from abroad miss deadlines more frequently, and one in five admits their personal annoyance with colleagues who log on from abroad.

‘You start to realise that life anywhere is just life’

Now that Sam has spent a month working from a more sunny location, he’s no longer so bothered about having the chance to do so at his company or elsewhere in the future. But “beforehand it was really important to me to have the freedom to work abroad for a while”, he says, admitting an end to the perk would have made him much more likely to look for work elsewhere.

Contrary to expectations, too, Sam says being able to do so made him more productive. “In the same conversation where I told my boss that I was working from Germany for the week, he had already told me that I was doing really great work, and being really productive those last few days,” he says.

“Without all the normal distractions of being at home, and with the friend I was visiting spending the daytime at her office, I was really getting through things I’d put off for months beforehand.”

Though his recent month-long spell away was more leisurely, “if there was actually more on my plate for me to do, I would’ve done more,” says Sam — something most of us chained to our desks in the height of summer can relate to, as colleagues and bosses take their leave.

“After a few weeks away, you do start to realise that life anywhere is just life after all,” Sam says. Far from being inclined to slack off, after four weeks away Sam was eager to get back to his normal routine. “It gets you away from the stuff that distracts you,” he says, “but also the things you really enjoy.”