Digital Nomads. The International Experience and the Case of Greece

One of the major changes brought about by the covid-19 pandemic in the labor market was the decoupling of an employee’s location and the job carried out from the premises operated by his/her employer. The employee could be in his/her home, a co-working or other shared space, a private office, or any other place outside of the traditional corporate office building. Moreover, the job could be performed at any day or time, obviously within a predetermined schedule. This change, which came as a mandatory outcome of the pandemic, gained considerable acceptance in the ranks of both employers and employees, and after the end of the pandemic, it remained as a strong option. A typical example is the growth of the movement of digital nomads, i.e., people who travel while working remotely using technology and the Internet. The paper looks firstly into the digital nomads’ phenomenon at an international level, its origins, its fast growth over the last years, and its future prospects. At a second level, focusing on the case of Greece and especially on its islands, it will examine whether digital nomads and their mode of operation could act as a tool that could alleviate the existing geographical discontinuity of such areas by establishing communication continuity.