The Future of Work - Keara Osborne - Episode 1

0:00This feature, the future of work, is funded by the news reporting scheme. Welcome to this week's episode of the Future of Work on ClareFM. Today we look at how remote working is reshaping life in Clare. In recent decades we've seen a significant shift in the way we do our jobs. Remote working has evolved dramatically in recent years and 2025 was a record year for remote and hybrid working in absolute and relative terms. Recent figures from Grow Remote show combined numbers of 998,000 people in Ireland worked from home last year, representing a 35.4% share of the Irish workforce. It's estimated that around a quarter of employees in Clare avail of the remote or hybrid working models. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the option to work remotely was available to only a few.

1:04However, it soon became a critical response to a global emergency. Kira Osborne is originally from Los Angeles in the US and works for Canadian e-commerce company Shopify. She moved to Ireland eight years ago and has worked remotely for other companies in the past. I have always worked remotely for Shopify. This is in fact my third remote job. With Shopify I've always worked remotely. Shopify is a remote first company so we are a global company and we operate on a remote first model so almost everyone everywhere works remotely. We do have some offices in Canada and the US but everyone works remote first as a standard. We do have an annual in-person meeting where everyone in the company gets together in Canada for a week and we all get our heads down and we work together really hard in person which is wonderful. But outside of that week everyone does meet digitally. We use a tool called Slack which I think is fairly common in the remote world. We use Slack and Google meets to meet digitally. My own team actually we're here in Ireland and in Canada and New Zealand.

2:07So I work with people all over the globe and I'm meeting with people digitally all over the globe and it's amazing. Remote work has always suited me. I much prefer to work remotely than in an office. I find that I get way more work done when I'm in my own curated space and I don't have distractions and noise and things going on around me. I find this to be a much more productive space and a much more comfortable space for me. So I was very much seeking out a remote position when I joined Shopify. When did you become aware of remote working? It's not entirely new but it's far more common than it was before the pandemic for example. Before I moved here I had picked up a remote job that was working on search engine integrity essentially. It was new, it was neat, I could do it on my own time. I did work full time at the time but this was something else I could do on the weekends and evenings when I had spare time for a little bit of extra money and it was absolutely brilliant. The best part about that is I was able to bring that job with me when I moved here.

3:09So I stayed employed when I moved from one country to another. I didn't have any gaps of employment. There are no gaps of employment on my CV even though I moved halfway around the world. And that really kicked off for me how valuable remote working was for my personal goals and my mental health as well. I'm much more productive and happy doing it this way. So when I moved here I maintained that job until COVID changed everything. We know COVID changed absolutely everything. A remote position, a temporary remote position opened up at Amazon for a little while which had better benefits and things forming. So I moved into that position and when that position ended I was lucky enough to move right into Shopify. So this has been a pretty consistent track for me to stay working remotely and it's definitely something I have considered and would continue to consider when looking for other opportunities if that ever had to happen for me.

4:09Was remote working a big thing in the States when you were there? That's a really good question. I'm not sure if it was a big thing in the States overall. I was certainly the first in my kind of friend and peer group to do this type of remote working that wasn't say I had friends that were self-employed web developers, people that would design websites for people. A lot of them worked from home. They would work on an independent contractor basis. I hadn't really heard yet of remote opportunities at this level. So it was fairly new to me. I am delighted to see more opportunities like that come up for friends and family. There it seems to have gained some popularity and of course we know that the demand for remote working is often very high. I find that to be the case here and with my friends back in the States as well. When you came to Ireland or you were aware of a remote worker's community for example? No, not at all. I got very very lucky to get linked up with grow remote actually through Shopify. At the time I found out about it, there were a few Shopify colleagues who were local leaders.

5:15I worked very closely with the local leader here in NS and the then local leader in Limerick. Both of them were really, really great about popping into our local Ireland Slack channels and saying, hey, there's this event. There's this remote working networking event. There's this brunch on this weekend. Come join, come join, come join. That's how my involvement with grow remote started is just coming to some of the in-person events. Those are brilliant. Hybrid working with that ever an option for you? It hasn't shown up as an option for me. I certainly would prefer hybrid working over in office. It would be very difficult to go back to a full-time in office position at this point. I've been out of the office so long. If my choices were only in office or hybrid, I would choose hybrid every day of the week. My first choice is full-time remote, but if it needs must at that point, I would choose hybrid over office. You're involved with grow remote. What's that all about? Grow remote is a grassroots advocacy and networking organization that aims to connect remote workers in Ireland

6:17because there are a lot of benefits to remote working, of course. But the downside to remote working is that you don't always have somebody that you can just meet up with at the water cooler to kind of bounce ideas off of or discuss challenges with. So grow remote seeks to fill a gap there in providing these in-person events for folks who work remotely and hybrid so we can get together and talk about wins and challenges and problems all together. And also to educate the general public and businesses and leadership and the government about the benefits and wonderful aspects of remote working and how it really can truly benefit both the employee side and the company side as well. I can confidently say we have some of the best minds in the world doing what we do. And we were able to pick up those brilliant brains regardless of where they were. So even though I'm employed in Ireland, I work very closely with folks in New Zealand who are really, really good at what they do. From a company standpoint, you really have access to a broad base of talent that isn't encumbered by location or if I have to move for a job, what would that cost the company, that kind of thing.

7:25Also, we don't have offices. So Shopify doesn't pay for an office in Ireland. There isn't any overhead there from rent or anything like that. So I think there are a lot of benefits to both sides. I find this to be a very mutually beneficial arrangement, frankly. We've seen from recent statistics that the number of people working remotely are hybrid and has increased dramatically. Are you surprised by that? I'm not surprised by it. I know there is a lot of pushback on a full remote model. I know that there is a lot of discontent from a leadership standpoint about leaving people to work wholly outside of an office. I think the hybrid work model is a compromise. Employees really do benefit from the flexibility and it becomes something very important to the employees that are looking for jobs. And it's kind of everybody getting a little bit of what they need. You have leadership needing to see sort of bodies and offices.

8:27And you have employees getting some of that flexibility that makes their lives and day to day is so much easier. Do you think that we would have as much hybrid and our remote working if we hadn't the pandemic? I really don't. I think the pandemic really shook up a lot for everyone. It really forced us to move very quickly. And think about things in a different way than we certainly would have had we not had that. So there are a lot of roles I think that went remote immediately that probably wouldn't have been considered at all for even a hybrid sort of mix out of necessity. Necessity is a great inventor, isn't it? Kira to work remotely, to work from home to work hybridly. Is there a special training involved? Can people just automatically slot into us? I think that was probably one of the biggest challenges that everybody had to figure out during COVID, right? Is that now leadership looks very different when you're leading from behind a computer instead of in front of someone. So one of the amazing opportunities that grow remote offers to remote workers and remote leaders is a fully funded training program called lead from anywhere.

9:32I was lucky enough to get a slot in one of these courses in 2024. And even coming into this course from a fully remote company, I learned lots of new tools and skills about how to interact and lead within my team in completely different ways. We problem solved with other attendees' real life problems that they were having in their remote leadership situations and it was really, really applicable and very useful. Last year, so in 2025, grow remote trained over 300 leaders from 125 plus companies, which is amazing. And the impacts from that training included that over 90% began implementing improved systems for their distributed teams and over 80% felt more confident in leading their distributed teams. And I think that confidence is really, really, really important, especially because if you go from leading an in-person setting to a remote setting where, again, you're leading, you're talking to a computer, you're not talking to a human that is sort of disregulating, it's discombobulating.

10:40So getting that confidence of learning that, hey, you've got tools and skills in your tool belt, these work, these are evidence-based and they work. That opens up a lot of doors for you to become a better leader. From speaking to colleagues on the various chat you would have, is everyone more productive if they're working in an atmosphere that suits them better? I can only speak to my personal experience, but I do find I work with people who are really happy to come to work. I know that I personally feel so much happier and healthier doing that from my own space than I would have in an office. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I think that's a common discussion point, right? As well, don't you miss going to an office? I don't. I am very, very close with a lot of my colleagues. I feel very up-to-date on the water cooler chat. I feel very confident walking into work. I am delighted to hear everyone's news. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything at all.

11:40When it comes to growth and training opportunities and all that, now I do benefit from working in a company that has a remote first model, so those are available to me. I don't feel like I've missed out on any of that. I've actually grown more in this role than I've probably grown in any other role. Why we are improving in Ireland in terms of our connectivity, broadband technology, not every county, not every town would have the amount or as much connectivity as they would like. If you can't do it at home, what's the option? If you can't connect to the tools and systems that you need to work in, you can't use them. That was a really important consideration for me, actually, when I moved into this house, I was looking for an area where I would have good connection because it is important to me to maintain my remote work status. There are options, however. We know that technology sometimes things go wrong, sometimes you know, sometimes your broadband goes out, sometimes stuff happens, it's life. There are options for folks who may not want to work in an office, but don't quite have the digital setup that they need at home or don't quite have the broadband access yet that they need at home.

12:43There are places like DigiClar, which is a country-wide network of flexible and affordable hot desks that provide co-working spaces where individuals and small teams can work. There are some small office spaces that can be used, you can close the door if you need to have some in-person meetings that is available to you without having to have an office. And it gives you the choice. One of my colleagues and I one day decided that we just wanted to work together, so we went to hot desks next to each other, we worked together, we went to lunch together, and then we went home. Having that choice is really, really important to me. So, to be able to go to a hub, maybe just for a change of scenery or maybe the hub would suit you on a certain day or for a certain meeting, you still utilize the DigiHubs? Absolutely. And this is the type of building that I will be looking for scheduling my upcoming Grow Remote presentation. So, hopefully at the end of March, I'm looking at hosting through Grow Remote a how to handle that first remote interview discussion, and we'll be looking at using like one of the small office areas in the co-working spaces for just a one-time

13:58use where we can get together and kind of talk about this in person, go over some skills and ideas for how to get through that interview when you're talking to a computer and not a person across from you. It is a very different experience. So, I'm looking forward to sharing some of my personal experience of having done that with others who are looking for those opportunities. Have you ever heard of anybody who wasn't suited to remote working or remote working didn't suit them that didn't like it? Absolutely. That is a really great question. And yes, I certainly have friends and colleagues in my network that find remote working isn't for them. And I think that really is a good highlight about how everyone's skills abilities and needs are different. I absolutely understand that working from home for a lot of people can feel very isolating, and you do miss the water cooler chats, right? Those become very important to people who want to have that engagement and back and forth day to day. So, I do see a value in having in-person opportunities still, of course, for those who remote working doesn't suit.

15:01Personally, myself just prefer the remote work. That was Kira Osborne, who works remotely from Ennis and is a member of the Grow Remote Network in Ireland. We'll be back next week with another episode of The Future of Work. This feature, The Future of Work, is funded by the news reporting scheme.