Research from the University of Illinois earlier this summer highlighted (again) how beneficial working from home often is.  When deprived of the joys of a commute to work, and of the frequent distractions of the modern open plan office, it seemed that employees were both more productive and more engaged.

“We have many reasons to expect that telecommuters should work as well or better than others,” said Ravi S. Gajendran, professor of business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This isn’t a revolutionary finding of course, with many studies over the past few years coming to broadly the same conclusion.  It raises the question of just how much (or how little) location plays a part.  For instance, whilst employers may be slowly coming round to the idea of people working from home, how keen would they be to do so if home was in another city, or maybe even in another country?

A recent study by NomadList has combed over data across a field of measures to try and come up with what they believe is the best country/city to work in if location isn’t a factor in your work.  They’ve looked at things such as the cost of living, weather conditions, internet access and so on, and the findings are pretty interesting, especially as I (we) have been mulling over the option of decamping to Czech.  The top 10 produced by NomadList are shown below, with Prague taking pride of place in 2nd spot.

Suffice to say, I don’t know a great deal about the Asian entries, but Prague is also great in that it is right in the middle of Europe, so relatively easy to get to other places should you need to.  Being the capital of Czech, it also has a strong English speaking basis, so you can probably get by without learning Czech (although I do recommend it, even if it is hard).

From experience, the cost of property in Czech is certainly cheaper than Britain (and an awful lot cheaper than London), although the cost of things like food is not all that much different.

As with most things of course, the biggest hurdle to overcome is likely to be the cultural one from your employer.  How would your employer feel about you working from another country?