cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1125686
Archived version: https://archive.ph/vL1mC
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230806071111/https://www.businessinsider.com/employees-work-from-home-benefits-as-good-as-raise-2023-8
Holy smokes, working from home is not a “raise.” You should be compensated for the value you bring, not where you’re sitting when you bring value.
I think it’s basically saying companies need to pay more if they want people in-office. Which makes sense to me. If you want someone to spend time and money to commute they need to compensate for that. You can’t ask someone who has been WFH to start coming in without some incentive or else you’re basically cutting their pay.
That said, many people won’t switch from WFH to in-office for any amount of money.
I spend $400 a month on gas because of my long commute. Work from home is definitely a raise in my situation. Gas bill goes down to $100 a month. Works out directly to a 5% raise just in gas alone. Car insurance can be switched to leisure only saving money further. Gain an extra two hours a day which were unpaid before, so my workday is now only 8 hours instead of 10, that is another equivalent to 25% on an hourly rate indirectly.
Then there is all the other benefits such as just being happier and more productive.
Many people also seem to forget that not everyone has a dedicated room or otherwise extra space to work in. Sure, if you live alone it doesn’t matter but with other people living in the same apartment/house and perhaps them also working remotely, you suddenly need extra space just for good working conditions. Working space has a cost, be it in an office building or at employees’ homes. Also good ergonomics means one needs a good desk and a great office chair which are not cheap to buy. Sure, I wouldn’t necessarily demand more pay just for WFH, but I would never ever ever take a lower compensation in exchange either.
That said, I love working remotely from home and wouldn’t go back to office. It’s just that even if you save time and money in commutes, there are other costs in place that wouldn’t otherwise necessarily exist.
Holy smokes, working from home is not a “raise.”
Sure it’s not a raise, but that’s not really the question. The question is the hidden cost that companies are imposing on themselves by demanding that employees come into an office. If employers are going to demand that out of their employees, they should do that with the expectation that employees will ask to be compensated or will leave.
Before the pandemic I was spending almost 2 hours a day on my commute to office, while being on site for 9 hours with an unpaid one hour lunch break. That’s 20% of my working hours.
I can use this time for entertainment and side projects
There’s not enough money in the world to pay for the time I save.
Besides, I save a lot on gas and food, and gain much more comfort (my house, my coffee, my chair, my screens, my toilets)
To be perfectly clear, if my company wants me back to office they will have to raise me more than 30%.
It could be considered a raise in terms of the amount of time you dedicate to work and the amount you get paid for it.
8 hour shift plus 1 hour commute both ways means you effectively dedicate 10 hours to your job. Replace the commute with a 30 second walk from your bed to your desk and you are now making more money for your time.
Mind you, I still agree that remote work should never be actively viewed as a raise or a perk. It should be the default for jobs that are compatible, which is a ton of them.
Maybe that’s the approach for hiring…remote employees are hired with the understanding that they will earn less than equivalent in-office employees. Commute time, transportation expenses, and any other incidentals make up the difference. It’s all made clear and transparent upfront.
If remaining remote limits an employee’s promotability for reasons of company need, this is also made clear.
Why should they earn less than somebody who is in-office? A remote employee costs less in physical resources like office space, heating and cooling, electricity and internet.
Ultimately it’s the end result that matters, not where it’s done.
Because remote employees don’t spend their own time and money on commuting to work. Those factors, along with saving on childcare, are the main drivers for desire to work remote, yes?
A company can reduce its office footprint to account for fewer in-person employees and save money. But that alone doesn’t address the factors above faced by employees who commute, so those workers should be compensated.
A remote worker’s worth is no less valuable than one who’s onsite. If you want something like this to work then the employer should pay a differential for those who have to be onsite to compensate for the time and money spent commuting.
I disagree. Workers should be compensated for being at a specific location if and only if that physical presence is necessary to do their work. If that’s the case, I think the commute and other costs should be carried by the employer. But if the employee is going to the office simply because they prefer to or enjoy it more, that adds zero value to the work they’re doing compared to wfh employees and should not be compensated differently.
Nonsense. If the value output of an employee is equivalent then they should be paid the same. It’s a net negative to employers if employees work in expensive offices, so if anything your argument says that in office workers should be paid less because they cost the company more.
It’s not a perk. Don’t reinforce their framing
I have not read the article yet but the headline saying “equivalent to an 8% raise” does not just have to mean some kind of soft value. I have to drive 50 km each way to my office. I am much more likely to eat out while at work ( or to hit a drive-thru on the way home ). Given the price of gas where I live, going to the office probably costs me $50 a day more than staying home. That is $50 after tax so you can simplistically double that in terms of salary that it consumes. If I have two jobs to choose from, from a purely financial stand-point, my current job and a fully remote one that pays me $100 less per day are equivalent in terms of the value they bring to my family.
Crap. I have been a “want to be in the office some of the time” guy but making me actually type this out has made me question that. I think I need to start shopping my CV.
Honestly. It’s about more than money.
If your boss says you must return to the office, after 3 years of WFH. At best, it shows that they do not value or respect you, and are just making an arbitrary decision in a bid to sell more stocks.
At worst, there might be some insidious reason to make employees physically available. Maybe they are getting a kickback somehow, or selling data that they can only get when you are there, or maybe they are just horny and want to seduce you sexually.
A remote worker is often happier, more productive, and cost less to employ even if they are paid the same as an on-site worker. Offices do not have to provide parking, seating, HVAC, power, wifi, and will even have less physical security vectors.
If some people prefer to go into an office, then it should be optional. Not a hybrid model where they force you to come a certain number of days a week.
At the end of the day unless you are on some kind of probation or evaluation period WFH should be the default when ever possible.
Control is another thing. I can’t tell you the amount of execs I’ve heard say “they’re losing control of their company” or “I don’t feel I have the same control over my people”. It’s crazy that they think that. What do they think the past 3 years have been when they’ve gotten record profits “oh, but our profits would be even better if we had people back in the office”. Sadly no amount of data will override the entrepreneurial “it could always be more” what if that they throw out.
I’m working in IT and as my last team lead hasn’t had any technical knowledge in my area, and he didn’t had to for his job, he wouldn’t even be able to control what I’m doing, …
Yeah, but there will also come a tone when the technical lead is being managed by someone with less technical experience than them.
At that point, it is less about telling them what to do and more about making sure they stay productive on tasks and projects that are important to the company.
The last part is important because a lot of the work management does at that level is supposed to be catching all the shit from other departments and setting goals, which does not look like technical work.
He couldn’t control whether you’re doing your work properly, but he can control that you "pretend* to be controlled by him.
It’s never about making you a better worker, it’s just about the illusion of control.
Think about it, when was the last time you had an interaction with your superior that actually had anything to do with your actual job? It’s all just a huge charade.
Control sounds insidious, but there are a lot of ways in which being physically present plays into your psychology and manipulates you into working harder/later/ect. Thinking back to the last time I was in an office, usually when someone was fired/they announced layoffs, the anxiety in the space was palpable. You ended up working later voluntarily just because you were afraid of not being seen at your desk and they’d fire you next.
WFH allows me to be more rational with my employer. They can’t scare me into working harder, and I’m not at all attached to the “office culture” if it suits me better to leave. I think a lot of the “soft power” of the employer-employee relationship comes from physical proximity, which is why you have middle managers not involved with the bottom line profitability rooting for BTO.
Any executive who has “lost control” of their business by allowing their employees to work from home is no more than the ring master of a runaway circus that they never actually controlled to begin with.
I’ve had the unfortunate displeasure of working for at least one company that made a full time job of keeping their employees under their thumb and I can say this much: the more you micromanage your workforce, the better your workforce becomes at professional time wasting. By that I mean finding creative ways to look very busy while achieving nothing of benefit to the organization.
But then again, much of the corporate world runs on incompetence so poor business decisions based on some executives feelings, rather than statistics, aren’t exactly rare.
I’m on my second probationary period entirely WFH, you shouldn’t be required to work in the office unless the job physically requires it. Return to office is very often a big power grab by shitty management that don’t know how to measure outcomes properly and instead prefer to micromanage. It is one of the biggest red flags.
On the sustainability front:
WFH means people aren’t commuting. This is good, as we use less energy, particularly gas in our cars. On the down side, public transit agencies may have to dramatically cut service, increasing people’s reliance on cars to get around. At an extreme level, they may go bankrupt due to lack of ridership.
Energy - home energy use has increased home residential energy use by between 7% and 23%. Lower income residents who do not have air conditioning can also suffer disproportionately. Higher income workers can readily afford expensive home upgrades, like adding a home office. Since empty commercial buildings still need to be heated and cooled, the energy savings aren’t as great.
Real Estate - the US will need to delete 18% of its commercial real estate. There is trillions of dollars worth of commercial real estate debt maturing in the next 3 years that will be worthless. I’ve actually seen vacancy rates approaching 30% in many downtown markets.
This will leave every major city with a giant hole in its central city and cause major economic disruption in both the real estate investment market, construction I distry and walkability of cities. We may be staring down the barrel of another “white flight to the suburbs” that we saw empty out cities from the 1950s through the late 1990s.
The upside to these empty buidings is they can - and should be - transitioned to housing. It’s just the rich companies who own the buildings don’t want to have to invest any money in that.
Gov’ts should force them to, but that won’t happen either. :/
I am all for converting commercial to residential. However, a civil engineer or architect (I can’t remember)on reddit explained all of the reasons that’s not practical or sometimes even feasible due to how commercial buildings are constructed. Plumbing, electric, HVAC, etc aren’t designed for units. Retro fitting is cost prohibitive to the point where they’d need to be torn down and built from scratch.
I don’t know how accurate that is, but it sounded legit.
Yet other engineers have said it can be done by refitting the window-facing offices as sets of single/double units with the interior of the floor as communal kitchen/gathering spaces, and separate floors for larger family units and spaces.
It’s not that hard to figure out ways to do it but companies will have to be forced, either by threat of bankruptcy or gov’t rules.
