The back-to-office backfire: Companies ending WFH perks lose out on top talent, who view flexible work as equivalent to an 8% raise

At least. If you work an 8 hour day, a 0.5 hour commute each way adds an extra 12.5% to work time commitment each day, and it’s considered unpaid time.

People don’t like offices and are more productive when they’re happy. Who knew?

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.

Commuting is also a nightmare. Thats 1-2 hours a day of slog to get to an arbitrary location to do a job that I could do at home. Combine this with school drop offs and pick ups and the ability to do life admin during the week instead of cramming it all on a Saturday with everyone else like pre COVID and WFH is a winner.

It’s not a perk. Don’t reinforce their framing

I can't go back to working in an office full time anymore. It would be a really difficult adjustment especially losing the time to commuting and needing to deal with child care. Plus we found that we no longer needed a second car anymore since we were both at home so we sold one. Our life is built around not having to commute anymore.

8% seems extremely low. You could double my pay and I don't think I'd stop working from home

Keep in mind this does not just apply to ‘top talent’.

Anyone who is confident they can find something elsewhere and have a good enough resume to land a hybrid/WFH job will do so, if pushed.

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.

But boomer bosses need to physically see their workers sitting in chairs, they need that feeling of power!

I could trade my WFH for a room with a view and a door. :) fuck openspace and flexdesks!

My coworkers and I figure it at about 20% raise. No need for a second vehicle for the household, less money on food and clothes, plus the extra time.

Crazy that it's so low. I'd assume people who commute to work waste like an hour minimum going to and from work, so 1/9th of their work day is just unpaid "work" as far as I'm concerned.

That's ignoring all the benefits in comfort at home. I'm surprised it's just 8%.

I'm not surprised; WFH is a great benefit to workers. The big thing is going to be how companies choose to balance remote and in-person work and it is going to be wildly different across different industries.

From experience I have seen how employers/government were forced back to the office. My Indian colleagues had to return to their offices because the office buildings were empty and it cost money. Government officials either owned or had friends own office buildings and it made monetary sense for them to force workers back to the offices. It was a play between corrupt officials and businesses, nothing more. Well, that and a profound and deep distrust of their workforce. It was a sad sight to see that happening to them.

My guess is that this could also occur the same way in the west.

What's galling is that big companies claim that the main reason for making people come into the office is to promote in-person collaboration. But, they constantly demonstrate that they don't, in fact, value in-person collaboration. They organize people into cross-geography teams all the time to save money on hiring. So, you're often sitting in a cubicle on a conference call with people on the other side of the planet that you will never see in the hallway. Or worse, you're sitting in a conference room with a handful of coworkers, struggling to communicate over a crappy speaker phone with a handful of coworkers on the other side of the planet. They also frequently lay off entire product teams in one fell swoop. Decades of institutional knowledge that you might tap into during a water cooler conversation just disappears overnight. It's hard to go along with all the extra real costs and pay the happiness tax that commutes and cubicle farms extract when it's so obvious that the stated reason for it all is a lie.

8% my ass. I view WFH as a 300% raise.

8%? Who came up with that? It's at least 20%

I'm waiting to hear back from a job and chomping at the bit to leave because they offer a hybrid work schedule (3 home/2 office). It's a 6% pay bump (from $80k to $85k) but being able to work from home 3 days a week is such a big plus (and not having to manage anyone being the other) makes it worth it for me. Not to mention that I can cash out all the vacation time that I've accrued. I'm sitting on 287 hours of vacation time right now so that would be roughly $10.9k paid out when I leave. I asked them if I could cash some out earlier this year but was told "no but if you leave the company, you'll still get paid out so don't worry about losing it". Well guess I'll be leaving the company then. I rolled over 218 hours so it's not like it wasn't time I didn't have accrued. I also have 300 hours of sick time and 41 hours of weather time too. Those won't get paid out though.

I worked from home for over a year and we had our best year in commercial lending as a credit union while everyone was home. Now everyone needs to be in the office every day. Yeah, no thanks.

Also informed by boomer consultants/board members advising millennial CEOs. No valid justification in most industries

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.

I would rather make 50k WFH than 100k in an office.

If my work tried to end WFH I'd leave instantly.

2 hours drive a day is not only a waste of my time but my money on fuel.

Yep. My employer has made several decisions I strongly dislike and disagree with over the last year or so. And would have been looking for the door over it if they did not allow full WFH for those that like that setup better.

Now that I have gotten to experience it I don't think I will ever willingly go back to a job that requires mandatory weekly in-office time.

Jokes are on them, I'm old but I still quit when they tried to force (illegally, we had at least 2 days@home by contract) us back 4 days/w in the noisy open space.

Got flexible home office at my new job ("must" be at the office Tuesdays, everything else is to your convenience) and cherry on the cake a 14.6% raise!

What are a set of tools I can recommend to my employer, which increase productivity of office workers, and which provide greater value than a hybrid office policy?

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8% is a joke. Conversation starts at 20%. You’re asking for 2-4 hours of 12-20 I have awake in my life. Full stop.

An 8% raise to bring people back to office sounds like a reasonable cost tbh

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.