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.
I couldn’t believe how much more time it felt like I had in the day just cutting out the short work commute. You don’t really realize the extent of how much time you waste going into work until it’s gone. Even a short commute adds up quick when you include all the time to get ready in the morning and decompress at night. Plus all the extra maintenance on a daily driver and gas… Companies making people go into the office when it’s not even necessary are just power hungry morons. That’s all there is to it.
And for many, half an hour primping in order to be seen in public. I guess if you’re still in vid convos that somewhat still applies, but for others, now you can lay around in your underwear and stink and still get work done.
My wife was talking about this recently. She used to wake up at 5:30AM everyday, take a shower, blowdry her hair and style it, put on makeup, and prep her lunch by 7AM. Then she’d set out on her 1.5 hour commute to the office.
Once we started working from home, all of that extra time went to sleeping well and relaxing.
If you have complicated health problems that can increase the amount of time done “primping” as well. I generally have to be awake three to four hours before I have to be anywhere and it’s a fucking nightmare.
The traveling time I’m saving by working from home, is directly reinvested into having a walk with the lady and the dogs, including sitting on a bench in the sunshine including a coffee, and if the mood is right, we’re staying for my first meeting at 10:00, …
I went from commuting 1-3 hours a day to zero commute. It is unbelievable how much of a quality of life improvement it is.
I am grateful I worked in a couple offices before switching to fully remote for my next few jobs, because it showed me how much better remote working is for me.
Yup. I have meetings at 8AM. If I had to do them in the office, I’ll have to be up at 6AM to get ready and leave to be able to get to the office in time. If I do it at home, I wake up at 7:50, which gives me almost 2 hours of extra sleep.
If I leave the office at 5PM, I’ll get home around 6PM. At home, I can log off as soon as the clock strikes 5, and now I have an extra hour of time to do whatever.
That adds up to around 3 hours a day that I save from not commuting to an office.
It’s not just the commute even, my “morning routine” is maybe 10 minutes if I’m not going into the office, 30+ if I am. Need to make myself “presentable”, pack some food, make a to go coffee. When I’m able to just snack and make coffee during downtime waiting for replies etc at the office it’s so much easier, I get another hour of sleep if I need it…
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.
My job requires me to go in bc I physically fix machines, so wouldn’t be able to complete my tasks from home. I’ve convinced myself I like it because it gives me a definitive separation between work and home. But I’ve never had a WFH job and would probably end up liking that a lot more tbh
it gives me a definitive separation between work and home.
This is big for me since I don’t have an office space at my house. I didn’t mind working from home during COVID but I also don’t mind having to go into the office. That said, my commute is only like 7 min to the office. I would like to be able to have a hybrid schedule though. Being able to work from home 3 days a week would be ideal for me. My working from home setup is a desk in the corner of my living room so the space where I work is the same room I relax and it was tough to have that separation.
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.
It’s an old relic from pre-covid where if it was snowing and you needed to come in an hour or two late (like if your kids had a delay at school), you could. Now we all have laptops and can work remotely if needed (minus the branch staff). Also, we didn’t get shit for snow here in PA this past winter either.
Yeah, just keep in mind that in some countries, paying out vacation hours results in a large portion of that sum being paid to the tax-man. In the Netherlands that’s about 40% (from the top of my head).
Yeah, I’m in the US and I understand that a bunch of that might be paid to the tax man but at the very least, I’m getting that cash out. Currently, the only way for me to benefit from it is to get my same salary every week but just have times where I’m not at work which just means I have more work when I come back. Things have been tight since my wife lost her job (though she does have an interview next week so fingers crossed) so just getting even half of that $10.9k in cash back to replenish our rainy day fund would be a big relief.
Yeah. We get 2.77 hours per pay period in accrual. The most you can get to is 60 days (480 hours) since they don’t offer short term disability. But once you hit 440 hours you can cash out 45 hours of sick time for 15 hours of pay or once you hit 480 you can cash out 60 hours for 20 hours of pay (3:1 conversion to cash).
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.
It is in the sense that commute time is not paid so compared to commuting jobs your effective hourly wage goes up. Also, commuting time is actually a negative wage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Especially galling since if I were to move to a cheaper region my company would want to pay me less. It’s “we only pay you for the value you bring” when cost of living goes up, but “we want some of those lifestyle savings” if I can get my costs down.
I view it as a benefit, and I’m willing to make concessions on salary for additional or better benefits. Arguably you could have both, but I think unionization is required for that and I’m in a low unionization industry.
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%.
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.
It’s because they need the real estate money, they built a lot of buildings on long term leases which are now expiring. Also, who is going to rent a space for a restaurant when no one is using restaurants for lunch in business districts?
That’s what I’m saying. Unless they talk about hybrid then yeah it’s equivalent to 8%, but if we’re talking full remote try more like 800% raise to get me back into an office. lol
It might be the average. Some pepole like working from office beacuse they feel lonely at home or they want to separate their work space from their home space.
Yes, people didn’t get my comment. We don’t have all the choice and luxury to work for a great company or good project. In old Europe, a 1 WFH was an ultimate privilege before COVID. Nowadays, It should be choice, I don’t mind coming 2 days a week but it to be a “mandatory minimal” 2 days is a bit ridiculous. Still, If I have my own or max 4 seats offices, I’ll be okay with it.
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?
I’ve suggested to my work that if they really want people back in the office full time, they should offer those that return a 4-day work week as a meaningful incentive to compensate for the lost time and money to commuting. Still waiting for them to implement that one…
I’ve been thinking about this, I’d sooner take a 20% paycut and keep working from home for a different company, than deal with traffic and smelling other people’s lunches. Fuck all that.
A shorter than 40 hour work week would be the biggest draw.
According to a study conducted by Zippia.com (1,000 full-time workers), the average worker is only productive for a little over 4 hours per day, with productivity capping out at 6 hours. This article on studyfinds.org references another 2,000 employee study done by OnePoll (no link given) that says “A new survey finds office workers are at their most productive by 10:22 a.m. each morning — but start to slump by 1:27 p.m.”
Letting employees who commute to the office every day work 30 hours per week instead of 40 would be a HUGE draw for a lot of people. Less traffic on the commute, less “fluff” time where you’re not doing anything, time to take care of personal errands during the week while businesses are still open, and I’m sure other benefits.
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.
The push has nothing to do with anything but getting money back into real estate. The majority of wealthy people’s money is tied up in either oil or real estate. Billion dollar office buildings going unused is unexplainable to the oligarchy. And I don’t use the word Oligarchy lightly. Combined with less oil being used moving people around, and you have the most powerful people in the western world yelling at business executives to get their workers back in the office or they’ll be unable to barrow money from the 0.0001% small companies don’t have a lot of debt from the Oligarchy so they don’t have to listen to them. But if you know anything, wealthy people don’t like it when the poors don’t filter their money upwards so this fight is long from over.
Conversion would cost billions for most of those buildings. And many of those areas can’t support a population increase on the level of hundreds of thousands of people. It’s do able but these people are not willing to do anything that improves humanity.
If Zoom is trying to get people back into offices, it may not be a real estate issue.
After all, are you going to argue that companies that are more than happy to outsource and offshore work overseas and sell off industrial assets are suddenly going to care about keeping their 4-year leases?
After all, are you going to argue that companies that are more than happy to outsource and offshore work overseas and sell off industrial assets are suddenly going to care about keeping their 4-year leases?
Zoom is beholden to the same investors trying to force everyone back to the office. They are likely required to use office space owned by one of their investors… That or poor leadership that hasn’t adapted to the new environment
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.
The giant multinational corporation that owns the company that owns the company that owns the buildings is the same multinational corporation that owns the company that leases the office space.
How are they going to surreptitiously pull money out of the country otherwise?
Government officials either owned or had friends own office buildings and it made monetary sense for them to force workers back to the offices.
Even that is sunk-cost fallacy. If they own the buildings, that means they’re already paid for. The only money they lose is theoretical and non-existent.
Edit: In fact, it costs them more money as you have to pay for utilities, maintenance, overhead, etc. when you fill a big building with people 5 days a week.
There’s gotta be pressure for offices to open up so employees are forced to spend money on food/coffee/dry cleaning/whatever around the building itself too.
I feel for those businesses, but not enough to subsidize their existence when I don’t need it.
Spot on. It is so much more than just ‘already owned a building’. There was an industry created around offices, inside and out. Powers that be (corrupt and otherwise) wanted to keep the gravy train going and so order people back to offices. Does it make sense for people to do so? Largely not I think bit screw the people right? Despicable.
Hey, I agree. It is about corrupt officials and businesses who want to make more. I’m not burning a candle for the (perceived) plight of these monsters 😀
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!
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