背部
Pexels的Retha Ferguson攝
遠程工作和生活時代的補償
公佈於2020年7月20日
丹·舒貝爾
紐約時報暢銷書作者和工作場所智能管理合夥人
在這個歷史悠久的社會裡，很難談論金錢。 在這個社會上，有3200萬美國人申請失業，近三分之一的人在7月份無法支付房租，而消費者支出則處於39年低位。 但是，對於美國人而言，甚至在身體和精神健康方面，金錢都是最重要的問題，因為兩者之間的聯繫是相互聯繫的，因為如果您努力支付每月的費用，那麼您的健康 就會受到直接影響。 而且，如果您是在2千3百萬可能在秋季取消驅逐令後秋季被趕出家園的美國人之一，那麼您更有可能感染和傳播Covid-19。
Your bank account has a direct correlation to your happiness. A new study found that the higher your income the happier you are in today's society compared to the 1970s and 1980s. Financial hardships have worsened due to higher medical costs during the pandemic, where a loss of a job means a loss of healthcare coverage for about 5.4 million people. A study by the American Cancer Society found that higher medical financial hardships are associated with more emergency department visits and lower receipt of preventive services. Money, health, and happiness are all interlinked.
This gloomy economic picture disproportionately affects minorities like African Americans and the LGBTQ+ community, who not only have to work harder to stay employed but make less money regardless of their work ethic. And, since it's a buyers market with so much of the workforce unemployed, employees either have to forgo promotions and bonuses or be replaced by someone who is willing to work harder for the same or less money. While there's discrimination against minorities, a new group may be targeted that was previously overlooked pre-Covid, remote workers.
While remote working is now commonplace and indoctrinated in our society, these workers may face a new form of discrimination in localized compensation. Many workers are fleeing their expensive housing in San Francisco and New York City for locations that offer a lower cost of living because they can work remotely anywhere. But, localized compensation would mean they would have to take a pay cut to adjust for their lowered expenses and newfound flexibility.
The remote work experiment revisited
While remote work started off as a necessity to avoid Covid-19 prone office spaces, it has become a permanent benefit in the new workplace era. It's now commonplace that you or someone you know has a home office. A recent study by Gartner found that 82 percent of business leaders will let employees work from home at least sometimes and almost half plan to offer remote work permanently. Some of the notable firms that have announced publicly that they would be remote-only include Twitter, Google, Shopify, Square, and now Fujitsu. It's not just companies that will reap the benefits of having a dispersed global workforce, but almost two-thirds of employees desire permanent remote work post-Covid. Both employers and employees agree that remote working increases productivity, despite having concerns about virtual management, lower morale, home distractions, and a lack of oversight.
Countries are even seeing remote work as an opportunity to boost their economies. Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley announced a 12-month "Welcome Stamp" for remote working visitors. And, new companies have surfaced to enable, promote, and monetize remote working in other countries. An example is NomadX, a real estate technology platform, that helps people relocate and work from Portugal. These companies promote not just a cost-savings, but the ability to have adventures, meet new people, and explore new cultures - almost like a grownup version of a college's study abroad program. With countries and companies helping facilitate remote work relocation, it's no wonder why companies are discussing localized compensation, especially during a recession.
The value of a remote worker versus an office worker
In our work culture, we pretend like we evaluate employees solely based on their performance when it's not the full criterion. Employees also get promotions based on favoritism, tenure, and nepotism. With an increase in remote workers, there might be a shift in perceived value based on what's observable (at an office) versus what's harder to oversee (remote). Not every worker is just, if not more, productive at home versus an office. And, the age-old saying is "out of sight, out of mind", meaning that if a manager can't walk over to your cubicle to verify that you're focused on work, then you aren't even if the opposite is true.
If we value our employees solely based on productivity, then research shows that remote workers have an advantage and therefore should be compensated more. Stanford University attributes the higher productivity of remote working to a decrease in commute time, more focus, less sick leave, and more working hours. The case can be made that remote workers should at least get paid the same as office workers if productivity is valued like companies say it is.
Would you take a pay reduction to work from home permanently?
This has become one of the most controversial workplace topics because of the increase in remote work during a pandemic and recession. It's really a question about fairness and what companies value. Some companies are using remote work as an excuse to suppress wages or even force resignations , while others are suffering financially and have to make hard decisions. Either way, localized compensation can be taken as a form of discrimination based on zip code, without factoring like marital and parental duties, and expenses like Internet access, electricity, and home office supplies that companies may or may not be covering.
While localized compensation isn't anything new, it's been brought to the forefront by Mark Zuckerberg during his announcement of permanent remote work for Facebook employees. "We'll localize everybody's compensation on January 1," he said. This statement triggered a lot of people because unlike other companies, Facebook has been one of the most profitable during the pandemic with revenues of over $17.7 billion in the first quarter of 2020, and Zuckerberg's net worth has risen to over $83 billion between March 18th and June 4th. The idea of paying people less when the company and founder are profiting financially sparked a well-deserved outrage.
Other companies have taken a different approach like Automatic and Basecamp, both of which were remote-only pre-Covid. Automatic has employed more than one thousand remote workers for the past three years. In a recent TechCrunch interview founder Matt Mullenweg said, "We aim to pay the same rates for the same roles, regardless of geography. Automattic currently has folks in over 75 countries. Sometimes this puts us above or below what may be the market rate for a role in a given area." Basecamp's approach is to pay all employees a competitive San Francisco salary rate even though they are remote working. "San Francisco was our benchmark because it's the highest in the world for technology and because we could afford it, after carefully growing a profitable software business for 15 years," said founder David Heinemeier Hansson.
More remote workers are opting to relocate not just for safety reasons but for a lower cost of living, especially from cities to suburbs. For instance, making $155,000 in San Francisco would be similar to making $224,000 in Austin and $202,000 in Denver when you adjust for cost of living. And since remote work is viewed as a privilege and employee benefit, workers are split whether they are willing to accept lower pay or not.
I posted a LinkedIn poll with the question "Would you take a pay reduction to work from home permanently?" 28 percent of the 980 respondents said "yes", 57 percent said "no" and 15 percent said, "not sure". Other polls from Fast and LogMeIn found that 66 percent and 62 percent of workers would take a pay cut for the flexibility to remote work. The studies also uncovered that men are more likely to take a pay cut than women and younger workers would take a pay cut over their older counterparts. A separate survey found that Americans would take a $316 monthly average pay cut to remote work. Of course, everyone will have their unique circumstances and weigh the benefits and drawbacks of working for one company over the other based on compensation and flexibility.
The benefits and drawbacks of remote work for employers and employees
Employers benefit from having a remote workforce because they can save approximately $11,000 per employee each year in office real estate. Employers with remote workers need smaller spaces if any, and that means less maintenance and smaller utility bills. They also benefit because they can expand their talent pool, offer flexibility (which is an attractive employee benefit right now), and stay competitive. But, employers have to weigh those benefits with the drawbacks, which include managing across time zones, having less control, harder to monitor employees and no in -person time that could help with collaboration, creativity, and innovation.
Employees receive a multitude of benefits from remote working and I can testify to all of them since I've been a remote worker for over a decade and am friends with many others who share the same sentiments. We save time, energy, and emotion from not having to commute to an office each day. Research shows that the longer your commute the more depressed you are. Back when I had a corporate job, I would have to drive home at night and felt depressed because of the length of the commute and the darkness around me. A shorter or no commute also saves you money because you might not need a car, will spend less on gas and maintenance. An analysis by Business Insider based on US Census Bureau data found that you could save $2,000 to $5,000 on your commute each year depending on where you live. This is especially valuable during our current recession, where families are cutting costs, while trying to save money.
Aside from saving money on commuting, you're also saving on work lunches, happy hours, clothing, and dry cleaning. Remote work gives you more control over your environment and schedule, helps you to avoid office politics, gives you more solitude time and time for family obligations, allows you to dress casually and you can write off your home office when you file your taxes. But, these benefits come with drawbacks like not being able to separate work and life, higher utility costs, losing face-to- face contact (if you don't live with someone), technology issues, distractions, working longer hours, communication barriers, being overlooked for promotions and localized compensation.
The future of workplace compensation
With the normalization of remote working and the clear value, it provides employees, there's no doubt that there will be trade-offs and sacrifices. If companies can still compete for the best talent, while localizing compensation, they will. If they can't remain competitive by paying people less if they live in certain zip codes, they won't. In today's buyers market, companies have the leverage to cut salaries in order to increase profits and owe it to their shareholders. That's why they view localized compensation as a solution. But, employees will resist because they believe "jobs should be paid based on value, not location". And, while that makes perfect sense in a healthy economy, we're in a recession where employers are aggressively cutting costs and the biggest cost is their payroll.
The future of work will embrace pay transparency driven by younger generations, who already share how much they make with their coworkers. Pay transparency can occur more frequently when working remotely because you can avoid the salary taboo that is frowned upon at an office. This means that it will be fairly obvious if two different workers, living in two different locations, are compensated differently for the same job everything else being equal. And, eventually, the system will be protested by employees who feel unfairly paid and when the economy returns, companies may have to rethink localized compensation to remain competitive.
If we continue to value productivity, then we must compensate for that productivity. That's why new surveillance technology will surface to measure employee productivity levels and that data will factor into compensation. Both pay transparency and productivity data will be the key to ensuring fairness in the system that should reward employees with compensation tied to performance, not zip code.
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