Employees Willing To Make Less Money To Stay Home

Employees Willing To Make Less Money To Stay Home

The widespread availability of Covid-19 vaccines could mean workers are returning to the office sooner than expected. 

Like the transition to fully remote work a year ago, the transition back has many obstacles. One of which is, do employees even want to go back?

On Blind, an anonymous professional network, professionals across companies have begun discussing what going back to the office means in practice.

A professional at Goldman Sachs posted, “Would you rather make $30k more switching to a new job that requires you to work in the office, or would you rather keep your current salary but WFH anywhere after covid?”

  • 64% of professionals prefer permanent work from home over a $30K compensation increase
    • 100% of Zillow Group professionals prefer permanent work from home over a compensation increase
    • 71% of Airbnb, 81% of Lyft, and 89% of Twitter professionals prefer permanent work from home over a compensation increase

These sentiments are not new, earlier in 2020 employees were willing to take a paycut in order to relocate out of major cities. See more of the data here.

Data from 3,019 respondents:

 

Data by Company:

 

While the value of $30,000 means drastically different things to different professionals, there are still valuable learnings on how employees feel about their ability to stay at home. There are many obstacles to returning to work. There are fears about commuting to work and reacclimating to the office environment, as well as potential conflicts between executives and staff over return-to-work policies. Here are some comments on the poll:

A user at Cisco’s writes, “You save more money by staying home. Working in an office creates extra costs. Insane commutes are such a waste of valuable time. Work can be done from anywhere. Open office layouts killed all productivity. Time is not something you can ever get back.” 

A Facebook professional writes, “30k after taxes is 15-20k. For me, that’s not enough to give up the flexibility of WFH.”

A Google professional writes, “30k is ?. For example, my current TC is 350k in Southern California. People have asked me if I’d move to the bay if I could double my salary and I probably wouldn’t even move to the bay for one mil TC. 2 mil TC and I guess I kind of would have to but I’d prob hate my life until early retirement. Permanent WFH worth A LOT more than 30k”

Another user writes, “Take into account the following factors before making a decision.

  1. Time, gas and energy wasted in commuting to work.
  2. Depreciation of car value.
  3. The amount of things you can do in the time that you would save.
  4. You can trade stocks and make anywhere between 10 to 20K a year if you WFH depending on your risk-taking capacity and mental acumen.
  5. Kid wrangling duties are easier when you WFH, but kids can also get on your nerves.

Just a few suggestions.”

The structure of the post-pandemic work world remains up in the air. It may be hard to know exactly what set-up an individual employer may choose when the time comes. Still, understanding why opinions are so diverse may help workers prepare for a hybrid future or reduce pay to maintain the flexible lifestyle they’ve adapted this past year.