Let the people who can work from home work from home. The money saved on office space can be used to increase wages for the people working in warehouses and doing deliveries
Then let the people who want to work in the office work in the office. Let the people who don't work from home. That will even reduce the number of people you're trying to fit into a building, making offices possible once more, so the people who do need to be in the office get a better working environment as well.
Let them work at home. With the ones who cannot work at home or remain at the office anyway, you'll have a lot more space per person to implement offices.
you save a lot of money on office space if you let people work at home; and usually you can save on salary, too- many people will work for less money if you let them stay at home.
This is what I've been doing, more out of necessity than anything else, Office space would cost more than what I'm paying people, and it's much easier to find people in my price range if I don't mind that they live a few timezones away.
if you work from home you need extra space which you don't need otherwise. the winners are those that are able to make use of that extra space outside of work.
i have an office at home that is not used outdide work. if i didn't work at home i could save money with a smaller apartment. seems only fair that my company pays that difference
Here's (part of) a solution: Let people work from home.
I have to work in a loud, noisy, open plan office with barely enough room. At home, I have a nicely decorated, well set-up, spacious office with all the equipment I need, sitting unused.
If you let people work from home, those that want to get can quiet, isolated environments in which to work. The people who still want to work in the office can do, and they now have more space. Plus, you can now hire people remotely from other areas of the world, rather than just a few miles of your office.
People working from home save their employers money through reduced need for space, services and consumables at offices or other business premises.
They make lesser demands of public facilities, notably reducing the load on overcrowded transport infrastructure and so improving efficiency, the environment and, particularly at the current time, the health and safety of those who do still need to travel.
They support local businesses in the areas around their homes.
Their own quality of life may be qualitatively improved, not least by getting back several hours every week that is no longer wasted on commuting. This has obvious benefits including greater personal productivity, better mental health and providing more family time for parents and children during the week.
And as a secondary benefit, forcing businesses to accept more remote working might undermine long-standing toxic practices and presenteeism culture imposed by bad management, further improving both business productivity and personal quality of life for many.
We shouldn't be taxing working from home (or working closer to home instead of in distant facilities). If anything, we should be incentivizing this shift in our way of life, and we should be adapting our planning and infrastructure policies to support doing more of it in the future for those who can and want to. That could mean anything from just allowing more small business premises within predominantly residential areas where their services are likely to be needed right up to creating local business hubs where people can set up to work, access shared facilities and enjoy some personal contact if they don't have good facilities to work literally at their own home or they prefer a more social work environment.
We're definitely going to have some big bills to pay after the coronavirus problem has been mitigated, but I can think of a lot of more reasonable ways to generate extra revenue on the required scale than this. How about some real international collaboration to establish transaction taxes on multinationals that make huge amounts of money largely by moving money and/or personal data around with little evidence of any wider societal benefit from their activities, for a start?
Why even provide office space to folks? Just let them work from home and you save a lot!
I always felt this was the fatal flaw in WeWork’s model. Once telecommuter culture has been established, companies realize they can just make their employees pay for their office space and deduct it.
For most things where you benefit from “going in to the office”, the benefit is reliant on having a set of people in the same place. If everyone is all over the country, what is the point of office space in the first place?
As an employee the cost of working from home is GARGANTUAN. I already life where I want to, don't force me to move to a more expensive place so that I have space for an office at home. I don't need to move for any office, as all offices in my local city (1+ mil) are easily reachable by bike or subway within 30 minutes.
I think from a utilitarian perspective, getting the minority who want to not work from home to find a cowork space or alternative solution is better than mandating working from the office. Won’t fit everyone, but neither does forcing everyone into the office.
Nah how about we all work from home 2 or 3 days a week. People will actually do that and it saves not only the city but whole bunch of other things for the employee and the employer.
If anything companies should be paying people MORE to work from home especially if they aren't providing equivalent hardware (multiple monitors/etc). The cost of space/facilities/utilities/etc are now handled by the worker and not the employer. The fact they want to instead pay these people less is really gross.
So if you don't work from home, you bring your own office and computer and desk and chair to work? In my part of the world, employer tends to provide those. And it makes sense that they still provide for what I need to do my job even if I don't do it on premises.
But yeah, I think people who work from home should make more money. Consider it a reward for not contributing to traffic congestion and pollution. :P If you really insist on working onsite, fine, maybe we can allow that but it's not a free perk!
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