Is the WFH life worth a pay cut?

This week I learned that there’s finally some research happening on the subject of what remote work is actually worth to employees. The Harvard Business School recently published a study about how much of a pay cut people would be willing to take in order to continue working hybrid over the choice to return to office 100% of the time.

While a small datapool (just over 2300 participants), the results are telling, with an average of 40% of respondents saying they’d take a 5% cut and 9% saying they’d take a 20% cut. I like that the variables they measured for include age range, remote work before the pandemic, and tenure at their current company, because it’s insightful from an overall context, plus the visual bar graphs are a nice touch.

They also provide data on men vs women, which included primary caregiver status (sorry to all the enby folks – this was back in 2023 so we can’t even blame Trump on this one. It’s either a shortcoming in the survey or the data illustration), and a third visual on workers that claimed they were more productive working remotely.

Although this is self reporting, this is exactly the type of data I’ve been begging to see – and not to derail the topic too much, but we often talk about increasing the number of days in office, claiming it impacts productivity, but there’s not really a comparable dataset. Roles and responsibilities change, and the whole world got upended in 2020 so the context in which we look at the data changes.

Something for an NPS survey if you ask me. I personally feel more productive working remotely when I’m working on items solo – there are fewer distractions and I have greater control over my environment. I acknowledge that for some projects, being able to walk over to someone or book a meeting room is more beneficial, even than a teams call.

That said, we’ve adapted to getting the work done, and in my experience the work is still done very well. Because the location isn’t the only factor going into staff motivation, although it is one of them. Freedom is an increasingly large piece of that puzzle, and it seems people will look for roles that give them that freedom. Especially in a world where brand loyalty is lower than it was a few decades ago.

Some of the news items that published before me around this item make some great callouts: that location doesn’t impact how well people work inherently, nor should anyone, in this economy or otherwise, have to give up salary to have an accommodating work arrangement.

Besides, with most businesses that survived/flourished in the pandemic, I think it’s evident you can see the work that’s getting done. Certainly, in the teams I’ve worked in, there are very measurable metrics in place.

I embrace the implication that if there are people out there willing to take any pay cut to work remotely that there’s something more sinister than empty desks in an empty office in play. Not to say that of my current workplace, but general trends as captured in the broader discussion.

Some food for thought – I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if you influence these decisions.