Would you trade salary to be able to work from home?

This is an interesting question that came up in conversation with a colleague of mine as I’d had some discussions around salary benchmarking for remote roles.

We discussed it from a candidate point of view and concluded that those that had an expensive commute, could make some significant cost and time savings if they were able to remove it.

My conversations regarding benchmarking, started to go down the line that if the role was remote, they could pitch it at a slightly lower level as candidates would not have costs of commute etc.

This interested me, as yes, I could see the point, but I did not agree that salary level should be determined by where you undertake your work, it should be by output.

You could use it as an opportunity to save on the wage bill, but would it be an effective recruitment strategy to hire the best people into your organisation?

Having mulled it over, I felt the best way to get to grips with this was to put a poll out on LinkedIn (very scientific, I know) to see what my network thinks.

Now I don’t want to be smug, but it seems they agree with me.

Although there are plenty of people that would trade salary for flexibility, the majority still believe that renumeration should be based on output.

If you use this as an opportunity to reduce employment costs, then you are ignoring the majority of the market and so at some point you will hire someone that is not the best person for the job.

My view is that it is a personal decision for a candidate to make when considering the complete package of a new job, as opposed to an opportunity for employers to drive down their wage bill.

As a candidate, this flexibility can make a big difference, and so of course if you decide you can choose to earn less because of that flexibility then go ahead and get that work life balance!

If we looked at an example of someone earning 50k and having an annual railcard at say 3k.?

By removing this 3k travel card from your expenses, then at 50k, you could roughly drop to 45.5k and still have the same take home pay.

That’s not including all of the other expenses you pick up when out of the house for 10 hours a day.?You have got to get to the station, park, probably will buy a fancy coffee and go to Pret for lunch etc.?

Clearly working at home is not free, but there are mainly savings to be made by eradicating the above expenses.

And of course, there is the time that you get back, that you can reinvest into your own wellbeing.

As an employer, you should promote this flexibility to engage a wider talent pool and give yourself the greatest opportunity to hire the best talent into your business and not as a way to reduce your wage bill.

What do you think??Am I missing anything?