Time to refresh the employee experience?
During the last 18+ months we have seen businesses become more people centric, applying refreshed consideration to the employee experience. Increased attention has been paid to balancing personal and professional needs, as the world’s of work and home have merged. The talking point for all companies at the moment is whether to commit to to maintaining remote work for the longer term. This opens up a Pandora’s Box of considerations, including where roles need to be based, tax, and employee legislation impacts.
Working from home is not a new concept. However, prior to the pandemic, many companies still treated it as a once-in-a-while practice restricted to certain employees, or even as a perk/reward for selected high achievers! COVID-19 has made distance work more accessible. The specifics vary, but it is clear that general awareness of remote work has created an expectation that will outlast the crisis.
The desire for workplace flexibility includes both location and working hours. According to BCG’s “Decoding Global Ways of Working” report only 36% of respondents globally say they want a traditional 9-to-5 job with fully fixed hours. The largest proportion (44%) would prefer a combination of fixed and flexible time, which could take the form of a daily window of a few hours when everyone is required to work and flexibility regarding the remaining required time. Another 20% of respondents would like to have complete timing flexibility, with no fixed work hours at all. Flexibility in terms of when one is at one's desk is obviously beneficial to the work-from-home model because it accommodates personal preferences and family commitments. Of course, the model necessitates discipline on the part of the remote worker as well as a reverse type of flexibility so that colleagues in other time zones are not perpetually unable to engage the remote worker in real time.
Willis Towers Watson forecast that in the next three years, 61% of organizations could make remote working a permanent policy as its various advantages begin to be realised. Many organisations expect to yield cost savings from reduced office footprint, less frequent business travel, and increased productivity from greater workforce engagement and employee wellbeing when employees have choices about where (and when) they work. This has raised questions about where to locate roles, and may result in another wave of offshoring or growth of shared service centres. Whilst not a phenomenon in single city markets such as Hong Kong and Singapore, in places such as the U.K. and the U.S., the London/New York centric is mobilising to smaller cities.
This has raised questions about geography-related aspects of salaries. Should salary and benefits be based on ability rather than location, or do you adjust pay to reflect working remotely from a lower-cost location compared with their higher-cost office location? Facebook announced last year that salaries could be adjusted to align with the cost of living in a chosen remote-work location. The Willis Towers Watson research indicated that 77% of organisations have decided that pay will be the same for remote and onsite workers in 2021, and only 10% are paying based on a remote worker’s location for all jobs. Whether this will become a permanent practice in 2022 and beyond is yet to be seen. Remote work also has opened questions about pay for skills/value, aligned incentives, performance measurement, goal setting, and other pay-related factors.
There is some variation, by region, in what workers are focused on. For instance, financial attributes are central for workers in China, whereas good relationships are a priority across India, Indonesia and MENA. In Europe good relationship and being appreciated for the work one does remain the top priorities.
