Remote or hybrid workers, would you rather work a 4 day week on site, or WFH completely for 5 days a week, for the same pay?
Remote or hybrid workers, would you rather work a 4 day week on site, or WFH completely for 5 days a week, for the same pay?
I know this will vary a lot, so hypothetically let’s say you currently WFH/work remotely at least 3 days a week. Your commute to work takes an hour max (door to door) each way. If you were given the choice of a 4 day week working onsite, or a 5 day week WFH (or as many days as you’d like) for the same pay, which would you choose?
The commute time is kinda worse than work time, so the 4 days in the office are equal to 5 days WFH timewise. And I would still be missing out on benefits like cheaper lunch at home and wearing comfortable clothes, and not being tired all the time. On the other hand, I would always have 3 day weekends.
Full remote.
I actually like going into the office ~2x per week. But tell me I have to and bump it to 4 days, I'm out. I also do not want my colleagues forced on site. My current ~2x/week is as productive as it is because the other people going on site now are there voluntarily and for specific reasons.
I originally wanted to go back to the office because I'm a weirdly social person. Eventually my work told us to come in 3 days a week. They told us "it's the best of both worlds!" That's when I realized that hybrid is actually the worst of both worlds. I don't get to have a consistent daily routine. I have to constantly lug all my equipment back and forth between work and home. I don't get a dedicated desk. Everyone is coming in just to take virtual meetings from their desk all day, so it's really loud. I would rather everyone be at work 5 days a week than three, because then we would all be there, so meetings would be in person again.
My manager rebelled against upper management and had us just come in one day a week, and honestly, I think that's fine. We just don't get hardly any work done that one day. But we are seeing each other's faces, which is what upper management wants. They say it's good for team building and collaboration, and I see the merits in that.
Half the team still doesn't even do that. I mean, one member of the team lives 2000 miles away from the rest of us. One has a newborn baby. One has kids that she needs to pick up from school at 3 every day. Another guy has worked at the company for like 15 years and just refuses to come in because he knows they won't fire him. Another guy is 2 months away from retiring, so what's the point?
I need to go into the office to be productive. I don't begrudge anyone that wants to work from home, I wish it worked for me, but it doesn't. During the pandemic I was 100% work-from-home and got very little done. I actually asked my boss how long it would be until we could go back to the office. Donkey-brains chose that time to upgrade the office furniture and shampoo the carpets. It was another month until the office was open. I went back, and it was heaven. There were very few people there. I could sit at my desk, listen to my music, and do whatever I needed. Don't ask me what the difference was. Maybe I just have an affinity for flickering fluorescent tubes.
I've been WFH full time since early covid, so WFH for sure. My commute wasn't even bad, my office is less than 10 minutes away.
I'm not a social person so there is no upside to going into the office for me. Everything to do with my job must be communicated by email so it's documented, so it's just a waste of time if someone wants to chat in person or on the phone about it.
Plus I don't have to wear pants.
The one downside is my dogs seem to have developed separation anxiety since I'm around all the time.
I am WFH full time now.
My commute was, at best, 30 minutes each way. Weather or traffic can easily drive up this time. So at least an hour a day. Being in the office 4 days/week = 4+ hours commuting and all the headaches of driving, parking expense, car expenses, etc. I was much less productive in the office so I think it actually hurts my work to be in the office.
I'd prefer to drop the commute and be more productive. My employer will get MORE than 8 hours of work with that arrangement.
Not even a question for me: full remote or bust. The extra day off wouldn't make up for all the time wasted just from the pageantry of going to and being at an office.
I don't want to go in to the office. The pay doesn't include the extra commute time, plus getting dressed up slightly nicer.
I live alone. I don't have kids. Home is fine.
The office is loud. Often the wrong temperature. I get interrupted a lot. I don't get as much done on the tiny monitor they provide vs the big ass 4k ones I have home.
Some people are really not great at responding on slack though. If they could get on my level that would be nice.
For me. 100% remote.
But I work more for objectives rather than gross time/days. If the project is falling behind I work extra to gain some safeguard. If the project is going well I work more relaxed.
I don't mind working extra hours if I'm already saving a lot of time avoiding travelling to the client or going to the office, living in another place away from a city. Etc.
In response to your question, I'd like to share my personal experience regarding remote work. I have been working entirely remotely for years, and given this background, I cannot imagine returning to an office setting, even if it was just for one day a month.
The primary reason is tied to time and quality of life. If my office were an hour away from my home - and in reality, it's even further - I would be committing 8 hours a week just for commuting. This effectively means that in terms of hours, I'd still be tied to a five-day work commitment when considering the commute time.
But beyond the simple tally of hours, there are aspects of daily life and routine to consider. On the days I'd be expected to be in the office, I would have significantly less time to spend with my son. This would majorly impact our daily routine. We wouldn't get the chance to have lunch together, and the management of daily commitments would become much more complex.
In conclusion, given my background and personal priorities, I would unquestionably choose to continue working from home five days a week rather than commuting to the office for four days. The flexibility and time saved from commuting hold invaluable worth to me.
I took WFH for higher pay in 2013. It makes sense because I'm more productive without the noise, uncomfortable lighting, interruptions and subpar hardware.
Not conidering going back to office unless things change A LOT
I work in a job where working from an office doesn’t make sense. So I’ve always wfh. In my current role, I’d never work for any employer that required me to go to an office. It’s counter productive to the job.
In your scenario, if I had a job that made sense, I’d pick wfh because I won’t commute an hour. 15-30 is the tops I’ll commute.
We WFH and have a "no meetings on Monday and Fridays" policy.
So people could hypothetically not work those days.
Doesn't bother me as long as the tasks get done.
WFH and it's not even close. Too many benefits to it.
I’m 100% WFH, my commute is about 30 mins each way, and I like the social aspect of going into the office, but 5 days remote all the way.
WFH, no question.
I'm not remote hybrid, but I AM 4 10hr days/week in office.
I would GLADLY switch to a remote 5 day/week job any day. HOWEVER: that's only because I also have an hour+ commute each way, so each of those days really ends up being more like 13 hours. Even without the commute though, I may still lean remote.
WFH hands down. I would get two hours of each week day back that I spend commuting.
I would waste more time going to work four times in a week than I would get back by dropping Fridays. I'm never going back to the office.
I simply wouldn't take a job with a one hour per way commute. Takes me 15-20 minutes max, and one less work day a week sounds sweet.
Commute time for 4 days is typically more than 1 whole work day.
My commute would need to be 45 minutes or less, and even then half the year said commute involves wading through snow, so, no thanks.
Full time WFH is a big yes. Too many offices aren't easy to commute to, to save money on rent. My last job did t even have a sidewalk to get there, the last 2 blocks to it were your choice of walking on the road itself, or wading through knee deep snow.
Work from home for me. 4 day work week would be nice, but nothing beats downtime during work at home. Playing a video game doing some chores or even a quick shower all things that get looked at strangely in an office but at home
"hey I'm just waiting for this thing, lemme hit the shower right quick to refresh myself" " Sounds good"
10 minutes later something else to do or someone to help out.
Plus. I'm not the biggest fan of wearing clothes. Those are optional at home.
I will never go back to commuting for free
Hybrid work is idiotic. Remote all the way. Why do I need to travel two hours both ways to work at the same computer I can access from my bedroom? Even in office most meetings take place on teams anyway.
In your scenario? WFH. I like my work and hate traffic.
If I lived five minutes away from the office like I used to? I'd go in, assuming they'd let me be flexible with my time. I like being in the office. My coworkers are great and if I get burned out on what I'm doing I can go play with the hardware in the lab.
In real life? I live 100 miles from the office and work from home. I miss the comradery and being able to just walk down the hall and kick a piece of malfunctioning equipment directly though.
I'm fully WFH right now. Company policy leaves office attendance to each team, although almost no one is expected in full time as they've shed a significant number of desks. The pandemic is the reason it went that far but they were headed for hot desking and partial WFH in late 2019 anyway.
Personally, I'm not expected in at all except for monthly (local) team briefings, because the scheme I'm working on is based in an office at the other end of the country, and so I'd be remote working regardless of visiting "my" office.WFH suits me, but to be honest I do sometimes wish I could go in. I miss having people to idly chat to, but I can't. The office I want to return to isn't there any more. I used to have my own desk, set up my own way, with neighbours from my (discipline) team, co workers and friends.
Now it's a sea of souless hot desks, each identical to the next, same shitty misaligned monitors plugged into the same cheap hub, no dividers at all (it wasn't quite cubes before, but there were half height dividers that absorbed some of the noise) resulting in an almighty din. Those friends who didn't retire, quit or transfer might be sat near me, but probably won't. I can't even get a coffee unless I plan ahead because they no longer stock non-dairy because apparently it's too much trouble now they don't know who's coming in when.
Eventually I'll have to give up my home office because it will be needed as a bedroom, and I'll have to go in, but until that day I'll stay where I am.
I went back to 5 days a week in office in summer 2021. I hated it when I was told but now I'm glad it happened. I walk 2 miles each way to work. That walk is one of the nicest parts of my day. I get crazy paranoia when I can't speak to people face-to-face, and I can maintain a routine. I appreciate I am lucky in my situation but I would take the 4 days and enjoy a long weekend where I can properly unwind
First of all, thanks for the question, I think it's really interesting and I'm sorry that some people are responding with so much hostility.
If I commute 2 hours a day and work 5 days a week, that works out at 10 hours, which is more than a single day's work - so for that reason alone I think the question is a little flawed.
However, the company I used to work for was a 5 minute or so commute for me. So if I could have a short commute like that and work 4 days from the office, I'd totally go for it. More time for me! If it was even as much as 20 minute commute (4.5 days work equivelent) then I'd rather work from home.
1 day doesn’t make much of a difference for me, so I’ll still take the 5 WFH days. It’s still a much better use of my time when you total all the time saved from commuting and being able to run errands/chores while WFH vs. being in the office for 4 days. 3 days though? Maybe I’ll consider it.
With my current job, remote. My company moved from being a 20 minute commute to a 1.5 hour commute. The four days commuting would cost me 12 hours vs 8 hours for the extra work day remote.
Even my old half hour commute... I think I would still take the remote. My position is very flexible, so I can get offline a little early and do something with my son, then wrap things up in the evening if I need to. That is a lot easier with being remote.
4 days on site, not even close.
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I work from home so that I don't have to go to the office.
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I don't have to go to the office.
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Let me work fewer days. 4x10 days would be nice. From home. So I don't have to go to the office.
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I don't want to go to the office just to be on Zoom all day anyway. It's a waste of time, a waste of carbon, and a waste of company money on the office space.
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WFH always, all the time.
Not to feed into the bosses' paranoia, but I'd say WFH 5-days (on paper) and bunk off, which is a lot easier to do WFH anyway.
I don't actually think the employer misses out here, even if most companies already take far more than they're owed from their employees to begin with.
The reality for a lot of jobs, especially those that require deep work, creativity etc, is that watching how long people are sat at their desks is not a good way to improve results anyway. Better a motivated happy workforce, and managers that are thinking in terms of how well a team is delivering useful things for the org rather than obsessing about timesheets.
If the company is happy to pay me X salary for the results I provide them, everybody wins. It's foolish for organisations to think that getting people to work longer hours, whether it's forcing people to work 4, 5, or 6 days, is going to get them more bang for buck.
As for remote working, I've worked exclusively from home for over a decade in fully remote teams. Everyone wins with WFH. There can be problems to mitigate and there's always some subjective preference to consider, but on the whole the average employee and employer wins big from the arrangement.
All the pushback I've seen on WFH since the pandemic seems in large part management using it as an excuse for their own incompetence.
"How can I tell my employees are working if I can't see them at their desks?" If you cant tell if they're working now, then you didn't know they were working before either!
On-boarding new people, building up young people, is just different from before. Make sure they have decent equilment for video and normalise teams sitting in video rooms when the work. Encourage buddy working at all levels. Recognise and respect the upfront cost of training. Encourage and fund opportunities for socialising both remotely and in person.
Managers don't know what's happening without the "water cooler effect". They're used to be able to shout at teams across an office, or easedrop. Again, this demonstrates a weakness in their ability to communicate and interact with the people they claim to "lead". Good managers will be in the same video rooms and chatting shit with the people they lead while they work as a united teams. Shitty managers will sit on their hands while not even noticing their team does everything they can to avoid a unhelpful or unsupportive "leader".
The worse one is productivity. I have no doubt things are going worse for corpos since the pandemic. This likely correlates with increase WFH. The ideas that this is proof that WFH is outrageously. During the pandemic we had teams working 17 hour days. Corpos took the opportunity to cut every corner and show contempt to the workforces, and they didn't fix things when the COVID numbers went down. The big shots made some truly terrible strategic calls. All these things and more are seeming to lead to a kind of mass enshittification across a ton of organisations. But bosses don't want to own their mistakes, let alone fix them , so WFH ends up the scapegoat.
(Sorry! This thread seems to have brought out the rant in me!)
4 days on-site. I like the mental separation by having a completely separate space for work, and I enjoy talking to my colleagues. I don't see many people outside of work, so I need the social interaction. And the lunches at work are usually much healthier than something I'd cook up myself, so that's also a plus.
I have tried to work from home a few days, but don't really like it at all.
I will take Working From Home, knowing that I can get the equivalent of a day off per week anyway and I can use it mostly as I need it through the week.
I'm assuming that my employer doesn't monitor my machine to make sure my mouse pointer is moving. If that were the case, I'd have to fix that problem first.
After doing WFH for several years, I'll only take a job on site as a last resort or for like double my pay. Then I would cut my time until FIRE roughly in half. I don't hate doing work. I hate having a huge chunk of my time taken up by having to work 40 hours.
If work weeks were cut to 24 or even 32 hours, I might even reconsider the FIRE path.
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A lot depends on the exact conditions. If the WFH/remote work let's my live anywhere in the world, I'd take that in a heartbeat. If I still have to be in a specific country it depends on how bad the commute is. If it's 10 minute to a train station, hop on a train for 40 minutes and another 10 to the office, then I take the 4 day work week. But if the commute is driving or lots of transfering then I would go with WFH.
It depends on a lot of factors, like how my productivity is measured, how long is the commute, etc. but in general I'd pick the 4 days in the office.
I have done it both ways actually and I would take the 5 days WFH because I could still do the same amount of work in both scenarios and get paid the same. And on my "extra" 5th day of WFH I can just pretend to work and do whatever anyway.
Even if I had to actually work more, I'd still do WFH instead of commuting to the office because the commute and office + city experience just suck that much more.
My comment goes against the trend, but I'd choose to go into work since I find it much easier to focus, to the point where I could likely get the same amount of work done in 4 days at the office vs 5 days at home.
Currently my employer makes us come into the office three days per week, unless we choose to switch to full-time remote.
Wfh for sure
I don't mind the one hour commute, I did it for 3 years going to college and my first job and I think 3 day weekends are the perfect amount of time between work weeks. Then again, I love the freedom of WFH. I can't choose.
I work 3 days a week WFH...so neither?
lol
Yeah 4 day WFH sounds great, IDK what the difference in onsite makes lol you just go onsite to zoom meeting anyways