Who’s Really Supposed to Pay for Your Commute?
The challenge for employers is to maximize savings for staff while keeping the benefit of having people come into work.
The days before social distancing.
Photographer: Oli Scarff/Getty ImagesIt’s the central battleground in the conflict over just how much home-working should continue if life eventually normalizes: the grimness of commuting. For years, the assumption has been that commuters were responsible for their lot — and longer and more expensive commutes were implicitly covered by their salaries. That old certainty is now in doubt.
The popularity of WFH is highest among those who commute. Avoiding this journey “of some distance,” as the dictionary defines it, was the most commonly cited reason in support of WFH in a survey by pollster YouGov for the U.K. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development conducted in December and January. Among office workers who prefer to WFH most or all days, 62% said their commute was too long, according to a more recent YouGov poll for real-estate analytics firm Locatee.