It depends, where is your designated work site. If your main office is the one at work then being able to wfh is a privilege that if feasible should 100% be allowed but if part of your job is not able to be done remotely and once a week they require you to go the office there is no reason the company should pay for that
On the flip side if you are a remote employee who does not have a designated work site that’s asked to come to some random office to pick up a new laptop that should be on the clock.
The difference is control of the situation if you know where your designated work site is and choose to have a long commute to get there that is a personal choice, you don’t however have control over the random places that your work sends you like secondary job sites or another state.
Obviously there is no right or wrong answer to this as it’s all opinions but the way I see it is it’s bad for morale if a coworker got to work less than because they lived further away and others had to pick up their slack. Environmentally it’s worse because it encourages people to live further away and be even more car reliant.
There also are just better options.
If the goal is to reduce the total hours people have to work because 8 hours + 1 hour unpaid lunch + 1 hour of commuting eats away at people’s day then you could just lower everybody’s required work time by the average commuting time
If the goal is to pay people more you could just use the extra money you would use for paying for the commute and just pay your employees more
But you could add extra incentives like anyone who bikes/walks/takes public transit to work gets to leave extra early
As I mentioned before pay people more if they live within X distance from work so they don’t have to commute as much
It depends, where is your designated work site. If your main office is the one at work then being able to wfh is a privilege that if feasible should 100% be allowed but if part of your job is not able to be done remotely and once a week they require you to go the office there is no reason the company should pay for that
On the flip side if you are a remote employee who does not have a designated work site that’s asked to come to some random office to pick up a new laptop that should be on the clock.
The difference is control of the situation if you know where your designated work site is and choose to have a long commute to get there that is a personal choice, you don’t however have control over the random places that your work sends you like secondary job sites or another state.
Obviously there is no right or wrong answer to this as it’s all opinions but the way I see it is it’s bad for morale if a coworker got to work less than because they lived further away and others had to pick up their slack. Environmentally it’s worse because it encourages people to live further away and be even more car reliant.
There also are just better options.
If the goal is to reduce the total hours people have to work because 8 hours + 1 hour unpaid lunch + 1 hour of commuting eats away at people’s day then you could just lower everybody’s required work time by the average commuting time
If the goal is to pay people more you could just use the extra money you would use for paying for the commute and just pay your employees more
But you could add extra incentives like anyone who bikes/walks/takes public transit to work gets to leave extra early
As I mentioned before pay people more if they live within X distance from work so they don’t have to commute as much