Good Morning,

Would company donations to charity incentivize you to come back to the office?

Salesforce is betting that it will. Their latest desperate RTO policy says for every day a person works from the office during the next two weeks, the company will donate $10 to a local charity.

But as we discuss in this edition, there are many, many reasons that remote workers don’t want to return to the office, which easily outweigh small charitable contributions.

I’m pretty confident guilt tripping employees about charitable giving isn’t the magic bullet the Salesforce CEO wants it to be.

Travel

Homelink is a home-swap website worth knowing about, and might be the oldest company of its kind: they’ve been in business since 1953!

The premise is simple: create an account, upload information about your home, and search for homes you’d want to swap with for a given period of time.

It’s a great way to work from new places for a substantially reduced cost.

Need to know

We’re digging deeper into the employee perspective this week, answering two big questions:

1. What do people do more of when they’re remote?

2. Why do remote workers want to continue working remotely?

For the first question, we’ll turn to the team at WFH Research.

This month, they found which activities remote workers spent more time on versus their in-office peers on workdays:

While it’s no surprise that people spend more time on these while remote, it’s especially promising to see that remote workers are 37% more likely to exercise than in-office workers (42.3% vs. 30.8%).

Or conversely, in-office workers are 27% less likely to exercise on a workday. Is that enough to consider office work a public health crisis?

And surprisingly, two activities people devoted slightly less time to when working remotely:

• Playing phone or computer games (43% remote vs. 46% in-office)

• Reading for leisure (27% remote vs. 28% in-office)

When addressing why remote workers want to stay remote, we’ll cite an article published by the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago: We Asked Workers Why They’re Not Coming Back to the Office.

While it’s less data-driven, it showcases trends they found in interviews with over a dozen remote workers, which undoubtedly impact millions more across the country. Here are the highlights:

• Expenses: meals, commutes, and childcare represent some of the biggest cost differences for in-office workers. Each of these categories can easily cost a person thousands more per year if they’re working in-office instead of remotely.

• Parent responsibilities: related to both childcare activities and expenses, many remote workers would consider leaving their jobs altogether if they were forced to go back to an office routinely.

• Emotional labor: attempting to fit into office culture can take an unnecessary toll on people for a variety of reasons. One person said working remotely “freed up so much of [his] mental bandwidth.”

• Lost productivity: commuting into an office is a waste of time for many people. Those who know that in-person attendance has no impact on their job are unwilling to add several hours per week of unproductive commuting time to their schedule.

The Wall Street Journal released a follow-up article on Thursday as a result of hundreds of responses to the story above, affirming the views shared by those interviewed.

The headline: ‘It’s Not My Responsibility’ to Save the Office Economy.

Recommended

• 🎙 America’s big city brain drain - how remote work supercharged existing population trends (The Daily, Podcast)

• Google and Salesforce try new tactics to enforce return to office (Washington Post)

• Flexible work is feminist (Fortune)

• 🔒 Zooming and the future of cities (New York Times Opinion)

• Parents say they’re more productive with flexible work, but 1 in 3 worry about a career hit (CNBC)

Would love to know the math behind the Salesforce experiment.

The fact is, for every $10 donated to charity, an employee is very likely spending an incremental $10+ each day on commuting, coffee, meals, and more.

But… it’s for the culture!

Cheers,
Grant