Are you still working from home? You would hardly be alone in doing so. According to Monster.com data highlighted by CNBC, 54% of workers are still working fully remote — and the same percentage have never met their work colleagues in person.
CNBC reporter Ryan Ermey lives in Washington, D.C., hundreds of miles away from his co-workers based in midtown Manhattan. He enthuses that his CNBC bosses “have kept their promise to let me remain remote, even as my co-workers return to work in person.”
However, it’s worth emphasizing that your own employer might not be willing to let you continue with remote working indefinitely. In the UK, for example, employees must comply with ‘reasonable management requests’, as quoted by Citizens Advice.
This means that, if your original contract with the employer specified that you would work in an office, the employer can ask you to return to one. So, if you find yourself in this position, how can you help yourself to rein in the expense of an office return?
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Why your new office might not quite be like your previous one
Let’s assume that you are an employer rather than an employee. You might have rented a flexible workspace — such as a serviced office or virtual office — in order to accommodate flexible working during the pandemic.
Even if you haven’t rented such a space, it wouldn’t be too late for you to go down this route. In the UK, the vast majority of employees who have been with the same employer for at least 26 weeks are legally entitled to request flexible working arrangements.
This process is referred to as ‘making a statutory application’ — and, if you are hit with one of these, you would need to handle it in a reasonable manner lest you are taken to an employment tribunal. However, flexible working does not necessarily always mean fully remote working.
You might not need to return entirely to the office
Now, let’s look at things from the perspective of the employee in the above-described scenario. If you are reticent about returning to the office, one reason for you to be confident in your statutory application’s chances of success is that you could potentially enjoy a compromise setup.
Citizens Advice details various examples of flexible working arrangements — including continuing to work remotely for some of the time, working shifts and engaging in term-time work, where you would be spared from working when kids aren’t at school.
The range of options available when it comes to flexible working could be an especially great comfort to you if you are worried about costs — like those of commuting or occupying a parking space — that you could need to incur as a result of recommencing with office life.
If you are the employer, you might not strictly need to spend big even on the office itself. That’s because it is perfectly possible to rent an office on flexible terms that would save you having to pay for a lot more than what you genuinely need.
