Should salaries change for employees shifting to remote?  And other questions to consider in writing your remote work policy

If you’re a HR Director or HR Manager, looking to add some verbiage to your employment policies, to adapt to the fact that some of your staff are currently working remotely, or you’re looking to write a specific remote work policy to help define your approach to remote working – or maybe you’re responsible for setting the compensation rates of your company’s employer and you’re asking yourself to what extent are remote and partially remote companies adapting remote worker salaries to reflect the fact that they’ve perhaps moved out of a City, or even moved country – then read on, this piece is for you:

Last week I was lucky enough to chat to CEO of SoapboxHQ, Brennan McEachran, about transitioning his business to remote.  SoapboxHQ is an employee engagement tool, which helps you transform the efficiency of your meetings – check it out here, there’s a free version to try.

SoapboxHQ is fully remote and we talked about some of the difficult decisions that need to be made when transitioning to remote – whether that’s fully remote or a hybrid model or just remote-friendly.

In many ways, a remote friendly approach makes these decisions even more important than fully remote businesses, since there’s added potential for employees to be working in different ways and to therefore create inequalities across the workforce.

We talked about the fact that a lot of businesses are currently just remote on a temporary basis, but that, in reality, once things return to normal – it will be a new version of normal in which most workforces will continue to incorporate an element of remote, in some shape or form, so developing a remote work policy will become de rigeur for every business.

Brennan shared some of the questions that his organization has already grappled with, along with the issues to consider, to help you determine which issues need figuring out, to write your remote work policy.

Questions to ask in creating an equitable remote work policy:

1. Will employee compensation change, for remote employees?

This is a challenging question to answer – particularly at the moment whilst there is a lot of flux in the market, and a lot of different practices exerting pressure to keep pace with trends, to stay competitive.

If compensation is adjusted, retention can become an issue – particularly if other businesses have not reduced compensation, or offer more flexibility.  Also vital to consider is whether to change compensation if the employee leaves the country?  Should pay adjust to the local market level of where they are moving to?  Or will it stay the same – and if staying the same, does that begin to create issues if you have different pay-levels across different geographies already?  It’s become the norm for employers to pay different rates for different talent in different markets already which, arguably makes the case for compensation tied to market economies, otherwise inequalities are created for employees who started in one country but moved to another, where their newly local peers are getting paid less.  It’s a challenging, multi-faceted, prickly question but one that really needs working through, to create clarity and transparency in your remote working policy.

2. What restrictions will you apply to remote workers

This is particularly relevant if your business doesn’t yet have a formal remote work policy in place, with workers operating remotely, temporarily.  Some of them may already have used this opportunity to move further away from a city, to more affordable housing for example – what level of flexibility will they be afforded, to work remotely, once things return to normal and the expectation to in-office returns?  Will you require all employees to return?  Or will you allow a degree of flexibility?

If you have remote workers across different timezones, what level of core hours, to create team overlap, might you want to mandate?  If you’re allowing remote work, but have employees on completely opposing timezones, how do you best manage this?  If you’re going completely remote, with employees globally, do you define a specific HQ-time for determining overlap?  Will you allow flexibility within your business, across teams – and if so, how will you manage the potential conflict and resentment this might cause?

3. What’s your long-term strategy?

This is a CEO level question, but one which then needs to filter into your remote work policy.

How do you want your remote work policy to look in 2+ years?  Will your business be fully remote, fully in-person with a degree of flexibility for parental responsibilities etc, or a hybrid of remote and in-office?

As with any business strategy, it’s important to work out where you’re heading, so you can best determine how to get there.  You need to give consideration to the unintended consequences of remote work and, particularly for larger organizations, how you will manage the different needs of the business, without creating potential for resentment because some teams have more flexibility than others.

You’ll want to consider the fact that a degree of remote-friendly is going to become de rigeur for businesses, and not to consider flexibility here will put you at a disadvantage in the market for talent.  Your choice of strategy has a massive impact on your workforce’s daily lives – if you’re fully remote, employees can essentially live where they choose, whilst partially remote gives them a wider commuting belt, creating more affordable housing opportunities – employees are more amenable to a long commute if it’s just occasionally rather than every day.  And employees that have flexibility make for happier employees.

4. How will you manage and measure productivity remotely?

Output is the most effective measure of productivity but  it is nonetheless recognised that operating remotely can create challenges in both managing and measuring productivity.  For some businesses, a fundamental change in how they view employee work might be needed – in which flexibility is needed to allow creativity and innovation, and if that’s being delivered as expected then whether an employee skipped Friday afternoon or not is immaterial.  For other businesses, this level of flexibility is not possible and fits neither with their culture or the work-output required.  There isn’t a silver bullet for this, it’s at the heart of figuring out how to manage and lead, effectively, but considerations in this area should feed into the remote work policy in terms of flexibility and expectations.  For some businesses, time-sheeting becomes a valuable tool, for others, monitoring tools give added visibility whilst for others still it’s about getting incredibly good at defining the processes and output and measuring success against those deliberately and consistently.

5. Consider the culture you’re creating

Finally, it’s important to ensure that culture isn’t forgotten.  With remote and partially remote workforces, more deliberate thought and intentional action is required to perpetuate the company’s culture.  What you decide about remote-flexibility and how you write your remote work policy in itself will be a product, in part, of the kind of organizational culture you’re striving to create, but it will also become a driving force of that culture, so getting it right is important – and difficult.  We’re running a free webinar on managing your company culture in remote and partially remote businesses, with author Brett Putter, which you’ll get a lot from.  See session 5 here, for a sneak preview of some of the things he’ll be discussing – and you can sign  up here.