This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
GOOGLE employees who decide to work from home may face pay cuts compared to their colleagues in the same workplace who come into the office.
Consistent with tech giants Facebook and Twitter, Google is experimenting with cutting pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas and work from home, according to a Reuters report.
In some cases, this threatens workers to commute to the office for longer periods than their counterparts – up to a few hours in total in a day – or have more of their salary taken.
Companies such as Reddit and Zillow are implementing location-agnostic pay models, considering them to have hiring, retention and diversity advantages.
Google offers employees a calculator that allows them to see the effects of a move, which Reuters says it has viewed.
One Google employee told Reuters they typically commute to the Seattle office from a nearby county and would likely see their pay cut by about 10% by working from home full-time, according to the company’s Work Location Tool that launched in June.
According to screenshots of the internal salary calculator seen by Reuters, an employee living in Stamford, Connecticut – about an hour from New York City by train – would be paid 15% worse off if they worked from home, while a colleague at the same office living in New York City would see no cut if they too worked from home.
Differences from 5% to 10% in the Seattle, Boston and San Francisco areas were also seen.
A Google spokesperson told Reuters, “Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from”, and that pay would differ from city to city and state to state.
They said the company would not change an employee’s salary based on them going from office work to being fully remote in the city where the office is located, giving the example that an employee working in the New York City office would be paid the same as those working remotely from another New York City location.
