Workers would take pay cuts to never return to the office: RPT

Colin Nabity, Breeze’s CEO & Co-founder, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss workers willingness to take payouts to work from home, with a new survey showing 65% of workers were willing to take a 5% reduction to stay at home.

Video transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: As investors hope tomorrow's jobs report will paint a picture of strength in the labor market, a majority of Americans are willing to take a pay cut so that they can continue working from home. That's all according to a new survey from the insurance company Breeze. We're joined now by Colin Nabity, Breeze's CEO and Co-founder. Colin, great to have you here with us.

Now, I was reading through the results-- now, they found that 65% are willing to take a 5% pay cut to work from home. As you can see there, some folks are willing to take even bigger pay cuts. And I saw that another roughly 40% are actually willing to give up their health insurance. How much do these findings really highlight for you that workers right now are placing such a high premium on the ability to work from home?

COLIN NABITY: Yeah, so I think what it's showing is workers are placing extremely high value on the ability to have flexible working situations and work from home. But I think it's also important to know this story is not that employers have the ability to cut benefits in place of letting people work remotely, but the story is that remote work is being highly valued by a large portion of the working population. And to be competitive in a post-COVID work environment, employers need to have flexibility when it comes to remote work.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Now, I know that you also asked folks, in addition to giving up things like some of their salary or even time off, you asked what else they would be willing to give up. Amd some of these answers sort of made me smile-- they'd give up Netflix, or Amazon, or social media for just a year. Can you share with us some of the other findings?

COLIN NABITY: Yeah. So 55% said that they would give up social media for the next year to continue working from home. 52% said that they would give up Netflix or their favorite streaming service. So like I said earlier, remote work is really becoming a new employee benefit. And so I think employers need to look at this holistically to realize that to compete in a post-COVID world, the flexible work environments are so incredibly important to remaining competitive.

KRISTIN MYERS: Now, Colin, you actually mentioned something that I was thinking about, which was that, frankly, a lot of employers would see results like this, or listen to their employees, and hear them saying repeatedly that they want more flexibility, they want the ability to work from home, and start actually cutting back on some of the other benefits. I hope that they wouldn't go so far as to say that they're going to be cutting health insurance benefits, but do you see some of the benefits, like subsidized gym memberships, for example, going away as more and more folks stay at home?

COLIN NABITY: I think we'll continue to see stipends to build out, you know, home offices and things like that. But, again, what this is showing is employees now value remote work just as much or more than some of the most popular traditional benefits like PTO, health insurance, dental, and vision?

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Well, Colin, you know, I keep reading that what we're finding is when people are working from home, they're actually working harder, they're working longer, they're being more productive. Did you ask folks how they feel about their productivity levels working from home? And maybe that could be the argument for these companies to say, yes, OK, we'll give you a little more wiggle room and you can work more from home.

COLIN NABITY: Yes, so we didn't ask about productivity, but it's something that we're going to run in the future. But I think you nailed it. Working from home, when you think about commute times to the office, when you think about time going into packing your lunch or money, you know, to eat outside of the office-- there's a lot of cost savings for employees to work from home. And so I think that's something that employers need to take into account as they're trying to figure out what a post-COVID work relationship looks like with employees.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, well, we'll have to leave that there. Colin Nabity, CEO of Breeze-- thanks so much for being here and also for sharing some of those findings.