Shomporko Desk:-At the point when Mark Zuckerberg facilitated a townhall in late May with Facebook’s 48,000 employees, some were tuning in from new urban communities they had mixed to move to as the pandemic hit.
Zuckerberg had a transparent message for them: if you intend to remain, expect a modification to your pay.
“That implies in the event that you live in an area where the typical cost of living is drastically lower, or the cost of labour is lower, at that point pay rates do will, in general, be fairly lower in those places,” he said on the video meeting, where he reported more employees would be permitted to work remotely for all time.
Zuckerberg gave Canadian and American workers until Jan. 1, 2021 to inform the company about their location, so it can properly complete taxes and accounting and use virtual private network checks to confirm staff are where they claim.
The demand is part of a new reality Canadian workers are being confronted with as employers try to quell the spread of COVID-19 and increasingly consider making remote work permanent.
The shift means many companies are having to rethink salaries and compensation while grappling with the logistics of a new work model.
Only one-third of Canadians working remotely expect to resume working from the office as consistently as they did pre-pandemic, while one-in-five says they will remain primarily at home, according to a June study from the Angus Reid Institute.
Like Facebook, Canadian technology companies Shopify Inc. and Open Text Corp. have already announced more employees will soon have the option to permanently work remotely.
Both declined interviews with The Canadian Press, but Richard Leblanc, a professor of governance, law and ethics at York University, said he wouldn’t be surprised if their staff that relocate will see their pay change.
“It’s inevitable because the cost and expense structure of work has changed,” he said.
“If you, for example, decide, that you could do the majority of your work from well outside the Greater Toronto Area…and you want to buy a home in Guelph or in Hamilton, should we expect the base salary for those individuals might change? Yes, because your cost of living has changed and your expenses have changed.”
If companies calculate salaries properly, neither the business nor workers should feel their salary adjustments are unfair, Leblanc said.
However, figuring out what to pay staff transitioning to permanent remote work is tough, especially with a pandemic raging on and forcing some businesses to lay off workers or keep companies closed.
Owners have to consider what salaries will help them retain talent, but also how their costs will change if workers are at home.
Companies like GitLab, an all-remote company in San Francisco focused on tools for software developers, may offer some clues about how Canadian companies opting for permanent remote work can tackle salaries.
When GitLab started offering permanent remote work years ago it built a compensation calculator combining a worker’s role and seniority with a rent index that correlates local market salaries with rent prices in the area.
Anyone can visit GitLab’s site and plugin a role, experience level and location to find a salary.
GitLab’s junior data engineers, for example, make between $50,936 and $68,913 if they live in Whitehorse, Yellowknife or Iqaluit, where the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation said the average rents for a two-bedroom home last October were $1,695, $1,100 and $2,678 respectively.
That salary shoots up to anywhere from $74,359 to $100,603 for those living in Toronto, Vancouver or Victoria, where CMHC reported the average rents for a two-bedroom home last October were $1,562, $1,748 and $1,448 respectively.
Leblanc warned that varying remote work salaries can create “global competition for talent in an online world.”
Photo credit: GETTY
News source: The Canadian Press
