Work from home;Should data costs replace transport allowances?

The raging novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is changing the way the world works and employers will have to reexamine how they remunerate employees.

Transport allowance could just be one of the victims of any readjustments in the remuneration packages of workers on the back of a new norm orchestrated by Covid-19.

In its place could be data allowances, an emerging cost item that employees are having to deal with in other to make the 'work from home' craze a reality.

Transport headache

Until the emergence of the virus, transporting workers to and from work was one of the top headaches facing employers.

With increased urbanisation and population growth making it difficult for most workers to reside closer to their work places, getting to work on time and in a good state of mind has been one of the priorities of top-rated employers, if not all those who employ.

It is such that transport has become a central part of the remuneration packages of employer-employee discussions.

While some companies resort to transporting their workers to and from work, others prioritise the allocation of fuels to staff with vehicles.

Similarly, other companies give money under what is generally called transport allowances to staff to cushion them against the hustles of transporting themselves to and from work while other companies combine these three packages under special arrangements and terms.

Whatever the arrangement, the central objective has always been to aid the worker's movement to and from the office to help improve delivery and health.

Covid-19 normal

But since the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the world has been adjusting to a new normal that promises to permanently impact how people work and the remuneration they get for those works.

One of them is virtual work. Given the contagious nature of the virus, health experts and authorities advocate that people reduce physical interactions and encourage staying indoors.

In place of indoors is virtual interaction. Buoyed by the increasing wonders of the Internet and the millions of innovations it is encouraging, people are able to interact with family, friends, colleagues and loved ones while apart as well as execute tasks that they would have ordinarily have been asked to be present while executing.

As a result, most companies have been promoting virtual work, a craze that is now taking over in organisations and sectors where physical presence is not a necessity to delivery and productivity.

Thus, in place of transporting oneself to the office or work location, most workers now have the luxury of staying in their homes and still delivering to the satisfaction of their employers.

This arrangement has loosely been described as working from home and it is fast becoming the smarter way to beat a pandemic whose rage weakens when people associate less.

Internet costs

The 'work from home' craze has been boosted by the surge in social media applications that make it easier for people to stay connected while miles apart.

These platforms allow workers to participate in meetings, share and sign off documents and virtually do everything that does not require physical presence to execute.

Although a good and an innovative way to beat the impact of the pandemic on production, this arrangement requires that employees are equipped with the right tools to be able to deliver.

Key among those are computers, tablets, mobile phones and Internet sources.

Thus, in place of transport costs, people who work from homes will have to fund their data costs (in the case of those supplied with office laptops and other electronic devices).

The commercial nature of the usage means that the costs will represent a credible drain on the salaries of the workers.

What to do

One beneficiary of the 'work from home' arrangement is Mr Kofi Boadi, a communications consultant who has been working from home since March. He told the Graphic Business that although his transport expenses were consolidated into his salary and data costs were never a headache to him, he now feels that less emphasis should be placed on the former in favour of the latter.

"Because, I use quite a good chunk of data, about 20 gigabytes (GB), at least for official work."

"The average data on one Zoom meeting is about one GB.

"So if I have 20 meetings in a month, that cost should be borne by the employer," he said.

He added that he was aware of colleagues who complained that their data costs had gone up after they were asked to work from home.

"One used to buy 40GB every month at about GHS100 cedis."

"He said he has had to buy data twice in a month now because of the many online meetings," he added.

Renegotiations

Thus, as the intricacies from the pandemic unfold, the human resource management divisions of companies will have to start re-examining the remuneration packages for employees.

For firms can take up all or part of the data costs of their employees in addition to existing remunerations on transport, that will be super good news.

However, for those that cannot, recalibrating the package to include or replace transport expenses with data costs will be a must.

This is necessary not just for the psychological feeling that my employer is paying for my data usage but to ensure that employees do not use lack of data as basis to stay off meetings, delay on delivering tasks or submitting reports, among other bad work ethics.