It’s no wonder staff fear returning to the office full time – it’s so expensive

New research shows employees are increasingly uneasy about being asked to return to the office for financial reasons. Hannah Ewens argues the cost of a typical in-office day is simply too high to justify

Why pay to commute when you can not pay to stay at home? (Getty)

There’s a nihilistic little phrase that my friends and I say to each other sometimes. The black humour sounds alarming to those who overhear, but we find it captures the lived reality quite well: “The problem is, you see, that I cannot afford to be alive.” Sometimes it’s softened to more palatable variations, like, “If I could just not leave the house for a few months...” Or, “If I could just go on a very long walk like that couple from The Salt Path maybe did, sleeping only under the night sky, forgoing all food but nature’s candy: deadly nightshade berries...” If only the demands of the corporeal form relented, then perhaps we could catch up with the snowballing cost of living.

Maybe you say things like this too. For many living in the UK, everything has become so costly that they can’t cover basic expenses. In just the past few days, the news cycle has informed us that one in six can’t afford to pay bills and that the number of people who have to work a second job is the highest since records began. It is quite literally expensive to be alive. Don’t think about it for too long. Or do, because rumination is a free activity.

In this economy, it tracks that workers now fear being ordered back into the office. In a study of 3,600 UK employers and employees by recruitment company Hays, four in five employees (84 per cent) who work in a hybrid way said it had a positive effect on physical, social and financial wellbeing. The main concern about returning more frequently to the office (cynical employers: read on) had less to do with such frivolous luxuries as watching Netflix on a lunch break, a better work-life balance, and best managing our chronic illnesses, and more about the fact that we can’t afford to go to work.

Almost six in 10 (59 per cent) said financial worries would affect their willingness to spend more time in the office. It’s unsurprising that younger workers (the ones arguably most impacted by the high cost of living with their lower wages) were more concerned by the possibility of increased office attendance than colleagues aged 50 and over (inevitably homeowners with more stable finances).

As the cost of everything has increased, so has the cost of simply attending your job. If you’re in the capital, our Tube system, run by Transport for London (TfL), is now the most expensive in the world. I commute using a train, which every day is an extra 15 quid on top of fFL costs. Forgetting to organise a packed lunch is another office tax that’s another tenner these days. When you’re in the office, you might have to pay for travel to meetings across town or work late and need a snack to tide you over until dinner. These little financial inconveniences add up.

My average day at work costs between 25 to 30 pounds, even when I’m being mindful. Three days a week in the office, and that’s a cost of £360 that I only recently added to my budget. That’s far from an unusual figure. I have had friends and colleagues in the past tell me that they have pretended to be ill or have people coming over to look at the boiler because of their maxed-out cards. “The problem is, you see, that I can’t afford to go to work,” they say in the group chat.

You might argue that until recently, we all paid to work in the office five days a week, so why is it a big deal if we were forced back into that scenario? But the financial climate has to be taken into consideration when discussing matters of the “RTO” (the official Return to Office acronym) backlash; the goal posts have shifted. Wages in the UK have been more or less stagnant since 2008, and getting a pay rises seem to have become a distant memory. For the average person, our post-pandemic WFH freedoms have coincided with new levels of financial pressure. I enjoy working in an office some of the time, but I understand why some wouldn’t like the prospect of employers essentially forcing them to spend more of their basic salary in order to do their job – with no measurable benefit for them.

A day working from home feels like a small mercy. It gives you a modicum of control when you’re in a financial tailspin. As budget-obsessed people know, once you’ve stripped away all the minor luxuries, there’s not much more you can delete from the outgoings. You can only stop spending so much. But on that glorious day at home, the balance sheet of simply existing starts to feel, for once, like it might break even. You eat the food in your freezer. You go for a walk in the park and then back to your home office for more snacks and drinks. You settle into your evening on the sofa. You can afford to be alive for another day.