50 FULL WORKING DAYS A YEAR
We’ve seen the headlines, heard the rumour mills and for some, even received the ‘return to office five days a week’ memo under the guise of increasing productivity and protecting company culture. What employers may be failing to realise is that working five days in the office could cost some employees an extra R45 000 a year to get to work, and they have absolutely no say in the matter.
As a business, it’s worth doing the maths before you put that policy in place, or risk being inundated with unhappy staff, feeling overlooked in an already tough economy.
Let's start with the commute, for those who drive to work
Working on a broad assumption that a good portion of your team lives 30km from the office, if you’re Cape Town or Joburg based, this is not an unrealistic commute.
A 30km trip each way is a 60km round trip, five days a week. When you add that up over a month, you’re looking at roughly 1300km or 15 600km of travel a year, just to get to work. Now let’s look at the financial reality.
Working on a reasonably economical petrol car that averages 8L/100km, you’re looking at somewhere around R2 500 a month for fuel and excludes the actual running cost of the vehicle. If we conservatively add a R1 per km running cost you’re looking at an additional R1 300 per month.
That’s a total of R3800 per month or R45 000 per year, just to get to work. That is a real, after-tax cost, before we’ve even considered the time implication.
The cost nobody puts on the spreadsheet
Yes, the cost of petrol and vehicle wear and tear is one thing, but what about time?
Let’s say that same 30 km journey takes 45 mins each way in traffic (if you’re lucky), your employee is effectively losing about 7.5 hours a week to commuting. That’s 32 hours plus, per month, which equates to 50, eight-hour working days a year, just sitting in a car.
A peer working the exact same role but going into the office only twice a week, will see this same financial and time cost drop by a whopping 60%. For someone moving to from two office days to five, that represents roughly R27 000 in additional annual commuting costs and another 240 hours spent travelling.
Reading between the policy lines
When a business says, ‘we’re moving to five days in-office’, what some hybrid employees actually hear is closer to something like ‘we’d like you to spend another R27 000 a year getting to work, and give us another 240 hours of your time, without receiving an extra cent.’
Now before you assume this is an ‘office bashing’ article, it’s not, it’s merely a description of what the request could cost your team without you even realising it.
Why this becomes a hiring problem
AI specialists, Software Engineers and Product owners, are just some examples of the in-demand tech roles where candidates expect a hybrid environment. Where it’s not met, they’re quick to look elsewhere to find the flexibility they’re looking for.
Over the years, we’ve seen businesses lose out on exceptional people, purely because they won’t budge on their mandatory in office policy, despite employees being able to prove they can successfully do their jobs remotely.
What this means for leadership
It’s a delicate dance, the balance between how a business wants its people to work and what its people are willing to accept to show up each day.
If you’re asking hybrid employees to spend an additional R27 000 per year and 240 additional hours of their time to be in office five days a week, there needs to be a very compelling reason for it.
If you don’t, the ask quietly erodes the confidence and loyalty in existing employees, and makes future hires harder, slower and more expensive to attract.
This isn’t an argument about whether the office provides value or not, we know it has its merits for collaboration, relationships and culture. But as a leader, you need to question whether this value outweighs the reality of what you’re asking your employees to give up in return.
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