There comes a point when working from home ceases to be a temporary situation.
We’re more than six months into the pandemic and many of us are still hunched over laptops on dining room tables. Our chairs aren’t the right height and we scour the home printer for note-taking paper. It’s obvious we’re spending a lot more money on electricity.
So, how do we get some help for the extra expenses, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that not many of us are heading back to the office this year or perhaps ever? One way is to ask your boss for a stipend to buy a decent desk and chair, office supplies and subsidize the extra utility costs. Another is to look at state and federal employment laws to see if your boss should be reimbursing you.
The average employee working from home will pay an extra $121 per month on utilities, according to personal finance shopping website CreditCards.com. Some of that will be offset by savings on commuting costs (about $33 a month), lunches at restaurants (about $27 a month) and the double-shot, non-fat latte you picked up on the way to the office, but working at home is most likely costing you.
The issue is a relatively new one. Pre-pandemic, working from home was considered a perk that wasn’t available to every employee. With many employees viewing it as a privilege, they didn’t push for extra compensation to cover the costs of utilities or setting up a home office, workplace experts say.
The landscape changed in March when many people got sent home to work as the pandemic spread. Suddenly, working from home wasn’t a choice. And now, many workers are starting to see how much it’s costing to keep their air conditioning on during the day when they were usually at work.
In normal times, no more than 25 percent of employers pay for home-office expenses such as internet, furniture and cell phones, according to the remote work consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics in California. The company’s president, Kate Lister, said she senses that more employers will start subsidizing the costs of working at home.
Companies realize it’s cheaper to buy 100 ergonomic office chairs than it is to pay for one workers’ compensation claim and employees are more productive when they can replicate their office desktop with two monitors instead of just their laptops, Lister said. Some companies are giving out stipends as much as $1,000, she said, with one company specifying that $300 must go toward an ergonomic chair.
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Sensitive subject
Let’s remember that companies are lowering overhead by having employees work at home, saving on heating and cooling costs while their workers crank up the AC at home. But subsidizing home office costs appears to be a sensitive topic for some companies in Houston. I contacted several and just about all of them either declined to comment or just didn’t respond.
One that did respond was NRG, one of the biggest generators and sellers of electricity in Texas. The company has provided employees with curbside pickup of IT equipment such as monitors, keyboards, laptop docking stations, headsets and webcams. Employees have also been authorized to expense equipment such as desk chairs to make sure their home work space is set up as ergonomically as possible, according to NRG spokeswoman Pat Hammond.
Many companies, however, haven’t decided what they’ll do because they don’t know how long the pandemic will last, said Lister.
In some cases, it’s not up to employers on what they must pay. Federal labor regulators recently issued guidelines to employers that they can’t require hourly wage workers to pay for business expenses such as laptops and monitors if that reduces an employee’s wages below the minimum wage. In Texas, that’s $7.25 an hour.
For employees with a disability that prevents them from working on-site because of coronavirus, their employers must pay for accommodations, such as remote access to company computer systems, that allow them to work from home, under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
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It’s unclear, however, whether the ADA would require employers to cover additional utility costs. It would likely need to be tested in court, workplace experts said.
New issues
“Coronavirus is bringing up all sorts of issues we haven’t had to deal with until now,” said Larry Stuart, an employment lawyer in Houston and adjunct professor of management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.
So, what to do? One thing you can do is raise the issue with your boss as I did when I mentioned I needed office supplies. He said get what you need and expense it — within reason.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
lynn.sixel@chron.com
twitter/lmsixel
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