Abstract

With the prevalence of remote work, the problem our team wanted to determine is what would it take to bring people back into the office. To analyze this, we created “packages” of incentives, from commuting credits and vacation days to salary increases. These incentives may entice more people to come into the office rather than working remotely. However, to make the decision more challenging, we will also test some non-compliance penalties, in particular, salary cuts. If employees don’t want to work in the office, then perhaps getting a salary cut instead of incentives will push them to consider working in the office. Based on the results of our survey, it seems that the most effective incentives for in-office work will be salary increases and monthly attendance bonuses, but should people not want to come in, either salary cuts or reducing the number of required in-person days from a full work week may be effective as well.

Introduction

Post-pandemic, many of us are eagerly waiting to get back to life as we want it, but there are a section of people who want to work remotely. A survey conducted by McKinsey & Company (Dua et al. 2022) found that, in the US, around 58% of employed respondents had an option to work remotely at least one day a week (Figure 1).