How much should you pay your in-person and remote employees?

Salary decisions used to be much easier pre-pandemic. Business leaders usually compare their offered salary to other companies within their industries and decide which salary would attract more applicants. 

The pandemic changed this dynamic. Now that people can work remotely and work from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection, salary comparisons are now in play.

Should the remote workers’ income be based on the company’s local levels? Or do recruiters need to look at national data to set an employee’s pay? The answer depends greatly on the kind of work your employee will be doing.

Inc. Magazine listed down three scenarios and what employers should do to keep their employees happy with their salaries. 

• Are they working locally? If the answer is yes, then employers can revert back to the normal way of paying their employees. As Inc. Magazine said, “it’s not likely someone will move across the country to get hired in a similar position elsewhere.” Most of them are not looking for jobs in other regions or countries. So, it’s best to set pay levels based on the state or region your company is physically located in.
• Will they come from another region or country? A growing number of people are becoming more interested in working from home — even if the home is hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away from the company headquarters. These situations create new salary challenges because there it would be harder to retain them if there is another company that can pay them higher.  It would help if you were willing to look at more of the national average for the position as your new baseline. 
• A blended solution. Another problem with hybrid and remote work arrangements is this: If your business is based in a big city, where pay levels top the national average, but your employee lives elsewhere, should you pay them at the highest level? A blended pay is a good solution for this. This means coming up with a salary that levels between the big city’s usual play and the national average. 

Employee salaries are no longer only based on local levels, as it formerly was. As the number of remote workers increases, companies will have to think of the best compensation that they could give to retain talent within the organization.

Read more here.