Want pay raise? Work 5 days a week in office, Brit firms tell staff

British companies are starting to pay a “five days in the office” premium to lure in staff who have retained bargaining power because workers are in such short supply, the nation’s biggest recruitment agency said.

James Reed, chairman of recruitment the giant Reed, said employers are having to lift wages most in industries such as hospitality, manufacturing and health care where there’s less flexibility to work from home.

“Pay rates for workers who are required to attend physically the workplace five or more days a week have risen quite significantly,” Reed said. “Employers are having to pay more to get them to do it.”

The remarks underscore the difficulty employers are having in finding and keeping staff after at least 600,000 people dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic. 

Wages are rising at near-record rates because workers are in short supply even though the economy is headed into recession.

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and the pandemic exacerbated those trends by reducing immigration that used to fill many low-skill jobs and building an expectation that many office workers can work from home much of the time. 

The problem is most acute in the National Health Service, hospitality and catering, where wages have historically lagged other sectors and workers can’t do their job remotely. 

While overall pay is up 6.8 per cent year on year across job postings on Reed’s website, it has jumped 12.9 per cent in health and medicine, 10.6 per cent in hospitality and catering and 14.6 per cent in manufacturing as the offer of hybrid working tempts applicants elsewhere.

The decline in the size of the UK’s workforce means that those people who are applying for jobs can ask for more flexibility and benefits. 

That’s tilting power in the economy away from capital and toward labor for the first time in decades. 

Wages rising rapidly, hitting 7.2 per cent in the private sector in the three months to November when excluding bonuses. Outside the pandemic, that was the sharpest gain on record and has emboldened workers to make ever more extravagant demands. 

“It’s not just money,” said Liz Martins, UK economist at HSBC Bank. “It’s also other demands around flexibility and those kinds of things. One of our customers said they’d had a request from a candidate for one duvet day per month on top of their annual leave. They were laughing about it, so perhaps the candidate wasn’t successful, but in this labour market you really don’t know.”