A few weeks back an article appeared about how the San Francisco Bay Area was leading the nation in workers who wanted to cut how many days they spend in the office. With commute cost soaring is it any wonder why?
It’s Expensive
- Fremont, in Alameda County, has the nation’s most expensive commute, with an annual cost of $15,005
- San Francisco came in at No. 2, with an annual commute cost of $13,015
- San Jose came in at No. 6, with an annual commute cost of $9,813
- Oakland came in at No. 9 with an annual commute cost of $9,176
That’s $52 per day to commute to work to San Francisco. That’s just the out of pocket expense. But it also eats up another of our most precious resources – time.
It’s Time Consuming
- Fremont commuters’ average travel time to work was 36.4 minutes
- San Francisco had an average travel time of 34.7 minutes to work
- San Jose clocked in at 31.7 minutes
- Oakland logged 34.4 minutes of travel time
It costs $260 and nearly 6 hours of precious time to commute to work in San Francisco per week. Other metropolitan areas around the country aren’t much better. While in-person collaboration remains vital, flexible work is an absolute necessity if you want to hire top executive management talent in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In a previous blog post, we spoke about the many changes wrought by the COVID19 pandemic. Our conclusion was that “Companies that wish to be successful need to recognize that flexibility in how their “work” gets done will be the only guarantee their “work” gets done at all.” Given the commute costs for the Bay Area, it’s imperative that companies be open to flex work if they wish to attract top talent.
It has been shown that flexible work situations often increase productivity. Given flexibility in when and how they work, can also improve employee experience.
Commute costs are not going to get better in the foreseeable future. And given the myriad of communication and productivity tools available like Zoom and Dropbox, flexibility will be key for hiring going forward.