So let me preface that compared to some of the posts I see on here this isn't overly bad and I'm in a position where I earn a decent wage and am not gonna be made homeless or make difficult decisions around whether to heat or eat but its pisses me off companies try and do this shit so i want to vent!
Took a new role at the start of the year, prior role was with a leading company in my field where the company and team I now work for were one of my clients. They contacted me to see if I would be interested in switching over, came at a time when i was thinking of moving on for various reasons so decided to go for it with the only worry being that there head office is over 100 miles away from my location. Brought this up in the interview process and was told three things:
- role is a hybrid model so expectations for going into the office are around once or twice a week
- Parent company purchased a smaller company whose office is around 7 miles away from my house so I could work from that office, makes sense as this office are creating the projects I will be working on
- Rest of my team based in head office over 100 miles away from me, expectation to come in around once a month for two to three days and all travel and accommodation can be expensed to company – this particular point was verbally agreed to during the interview process
Interviews go well they make an offer 3k more than my current role, I'd asked for at least 5k more but thought fuck it like the sound of the role and there's more room for progress etc so accepted.
Join company, working from home first 5 months as neither office has opened yet but are now looking to open up. Have a 1 to 1 with the director of my org today and lo and behold am told that the hybrid model of working doesn't allow you to expenses travel and accommodation to your 'home office', I think well that's no issue as my home office is the one around 7 miles away which i plan on going to once or twice a week and not the office over 100 miles away. No my home office is apparently the one 100 miles away, ok well that doesn't make sense why don't we change my home office to the one 7 miles away?
Told well we could change that but your salary is based on a band of where the home office is, if we moved your home office to the other office near you then your salary band might go down – is this even a thing in the UK? I mean house prices do drastically go up and down across the country but the cost of my petrol, bills and food is roughly the same wherever I am located so the cost of living when it comes to essentials is nearly equal across the country.
I've calculated how much travel and accommodation would cost me over a year to go to the main office once a month and it's at least over 3k a year, meaning I would be worse off in this role than I was in my last – I didn't move from a company I'd been at for over 5 years to make less money.
I've gone and checked my contract which regarding place of work and it makes no mention of a specific office location, just says ''the companies offices'' without specifying if that's the head office or the one right near me.
So without mention of a specific location that I'm required to go and no mention of how many times a year etc, this makes me feel that I haven't agreed to anything and they can't make me go to the main office on my own money once a month but am so pissed as they lied around a major point I made during the interview process, if I knew I had to pay for the head office visits I would have never gone ahead with applying and accepting the role.