5 Major Frustrations Employees Face When Gas Prices Go Up

At this point pretty much anybody with a driver’s license is all-too-familiar with pain at the pump – also known as the financial strain caused by skyrocketing fuel prices. However, few are as affected as those mobile employees who use their personal vehicles as part of their day-to-day work duties. As national averages put the price of fuel in the US above $4, let’s take a look out how high gas prices impact workers, and how smart reimbursement solutions like CompanyMileage can help.

1. Increased Commuting Costs Feel Like a Direct Pay Cut

According to the IRS rules for an accountable plan, an employee’s commuting mileage, or the miles driven from their home to their primary work location and vice-versa, is considered personal mileage and thus ineligible for reimbursement. That means that when gas prices go up, the money workers spend on fuel for their daily commute comes directly out of their own pockets. 

A daily or weekly commute that usually costs around $20-40 will spike significantly when the price of gas does. The longer the commute, the further workers will have to reach into their wallets to make up the difference. Price hikes turn a routine expense into a major budget strain, especially for employees in lower-and middle-income brackets who may already be working paycheck to paycheck. 

2. Resistance Against Return-to-Office (RTO) Mandates

These days, many corporations are pushing for remote or hybrid workers to return to in-office work. This is already a pretty hot topic among members of the remote and mobile workforce, but sky-high gas prices often exacerbate resistance against RTO orders. Employees resent being ordered to come into the office when hybrid or remote work helps diminish or even eliminate driving costs entirely. 

Surging prices almost always reignite worker demands for work-from-home flexibility. After all, those employees may say, with such a high price tag on driving to the office, RTO requirements seem unfair or tone-deaf. Employee frustration is never a good sign, leading to pushback and higher rates of absenteeism. Some employees unhappy with RTO offers might quit entirely, in hopes of finding more accommodating employers.

3. Insufficient Mileage Reimbursements

Workers who are reimbursed for using their personal vehicles to do their jobs (such as home healthcare workers, people with sales roles, maids, and so on) often discover that in the wake of rocketing fuel prices, those fixed reimbursement payments no longer cover actual vehicle costs. No-longer-adequate reimbursement payments reduce the actual earnings of those mobile employees, forcing them to absorb losses, work extra hours, or to cut back on costs in their personal lives. 

4. Broader Financial Stress

Stressors caused by high gas prices don’t actually stop at vehicle costs. Spiking fuel costs instead tend to compound consumers’ worries about inflation in related sectors, such as groceries and home goods, due in no small part to higher transportation costs. For employees, this means added stress, difficulty saving money, and tough compromises, like having to take second jobs or to cut spending on non-essential purchases. Those workers also often report frustration with their employers for not doing anything to alleviate the strain in the form of benefits, pay increases, or policy changes. 

5. Impact on Productivity and Work-Life Balance

Stress from tightened finances and high fuel prices have a direct impact on employees’ lives, their physical and emotional health, and yes, on their work. Commuters during periods of oil-related economic strain face higher levels of stress, fatigue from longer or costlier drives, and distractions at work from money worries. 

Those factors, at best, indirectly impact worker performance in the form of lower productivity, lower morale, and an inability to fully separate their work duties from their personal struggles. At worst, the strain directly correlates with diminished compliance, higher call-out rates, and increased levels of employee turnover as mobile employees burn out or decide to turn to jobs with less vehicle-dependent roles. 

Optimize Employee Reimbursement with CompanyMileage 

Last year, almost 27% of civilian workers stated that driving was a significant part of the physical demand required by their job, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. When gas prices skyrocket, so goes the cost of owning and operating a vehicle, and those workers who use their personal vehicles to accomplish their job-related tasks feel that strain acutely. While your company can’t control the cost of fuel or the factors that drive pricing highs and lows, there are steps you can take to keep mileage reimbursement processes as simple, streamlined, and cost-effective as possible. 

The first step? Start using CompanyMileage and our suite of intuitive and easy-to-use software solutions for mobile mileage reimbursement. Our reimbursement software, SureMileage, simplifies reimbursement by automating the process of tracking and logging mileage. Instead of having to manually calculate their work-related mileage using paper logs and odometer readings, mobile employees simply enter the starting and ending points of each work-related trip into the software. 

From there the system automatically calculates the best route between those two points and the mileage for reimbursement. This point-to-point method keeps mileage totals as accurate as possible, while keeping personal trips, calculation errors, duplicate reporting, and fraudulent behavior from making its way into mileage reimbursements.  

When world and economic factors send the cost of fuel into the stratosphere, many companies find that the rate of reimbursement they’ve been using (usually but not always the standard mileage rate determined annually by the IRS) no longer reflects mobile workers’ economic reality. With our free rate calculator, CompanyMileage offers businesses a way to calculate more accommodating mileage rates for mobile workers using gas prices in their region. 

To learn more about how CompanyMileage can help your organization manage reimbursement and even save money in the process, contact us for a free demo today!