It will be correct that heating bills in offices will have dropped if no-one is able to go in. Where some people are still in then the building will have to be heated. And the costs need to be totalled - there are lots of new costs due to Covid too which the firm is bearing as extras. Plus if changes to benefits/expenses allowed and also wages should be related to Covid, the drop in revenue most firms have experienced probably means that whilst lots of firms will need to give some heating allowance to employees wfh, that will be more than offset by cuts to wages resulting from firms being less profitable.
You can’t have it all ways - not wanting to incur any extra costs but also not being willing to accept there might be lower pay.
Not all fixed costs have fallen for firms - by nature they are fixed and don’t really change - such as building rent as lease terms determine how long payment must continue.
The real thing to consider is the firms total costs - in most (not all) cases these have not really fallen as Covid compliance has brought many i costs. And if you assess what should be paid to employees by looking at both sides of the coin of costs and revenue, it’s profitability which is key. For many this is down. Employees will at some point be impacted by this....less wages, redundancies so no pay for some workers, cuts to other aspects of the employment package. If you give workers allowances for heating etc you are raising costs further. Yes, those workers allow the firm to operate and bring in revenue and if a firm is being profitable can expect to see gains via increased pay, but in bad times they can expect no pay rise, pay cuts and redundancies too. It’s simple maths.
I don’t think the business is shifting the burden of costs onto the employee. In reality lots of offices will be geared for the few staff who have to go in still. It’s just that overall heating costs of all the homes and office together are more than if everyone is at home. But because government not the firm has required as many to work from home as possible, the costs fall on whoever directly faces them - and heating bills go to the property occupier not their employer.
Firms will approach it in different ways and a lot of this will be based on profitability. Some who have done well have already given bonuses to their workers to acknowledge their hard work (lots of excess hours) during lockdown. Others have written to say they acknowledge the efforts but profitability is down and survival perilous and so there won’t be pay rises and some have to give pay cuts to avoid redundancies.
People think ‘my heating costs £7 per week’ but the firm isn’t saving £7xno of homeworkers on heating bills in the office. So they can pay it to employees and raise their costs or let the worker pay it. Most people have accepted that things like increased heating bills are regrettable but understand why the firm probably won’t pay and lots will say they would rather face this bill than possibly have wage cuts or see people lose their jobs .....and this bigger picture impact on lots of workers absolutely correlates to seemingly small additional costs for the firm to you as an individual, but which total vast sums overall and can make a big difference to the bottom line and people’s jobs.
If firms have done really well during Covid and don’t reward their workers then that’s not good. Most haven’t done well though and are keeping every penny of expenditure under review and avoiding extras. Lots will find that ‘perks’ that were part of the job such as memberships or training or expenses will all be scaled back hugely. Broadly speaking we have to suck it up along with some extra heating costs and see it as Covid costs rather than employer exploitation costs I think.