Telecommuting could be absolutely massive for reduced emissions, could bring down urban house prices, improve inter-family relationships, and revitalized suburban neighborhoods (e.g. more walkable areas). Plus increase wealth to relatively poor rural areas.
Even some corporations are starting to realize that telecommuting isn't their enemy, but large ships move slowly, and recently we've been seeing a lot of "return to work" used as a way to conduct layoffs with lower negative PR/stock tanking. This isn't a byproduct but a goal of return-to-work (e.g. see Musk's text message conversation during Twitter-lawsuit discovery).
I only saw this now : https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
It's actually kind of incredible how it all seems to work. The cringe too of the fawning is a good indicator why Musk feels he can do whatever he likes, including attempting to troll everyone on his board. It seems so juvenile.
It's the fact that they were idealized that makes this dip into their intimacy so strange.
But basically, those communications look a lot like ones that I would have with my own friends. And when I was a students, we were careful about spending 10 euros. Now, we have casual chats about buying a sauna for the garden, and if you think about it, it would sound crazy to someone making minimum wage.
If I had billions, I would talk as casually about huge amounts for actions with big consequences, because I'm still ...me. And I would still make jokes like "you have my sword" since we quote LOTR for fun, not because of social status. What? You thougth billionaires were taking all their texts seriously?
Also, calling people out for making mistake that cost you is kinda what everybody sane does. And apologizing to people when you made a mistake is not being submissive, it's being decent. Again, it reads like text I would send myself.
All in all, it seems pretty standard human behavior to me.
Now you may feel shocked that regular humans have so much power, but remember:
- a lot of luck is involved
- some skills like managing stress or being persistent may matter more than a lot others and those people may have much more than the average person
- this is by design in our system, the problem therefore is not that humans are humans, but that our system promote profiles that you don't think deserve it
- nevertheless, managing tesla or spacex is not something most people would succeed at, so there is probably some human traits those texts are not showing that make them capable of doing billions of dollars of operations
> improve inter-family relationships
It could, maybe, but it can also be a significant source of strife. It's tough spending all day, every day with someone. Because of that, you find that people are either looking for larger homes in order to have private work spaces or renting office space. Both of those shift the cost burden from the company to the individual.
You literally do this with coworkers in an office. Except, you didn't get to pick those people and you have to be even physically closer to them. The last office I worked in was an open floor plan and the guy three feet next to me typed so hard I thought he would break his keyboard. And he was on a rubber dome!! It was louder than the loudest mechanical keyboard. Before that I sat next to the sales department. They would talk loudly on the phone for 8 straight hours. One time my desk was next to the break room. You like hearing people talk all day long?
> in order to have private work spaces
With open floor plans the only privacy you get is when you put on your headphones. Anyone walking by still sees your screen and wearing headphones all day is not great for your health.
For those with room, especially if you have a good sized commute, remote working is great (I really really value being able to eat with my kids and hang out in the evening), but you are right that if you are two people in a small 1 bed flat, or a few people in a house share, or just a family in a standard family house, then yes remote working is not always going to be a bonus.
However, contact hours are desirable for actual child rearing outcomes. Lingusitic development in the early years = has a huge impact on vocabulary development with college-educated parents and for older kids discipline... two brothers grew up being watched like a hawk by my mom. Two younger ones grew up as latchkey kids once she went back to work. Outcomes were quite different.
It is for this reason that you will never find anything that makes sense advertised as green or efficient. Corporations are things that exist solely to exploit: nothing in their core impulses moves them to be kind or understanding. Anything that makes it seem otherwise must be regarded with suspicion.
Most of the time corporations claim to be doing something in a carbon-neutral way it's because they are purchasing offsets where you just have to believe that they are actually computing the carbon costs appropriately and the offsets are "real" anyway.
Our leaders know full well that consumers and corporations have no power to act on this themselves. They will suck up any resources presented to them in the lowest energy configuration. Capitalism demands it. Regulation and governance is the only solution to tragedy of the commons. All else is noise being created by leaders who have been bought and paid for.
Without other changes, this would not happen (in the US at least). The default would be every more cookie-cutter suburban sprawl, with the cul-de-sac-y construction of these neighborhoods creating a more labrynthian, difficult-to-walk place to live.
Until there is more mixed-use zoning in the US, with high enough density to justify frequent public transit arrival times, WFH would only save the car and infra wear-and-tear (and pollution level) from commuting, but it would not necessarily create a "third place" automatically.
Public transit will never work for me except under very rare circumstances. For what it's worth, I hate wasting my time traveling and cars are the only things fast enough make going anywhere vaguely tolerable. Amazon lets me avoid a lot of driving.
I get that you want to change things in the world but the only way to do it is not to say "it should be…" But find out what public office you need to hold, run the campaign, win the seat and then start trying to change from there. Then I can tell you from experience that you have to start local like planning board or zoning Board of appeals. Gain the trust of the people on the board listen to what people want. Once they feel heard they will hear you. If you go in guns blazing, everyone including potential allies will dig in their heels and say fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Yes I've served on municipal boards and I have been told FU. Learned my lesson and then had my ideas heard. I didn't live there long enough to affect change but I learned a lot about local politics
So yes, wouldn't it be great people lived in denser environments? Oh yeah, but that's not the choice we're making today. The choice we're making is given that lots of people live a 20-60 minute drive from their jobs would we rather they commute into work or work remotely?
We need to learn that corporations care even less about the environment than they care about remote work. Invoking the environment to gain their support of remote work is just misunderstanding their priorities. The game is to make remote work attractive to them.
You think Elon Musk wants to hear your spiel about the environment? Or does he want you to get back into your office and work a 16 hour day?
If we want to get corporate america on the side of remote work, then we need to do it with dollars and cents. Not "indirect savings", not "improved morale", but concrete examples of how remote work is increasing their profit. (Even better, would be if it could increase their revenue as well. That would be a slam dunk.) We almost got there with the idea of lowering rent costs after the pandemic, but now it just seems that the idea of getting rid of office space in favor of remote work is getting a lot of push back. Maybe even backlash would be a better term.
I'm OK with working 16 hour days on something that matters (obviously burn out needs to be kept in check - it can't be done forever). I realize that I might be "wired" differently than others as I care a bit less about work life balance and more about accomplishment (not proud of it). I see no reason why this can't be done at the beach house however. In fact, I'm convinced it would be better as commuting is a burnout accelerator.
It's not patently absurd, it obviously bring some benefit to their life to chose this, you're just ignoring those benefits to focus solely on the time and energy costs; which people gladly trade away in order to achieve these other benefits.
> The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful.
This view is solely focused on the "information economy," and really doesn't make any sense once you start adding in light commercial or industrial activity. We built this infrastructure for a reason, and it wasn't solely to create a trap for white collar workers.
> Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
This is probably because most people do not view their lives as part of some giant "min-max" game designed to provide maximum benefit to everyone other than themselves.
For the vast majority of people in the last four decades working out of an office was not a decision up to the employees so I don't know where this is coming from.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/realestate/commuting-best...
And that's just commute time, which doesn't include getting dressed for work, gassing up the car, etc. (sure, WFH doesn't completely eliminate those, but the difference adds up across the population)
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
45-minute to hour-long commutes each way have been the norm for me pretty much the entirety of my 20-odd year career in Silicon Valley. For me the outliers were the folk who opted to live 2+hrs away to afford a single family home, and were still commuting in - some did it daily; some did it weekly, and couch surfed during the week.
(The other outlier was the fellow who parked his Airstream in the back of the company lot until they told him he had to move.)
An hour each way including waiting time is perfectly normal for anyone who has relied on public transit.
It doesn't include the fact that when you're working remotely, you can just plop your ass on the work chair wearing whatever you slept in. Log in, check your messages and go make some coffee, prep the kids for school and maybe change into something smarter before the first meetings of the day.
You can also do chores while listening to meandering presentations on wireless headphones. If you're brave and cameras on isn't a culture in your company, you can do interactive ones by lugging your laptop or phone next to the dishwasher :D
You can flip that around too - If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it? There really isn't any point arguing over it, because it doesn't change the current state of affairs.
My belief is that for remote work to gain mainstream adoption, you'll need a few trailblazer companies who establish a model of remote work where you can get everything done remotely - team building, motivating people, etc, etc.
Now we have remote work, and we're starting to get studies that show the impact it has on productivity… (and thus far, the ones I've seen show favorable results!)
Someday, scientists will finally reach the ultimate conclusion: that many companies routinely make poor short-term tradeoffs to their long-term detriment.
My belief is that a lot of the people who get to make these decision like the office, because they don't suffer from the same externalities. In other words, many of the things that make commuting to the office suck ass don't necessarily pertain to the boss.
When you’re flipping this pancake please remember that real estate prices and tax write offs weigh into the reasoning some companies employ when deciding their wfh policies
It's not just about gains in productivity (profit/surplus value) for companies*. It would be enough for remote work to be a net benefit for the whole society. Take the reduction in car traffic, the time savings, the pollution avoided, etc, and subtract an hypotetical loss in profit for capitalists. Still worth it? Then we're doing it!
> My belief is that for remote work to gain mainstream adoption, you'll need a few trailblazer companies who establish a model of remote work
Sure, but we can't wait for a handful of capitalists to take the lead on this. If it's important and necessary, governments should act and enforce it. The same way as we did for work safety rules, the 40h work week, the abolition of child labor and so on.
All of the labor rights we now give for granted, when enforced caused a reduction in the productivity of labor. Still, nowadays it would sound insane to advocate for a return to child labor in order to increase profits.
* Companies are abstract concepts without a will, so we can't really expect a company to take decisions. What we really mean here is capitalists. Capitalists are people, they have a will and the decisional power required to change things. We'll just refer to them as capitalists from now on.
Lol what? Why are they making you pay for these things?
I come in at 8am and leave at 2pm, when my commute is about 1/4 what it is during rush hour. Then I hope on for another couple of hours after dinner.
This type of flexibility gives me the best of both worlds, I get to go into the office because I LOVE it, and HATE work-from-home, and I skip the commute.
I recommend this to anyone looking for a perfect 'hybrid'.
What we, as a society, should do, is to increase the possibility of working in walking or biking distance.
The problem I would have to live near where I would work (likely in the city center). Which means higher rents and smaller places. Also if I change jobs my options would be limited.
Maybe the "illogical" issue is people living in high density massive population centers.
To add, I live on a nice tree-lined street within walking distance of local schools and shopping. I don't live in some apartment near my place of employment.
I suspect that you don't commute to a large city (either via car or mass transit).
It's more like 4-6 hours.
Crazy.
1. Middle and senior management who don't want to lose control or be rendered less effective. 2. Engineers who are not trained in written communication and largely cannot autonomously move a group towards a goal without a lot of supervision.
If you solve for no 2, then that acts counter to no 1 - because middle management will be questioned - why do we need you ? If a group of engineers can function on their own towards a common goal, then the manager's role is more or less rendered redundant. Sure there may be a need for psychological support but you surely won't need the current ratio of engineers: managers.
There is a deep rooted old school interest in staying physically connected. This won't go away anytime soon. I am not debating whether that is right or wrong, but the general notion that 'we are better if we are physically together' still persists. I don't know if this is a genuine feel-good-together feeling or just a made up emotion to mask point no 1 above.
I am flummoxed by how executive leadership is simply blind to these facts in most companies. I mean the CEO can declare a fully remote constraint sort of like the exact opposite of what Musk did at Twitter and drive productivity higher. The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
Specifically I think the major disconnect is not so much between middle managers and IC's, it's between executives and the rest of the org.
Unfortunately I'm beginning to think that this is truly a case of misaligned incentives that may prove hard to fix. What I mean is that executives are directly incentivized to be in the office. Almost all of their career capital is tied up in relationships and patterns of decision making with other executives.
Good day for a manager or IC - 'Wow, I really got a lot done today and I'm moving the team goals forward.'
Good day for an executive - 'That conversation with Dan and Steve went really well.'
Probably the only group made more productive are senior independent engineers.
One was hybrid remote / on-prem with on-prem menotring and sadly they turned up not to meet our standards. I don't think the work arrangement impacted them.
One was fully remote with their mentor fully remote as well and we hired them full-time.
One was fully on-prem as much as they could, with a mentor who was almost fully remote. They were also hired full-time.
So my experience is that there is no correlation between bringing junior developers up to speed and exactly where they work from. Communicating face to face and communicating remotely are different and require different skill sets, but that is down to the abilities of the individual mentors assigned to the individual juniors. Or put another way - every combination works best for some people
How so? What prevents that? I don't believe it, but people like saying it without evidence.
If this is a website supposedly for startups, the audience missed that mark by a wide margin.
In my case small percentage of total time and making the 5% more effective to make the remaining 95% less effective doesn't seem like good tradeoff, just not having co-workers interrupt me because I'm near and know the answer is a blessing.
But from manager position I can see that, my 5-10% spent on meetings & related stuff is what they do maybe 80% of the time. Then again bringing 20 people to office just to keep one or two managers happy is also a waste.
> The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
Remote work does require shift of habits, training can help (maybe a niche here for company doing the training?) but it still takes time and effort if you did it in person for last 10-20 years
Role of a manager that will change significantly based on where the team is sitting - The ability to convey meaning and emotion over written comms and over video calls, to drive the team forward without being too mechanical about it.
When I had an office with a door and window I liked going in. It was a good mix of seeing people and privacy. I hate the 1 year of cubicle stuff after 15 years in an office with a door. Then the pandemic hit and I really hate cubicles even more.
When I was doing the same during the pandemic, similar commute time, my car making 21ish mpg was only needing about 100 dollars in gas a month. About 10 miles with more than a dozen stop lights.
Edit - if I didn't have kids I'd totally have a beach house and a mountain house to live in. Maybe in different countries too.
You then transformed it into <<suffer the commute on a train>>
I'm confused about that.
I used to live in a small apartment and walk to work. Then when my wife and I both had to work from home, we ended up renting a big house because we still needed offices to work. Maybe there are some jobs & personal situations that allow one to wfh without additional space and costs - really though it's just shifting space around, often very inefficiently.
Mountains of research show that this will increase total emissions. It would be one thing if the U.S. was developing medium density suburban cores, but that seems to be on the table in very, very few places.
*And this is why management and operation of public utilities should be policy-driven rather than profit-driven.
Commuters generally want heavy rail to get them from where their housing dollar goes farthest to where the highest wage is, and back, riding twice a day, usually over a significant distance. Fast trains, stops widely-spaced so they can hit top speed.
This is at odds with local service for residents, who want trains with tightly-spaced stops and care more about frequency than speed. I live in a dense city with largely non-functional rail transit (Baltimore), and IMO part of the problem is that our public transit options can't decide if they want to be commuter rail or local service and wind up being terrible for both (too slow for commuters because it's light rail, too infrequent for local traffic because of the cost of running a bunch of trains out to the burbs).
For me, WFH means I can walk/bike/drive to the local coffee shop or public library to work, but still live in a cramped studio apartment.
Dogs are optional, and I hear people cite them as a reason to move to a bigger place all the time. It also seems like "get a dog" is the first thing a lot of people do when they get into a WFH situation.
And while some might say, “but then people who rely on public transit for things other than commuting to work would be hurt,” note that most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns. Example: https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2022/01/public-transit-service....
I wish we used the same logic for roads/streets as well. Except for toll roads, which only get a partial subsidy, roads are fully subsidized by the taxpayer.
Since others get fully subsidized roads for their private vehicles, I argue public transit should be fully subsidized as well.
If people are mainly working from home then we can redirect public transit from business parks or whatever towards places people still want to go (e.g. shopping, nightlife, events) but without a car. Starving already often underfunded public transit is not the answer.
Why not use the hundreds of millions spent on highways to subsidize people to work from home instead? Most commuters in North America are not using public transit but highways.
> most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns.
Does it? Work-related travel is mostly during morning and late afternoon, but public transit also runs outside those hours. In my experience public transit works quite well for non-commuting travel. Of course this can vary wildly by country, but the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true.
It is always partially true, but each city is different. People who travel in the very early hours (like 2:30am) always have problems, (even the best cities run reduced and thus inconvenient service for maintenance reasons, most give up on transit completely). While those hours are not common it is safe to bet everyone reading this has had reason to travel at those times at least one night in their life.
In far too many cities, (and not just in the US) additional service is run during the peaks. By additional service I mean they run more buses/trains as opposed something with more seats (that is longer). This means people who travel at non-peak hours have to be careful about when they travel to ensure there is service without waiting. Of course if the wait is still less than 5 minutes nobody cares, but as waits get longer - humans don't have time for that.
Because if they promote it too much, they people move far away and the city loses the tax base. One extreme example is New York City -- they have a 3.5% income tax. If you move into next-door NJ or CT, the city loses that 3.5% income.
And once telecommuting is common in a given company, the workers begin to disperse, first to "driving distance" and then to "anywhere in a reasonable timezone".
We already saw how badly Covid hit city centers, perpetual work-from-home would be worse; causing a mini-Detroit in many cities.
Currently, when we see recession, we can increase government spending. This is usually done in infrastructure – we give people a job, and in return we get infrastructure, nice!
But if we agree that infrastructure does not provide that amount of value we either need to figure other large scale projects that 1) provide value and 2) requires a lot of manual labor or we need to not found money distribution in work (an alternative could be UBI here).
giant office buildings also have a giant impact. Those resources could have been homes or extra rooms to work from.
then there is the whole fast food and fast everything along the road and various industries that busy themselves with appearance.
This is the correct answer. Most environment related stuff (and other causes that are taken up) is mostly virtue signalling.
And this can be exceptionally difficult because it can be almost impossible to actually work out the long-term effects of things like "more people should work from home". It's easy to say "shutting down a coal power plant will reduce emissions" because they're so bad, but more remote workers could result in MORE pollution if it enabled more "working holidays" and therefore more flying. And that's only one tiny aspect of all the long-term changes that could occur.
It isn't as clear-cut as you'd expect either - one argument I've heard is that in areas where air conditioning is a large contributor to energy use and homes are poorly insulated, someone staying home and cooling their home with an inefficient, small air conditioner may be worse than having that person commute to an office instead. This argument is often generalized and sometimes dishonestly used by people who prefer office work to argue that teleworking is actually bad for the environment.
I found a meta-study https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab8a84/... that claims vehicle miles traveled increase (because people move further away) while the studies generally claimed a reduction in overall energy consumption.
Several studies claim grossly exaggerated environmental impacts for streaming/data transfers. I don't remember seeing it misused to dismiss the environmental argument for teleworking, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it. The worst offender here is the Shift Project, which overstated the results of their already flawed study by another factor of 8 in an interview, and then used that huge mistake to argue that their other mistakes aren't that relevant because they're small (compared to the initial mistake, not compared to their claimed impact). https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/shift-project-really-...
Most of our housing stock is not particularly energy efficient. Whole-house AC and heat instead of systems with multiple zones, big tank water heaters, ok but not great insulation.
I'd buy the idea that working from home lowers emissions and gasoline consumption but also increases the consumption of electricity and natural gas.
Everybody spending 8 more hours at home means so much more individual heating, whereas before, when you went into the office you'd turn the heating off.
Also as someone else pointed, working remote leads to leaving small apartments in the city to move into larger spaces (houses) in the suburbs. Then you would need to use a car more to meet people, get groceries etc. Cities are much more carbon efficient.
Example for Heating
A German price comparison site has done the calculation and for their model – 20m² home office and a yearly usage of ~2000 litres heating oil for the whole apartment) – you would end up with ~4% higher usage [0]. That means that you have 80 litres more heating oil which is equivalent to roughly 80 days of commuting 20 km / day via car. The German average commuter does ~32 km / day [1].
[0]: https://www.verivox.de/presse/modellrechnung-homeoffice-erho...
[1]: https://www.postbank.de/themenwelten/beruf-vorsorge/artikel_...
We only get groceries twice a month. I only drive a 2-3k miles a year which is far below average in the U.S. and I owe it all to the lack of commute. Most of those miles are due to the fact that we own a cabin in another state which we visit in the summer as well and has nothing to do with the day to day.
I don't think the solution to that is "commute to the office where it's more efficient to heat all of us", though.
It's a long-term city-planning/suburb-planning, environmental architecture problem.
What about buildings semi-recessed into the ground (bedrooms in basement, use the surrounding ground for heat storage, sky-lights to allow sunlight in)? What about further adoption of solar panels for water heating and supplemental electricity? What about "keeping the door shut so the heat doesn't escape"...? What about neighbourhoods using communal heat pumps?
Then there's the fact that a helluva lot of us can't even afford these houses you mention because the housing market is in crisis so we continue to stay in our smaller city flats despite our ability to work remotely.
Like, there's a helluva lot more white collar office workers out there in Western civilisation who _aren't_ following that "get enough money, get a car, have 2.5 kids, move out to the 'burbs" life - don't forget about us.
I also live in Seattle where a majority of the homes weren’t built with AC. Offices will run the AC units all summer long too.
Not everyone commute with an ICE vehicle too
Citation needed. I would argue its very hard to make any general statement about this. In my case the office is much more wasteful than the space I use for remote work for a multitude of reasons.
A friend of mine spends 500+ euros per month on gas for heating since he works from home, no way on earth his office uses 500 per person and per month on heat
People often say it’s cost prohibitive, but it’s been done many times before, and valuations of Offices will get so depressed that conversions begin to look very lucrative
Most people also like to come back to warm house so heating is running during the day
Despite modern office jobs being done entirely on a computer, most workers are still expected to get up in the morning, battle the daily commute, and physically congregate at the office to work. Companies have given innumerable arguments for why this must be so, and until recently there wasn’t an empirical way to test any of them.
Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell whether an argument holds water without running an experiment since ideas that sound great on paper can spectacularly fail in practice. However, the pandemic presented a unique scenario where it was no longer safe to continue following these practices resulting in a forced experiment of mass remote work across the world. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that remote work was possible all along, and a recent study shows that there is no loss of productivity associated with it. It would appear that the main barrier to remote work was the desire to stick with the familiar. Now that this valuable experiment has been run we shouldn’t simply discard the results. Office workers should demand the ability to continue working remotely. There is no longer any justification to keep up the daily commute.
Consider that he'd already moved to Sri Lanka in the 1950s, ostensibly out of his love for diving. He was primed to see the benefits of WFH and telecommunication, and certainly able to exploit the flexibility in his own life and career.
Ironically, with his adventurism and individualism, perhaps his imagination was too limited to think that many people are self-limiting. The companies you speak of are not abstract entities forcing the poor humans to live unwanted lives. They are the people---identifying with the rituals of office life and demanding conformance from one another.
I have quite a few people in my social circle who moved out to the suburbs/countryside and remote work was by and large considered only after they moved and found that they underestimated what an issue their commute would be(especially when traffic increased over time as it usually does).
Personally I live in the city and still work remotely because it's more convenient than travelling to work daily regardless how close to the workplace I might live.
But, sprawl is only a problem because of commutes. If you had sprawl with lots of small, local commercial outlets, then that's just perfect. No long commutes to work and no long commutes to get life's necessities.
Plus, remote work is still not the norm in every company, so it's difficult for someone like you and me to move to the suburbs even if we wanted to, because we can't be 100% certain our next jobs will be remote.
2021 emissions were about equal to 2019 emissions. So there may be not much of an effect from remote work.
- Have good writing skills, because communication is asynchronous most of the time.
- Task description needs to be as clear as possible ! You don't want to spend most of time to explain what the specification means.
- Self-management and time management: How to do things concurrently without less help as possible from others ?
Even if working from office, I'd expect any professional to know how to communicate effectively, and is able to manage their time and tasks efficiently. If they cannot do it remotely, then I'd worry about their performance in the office also.
I've been working ~90% remote for about 8 years. It works for me, because I'm disciplined and honest, and because I have a job that can be performed remotely. It also works for me because I've been able to find good ways to have facetime with the people I work with; but I'm normally shy and prefer to work in isolation.
Not every job can be performed remotely. Even jobs that can be performed remotely need facetime for helping people early in their careers start. Some people, unfortunately, aren't disciplined enough to work remotely.
Other people are extreme extroverts and really, really need to be around a large group of people for most of their day. A good friend of mine, who works in a hospital, used to love his job until he was assigned work-at-home work. He hates it now, just because he's a major extrovert.
There's another post in this thread from someone who lives in a small city apartment and commutes by train a few stops to their office. That's also environmentally friendly.
To phrase it another way, our governments are fucking stupid and it makes me sad.
If we really care about this problem, we should attack it coldly, rationally, as an engineer or economist might.
Truth is that composting your tea bags isn't that relevant. We have to look at the large picture and see if we can curb the largest emissions (from which everyone profits).
It may be risky to throw up billboards talking about the evironmental benefit of WFH if your customer's CEO thinks that they should be back in the office.
So let's say Zoom wanted to run an initiative like this… the market wouldn't be workers, it's be the bosses. So already you're talking about a tiny sliver of the population. No billboards or tv spends, that's for the mass market.
Okay, now that you've identified the target audience, what do they respond to? "This way of working that most of you hate, it's happy days and sunshine?" No, they respond to money. The campaign that would resonate with bosses is "your office lease costs too much money." Environmental concerns wouldn't even measure up.
Having said all this, I suppose one could make the case that remote-work-apps could advertise to "shift the conversation" amongst workers to demand remote-work for the sake of the environment, but I personally don't think anyone in America at least believes in this kind of grass-roots influence in business, that's too socialist.
Neither the billboards for Brex on the drive to Mission from SFO, nor those for Boeing in the Washington, D.C. metro, nor those “for your consideration” on the Sunset Strip come Oscar season, are meant for a mass market. This doesn’t seem a sound premise.
In being so physical, billboards are hardly mass media at all. More big brochures.
If only those polluters would stop pointlessly polluting! Gee I mean why would they even do it? It's almost as if you're paying them to pollute for you so you can have that new laptop and fast shipping!
The companies? They care about profit not the environment.
The employees? They are either already sold on remote work or don’t like remote work.
Whose mind is changed by being told the environmental benefits of remote work?
The employees? Isn't that the whole point of the "corporate culture" BS?
- The mind of those people who can't live without the daily commute to office
Technically if you want to optimize emissions reductions, you should eliminate homes, not offices. If everyone lived in the office we would all use less energy!
Anyways, transportation for commuting is one of the smallest buckets of emissions. So if it is a net positive it's still not moving the needle in a meaningful way.
That said, I do expect it is still ahead in most measures. Is a good question and I would love to see a comprehensive analysis.
This is an answer to both “Why is remote work currently not advertised as a pro climate environment initiative?” and “Why won’t remote work ever be advertised as a pro climate environment initiative, ever, for the foreseeable future?”
In a word: Rent.
So while I’m certainly spending a lot less time in total on transportation, the mode of transportation is much worse for the environment.
I now have a remote job that I do at home, with an extremely modest amount of travel -- I see my teammates 2-3 times a year at conferences or meetups.
It turns out that flying, even very occasionally, is worse for the environment than driving, and that my "eco-friendly" remote job leaves a bigger carbon footprint than my commuting job. A single person's share of a single cross-country flight once a year can emit more carbon than an ENTIRE YEAR of car commuting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest...
What we get instead though, is ringing, ringing ringing. Can't get my power ordered. I can't get roofing ordered. Can't get call backs.
Things were more expedient pre-pandemic. I often do wonder too, is part of the reason company X is OUT of something isn't because the ship is late - or is it because the ordering person no longer sits in front of a giant pile of insulation and goes - oh crap, that is getting really low. I should order more. (And guess what happens if he calls to order more - ringing ringing ringing)
I'm sure you can think of many other downsides than that. This topic has been discussed adnaseum, and there are many pros and cons of remote vs in-office
To be an environmental activist * requires a certain type of personality. The kind that thrives in groups and in public. Of course they wouldn't even think of working from home.
* or any kind of activist for a cause actually. But that would decrease the nastiness.
From https://www.agora-verkehrswende.de/veroeffentlichungen/wende... For Germany:
The climate effects of home office were estimated for 40 percent of the workers, each with two home office days per week, were estimated to save 5.4 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year.
This corresponds to 18 percent of percent of the emissions from commuting to work or 4 percent of the of total passenger transport emissions (Büttner and Breitkreuz 2020).
The result is a share of 25.8% (short-term) to 39.3% (long-term) of all employed persons in Austria who could in principle work from home on a permanent or temporary basis.
By overestimating the work-related passenger kilometers, this results in a savings potential of about 300 kilotons of CO2 equivalents per year, if about a quarter of all employed persons in Austria work from home for 40 % of the working time (or 2 out of 5 working days).
Due to undesirable rebound effects, such as an increasing distance between home and work, induced traffic as a result of freed-up capacity, or increased capacities or increased leisure mobility, this potential can increase to 90 kilotons of CO2 equivalents per year.
"Home energy usage SKYROCKETS as workers abandon the eco-friendly advantages of a shared work space"
That being said you are totally right that Zoom should be advertising the crap out of this - Microsoft may have incentivize NOT to do this (if they want their own employees in the office) but for Zoom it seems like a no brainer.
More CO2 is generated by remote employees than those that go to work. The CO2 emissions generated by an office (including heating / AC / water / employee transportation - in EU it's mostly by subway / bus) are smaller compared to each individual employee CO2 emissions.
Don't have a source, but you can find CO2 calculators online.
There seem to be opportunities in other places (such as EU) around as well, but one has to search far and wide instead of just having them available in the easy-to-access sites.
0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ac3d3e/...
Not all jobs can be remote though, so i'm not sure why one would expect all of work to be remote. That makes as much sense as 'no remote work at all'.
But the point is, it's not mentioned in almost every article that discusses trying to stop climate change.
Telecommuting: Turn on your PC in a room of your house and start work Biking/Walking to Work: Bike/walk to work and turn on a PC in an office.
What's the extra telecommuting energy expenditure? Servers for a VPN?
Also with distracted driving becoming so much more of a problem, and accidents increasing even though we've got driving assist technologies, the workers are running personal risk of debilitating injuries.
Cons: - I’d probably make up those 16mi of commuting in other ways (errands, driving to a lunch time hike, etc) - I’d need more space at home, and consume more energy (prob not fully offsetting the savings from work, but a meaningful part) - I’d probably work remotely from other locations more, increasing my air travel footprint meaningfully (which I think puts this in the red) - I’d probably cook more at home (while cheaper, is probably more energy intensive than a commercial kitchen per meal?)
Doesn’t feel like a huge net savings
Everybody heating their own workplace requires more energy.
In general: Anything you do alone is more resource intensive than a comparable group activity.
This applies to both office and WFH. When I worked in offices, 90% of my meals were prepared at home.
Some jobs are worse candidates for that too and if you force everyone to WFH of course that won't be positive.
Then you have internal forces at play too. HR managers, and department managers don't look so useful when the majority of people never interact in real life. No matter how optimistic we look at the human condition, people have the desire to exercise power and control over others. With people working remote exercising power and control is harder. Additionally, you still have gen-x and boomers working, especially in management who have a different idea of work culture than millennials and gen-z. To the older generations working on-site is the only justifiable way to work. To them the notion of being at home for work is not real work.
There also appears to be a camp of management types who have seen evidence confirming that remote work doesn't work. They are going to stick to their position because they have evidence to support. I recently heard similar sentiments to Musk's take on remote work from Tim Pool, and a manager at my job. They are convinced that meaningful work can only happen in person.
So between those three main factors: Money, power, and bias of evidence the pitch for remote work being an environmental initiative gets drowned out. Really, makes you wonder if environmentalism is really that important for the business leadership class.
I personally believe work from home can be an amazing option for white collar work and for the right person. As a UI developer I love it. I don't get distracted by office stuff and get good flow often. I'm and expert at using online communication tools and desktop publishing tools so I can communicate my ideas and thoughts coherently remotely. However, I've seen some people not be able to manage themselves or have the skills to work from home.
I've been on multiple sides of this environment over my 3+ decades in the job market: managed people in office, managed people while I worked remotely, worked in an office, worked remotely (mostly for the last 13 years).
I'm very sympathetic to remote work, but my experience tells me that your "needlessly" is not well-founded.
Yes there's climate change, Yes there's human influence to it. And well sure as hell adapt to this slow moving challenge.
Change is hard and re-thinking work as an entirely online activity requires a lot of change.
For some, their jobs which were fun before the pandemic now just suck because they don’t get to meet people face to face.
Some dread the long boring days WFH and spending time in back-to-back Zoom meetings where 90% of those attending have their camera off and do something else.
Some are frustrated because their coworkers are slacking off WFH. Others are frustrated because their productivity at home is a disaster.
But there is also a pro-environment factor of working in an office: In countries where buildings need heating, heating one office compound is more efficient than heating a hundred homes at the same time.
Additionally, lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl.
I am not saying that's the case, but I don't buy that it's a strictly pro-environment win a-priori.
If anything commuting is the daily theft of an hour of everyone's life, more so for drivers. "Get an hour of your life back every day" should be all the marketing that's ever needed.
>lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl
I dont understand this point, IMO commuting leads to more suburban sprawl? Also i think this is a very USA-centric problem.