Remote workers cause up to 54% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, largely due to reduced office energy use, according to new research. — FINN WINKLER/dpa
BIT BY bit, businesses have for the past year and more been nudging employees back to the office after the end of Covid-19 lockdowns and distancing rules.
But those nudges have started to feel more like pushes, particularly in Big Tech, where several rounds of lay-offs have been announced since pandemic restrictions were eased.
In August, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy warned staff that it was “probably not going to work out” if they refused to work at least three days a week in the office.
Google, Meta and X had previously told employees to cut back on work-from-home and revert to something closer to pre-Covid operations.
But employees who feel unshackled by spending most of the week at home are getting some ammunition to fire back at their whip-cracking, axe-wielding bosses.
According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in the US, “remote workers produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions of office workers.”
That’s because “factors such as commuting and residential energy use” are affected by how many people are travelling to and from work and how often.
Workers who were “fully remote” could “contribute a 54% per-head reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” which would be “primarily due to reduced office energy use,” according to researchers, who were led by Cornell University engineer Yanqiu Tao.
But while two to four days of remote work would lead to a drop of “up to 29%,” limiting remote work to a day a week would mean a drop of only 2%, according to the team, which included Longqi Yang of Microsoft.
”One day of WFH (work from home) has no benefits due to offsetting factors like more non-commute travel, home energy use and commuting distance,” they wrote.
The research featured datasets of over 100,000 samples, including the US Residential Energy Consumption Survey and Microsoft’s employee data, which covered commuting and teleworking behaviours. – dpa
