Reply to Companies are on the war path against remote work

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Commutes for work are terrible for the environment. Gee let's all make people consume massive amounts of fossil fuels and waste millions of hours per year to sit in traffic or take public transportation just so they can sit in office and do jobs that we have already shown can be done remotely.

What is the point of wasting so much fossil fuels and polluting the environment so much just so we can keep 20th century office culture alive?

Humans are really dumb.  Too bad you wasted money on commercial real estate or decorating the office. There are risks in life, companies should get used to it.[/quote]

*Car* commutes for work are terrible for the environment. Nobody is forcing you to commute by car. You could’ve lived in the district or close-in in a condo.[/quote]

Lol.  How do you think they power subways, buses, and other forms of public transportation? Electricity magically comes from the sky? The largest source of electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. Buses consume fossil fuels. Even if they use natural gas to power a bus, they're still burning fossil fuels.

No commute beats any commutes for environmental impact every.single.time. That's not even considering the massive amounts of waste needed to supply water, heat, and cooling to gigantic buildings that aren't even needed anymore just so we can keep office culture alive.[/quote]

Guys, there is research on this, even cited within this thread.  Absolutely less cars on the road means less fossil fuel emissions *from cars.*  But several other factors go into the total environmental impact of WFH versus onsite.  Increased WFH will likely net out as a marginal benefit to the environment.  But it isn't the slam dunk argument that ends the case that many are making it out to be.[/quote]

WFH means less cars on the road. Period.  People will always use cars to commute to an office. You can't make a WFH vs RTO by conveniently cutting out the impact of car commutes by throwing out pie in the sky ideas like 100% of workers will magically all live in a city and walk or bike to work everyday.

What a stupid argument. Global emissions dropped dramatically during COVID and at the peak of WFH. There's really no argument. WFH saves tremendous amounts of needless waste that we burn to power transportation and heating/cooling/electricity for needless office buildings. [/quote]

I kinda feel like you didn't really read my post....  I agreed that less cars on the road means less emissions and I didn't say anything at all about workers "magically' doing anything.

There is research on the total impact on the environment of remote work.

(And it is hard for me to reconcile folks saying that people who want to go into the office can always go into the office, but then says that organizations will no longer have office buildings.)[/quote]

DP - I don't think anyone is saying there will be no more offices. I'm a PP who is seeing a lot offices reconfigured and downsized to be used differently - more for meetings, group activities, fewer work stations for people to just come in. Where I work, there are some people who like to come in 2-3 days a week (it's very rare that anyone comes in Fridays, and very few people are in 4 days a week. Even our office managers switch off so they are either in 2 or 3 days depending on the week). But many of us do fine working most days from home, coming in only for big meetings or getting together for team retreats etc.

There are some jobs that lend themselves well to working remotely. But even pre pandemic, I worked for one of the major consulting firms and many people were on the road, selling and doing client work. They had to have a remote set up as people did calls from client spaces, from hotels, etc. And before that, I worked for an association. Our members were all over the country, so most of my day was spent on calls with members - not in person.

I can't think of a company with professional workers where every person works in the same area and all the clients/members/vendors you interact with are in the office with you. We will always need to be able to communicate with people not in our physical space. And now we are just adapting to that much more given the push from the pandemic.  [/quote]

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