Want to make a difference this Earth Day? Let employees WFH forever

As employers push their employees to return to the office, employees are pushing back with a demand to maintain a remote work schedule, pointing to benefits like better work-life balance,  lower turnover rates and increased productivity. Another compelling argument for staying home: Offices may just be bad for the environment. 

According to a new Earth Day survey by PR and marketing firm Bospar, 95% of Americans who work from home feel they engage in more eco-friendly habits than when they're in the office. Sixty-six percent of respondents say they take proactive measures to reduce their carbon footprint, 25% say they eat more locally produced food, 47% say they use more natural or energy-efficient lights and 42% say they've eliminated single-use plastics from their day-to-day routines. 

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"Eating at home, the ability to recycle — I found those habits very easy to do when I was at home," says Curtis Sparrer, a principal at Bospar. "When you consider that the U.S. is supposed to cut our carbon footprint by 50% by 2030, I don't know why more companies are not being more serious about [remote work]." 

Notably, an individual could eliminate their carbon footprint by up to 58% if they work four or more days from home, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. While a hybrid solution is still better than nothing, just one day of working from home is estimated to only reduce someone's footprint by 2%. 

Sparrer acknowledges that many companies are driving their employees back to the office out of fear that innovation and productivity will suffer in a remote work setup. However, Sparrer believes this anxiety is not rooted in actual observed drops in productivity.

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"Part of the RTO movement has to do with a lot of executives being of a certain age, where they just can't get their heads around the fact that they could trust their staff to do the job," he says. "Remote work is a great boogeyman, but when it comes to the productivity of home workers versus office workers, the only difference is office workers are contributing to the destruction of our species."

Studies centered on remote versus office productivity offer mixed results at best. For example, according to an Owl Labs study, 60% of managers are concerned that workers are less productive at home, while 62% of workers report being more productive at home. And given the socioeconomic state of the U.S., a company's bottom line may not be able to determine the answer either. Regardless, Sparrer warns employers against sending their employees back to the office out of fear or distrust — the move is more likely to cost them talent than boost sales, he says.

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Sparrer advises employers to reflect on where they claim to stand on sustainability and act accordingly. If their workforce is mainly made up of desk workers, that means remote work should be a cornerstone of their eco-friendly policies, underlines Sparrer. 

"Any company that is in a knowledge worker-based industry should be looking at a way to be compliant with 2030 carbon emission goals," he says. "We are already seeing the cataclysmic effects of climate change. We need to take serious action now."