> Since our company consists of a distributed workforce, the majority of our employees work remotely from home, reducing the need to commute daily to a central workplace, and greenhouse gas emissions as a result. Employees at Automattic are invited to share the distance of their previous commute. On this basis we are able to calculate that we save approximately 18,207 kilometers of travel every work day.
> However, we also believe that it’s crucial to meet together in person several times a year, and those flights can have a very large impact. We don’t have exact data yet, but our rough estimate is that each Automattician is generating about 2,500kg of CO2 per year for work related flights.
Considering that they have 1424 employees listed on the map on their about page [1], let's do some simple math:
1424 employees * 2500000 g/employee CO2 = 3,560,000,000 g CO2/year
is the company's actual current footprint of the air-travel meetups.
Suppose a car emits around 200 g CO2 per km,
200 g/km * 18207 km/day * 365 days/year = 1,329,111,000 g CO2/year
if they forgo the meetups and do on-site instead. (And that's the worst case scenario of everyone driving their own car to work and zero public transportation use.)
Conclusion: Remote + air travel meetups is NOT necessarily more sustainable! In this case the CO2 emissions of remote work is almost TRIPLE.
Like, look at London. Mega house prices in the city, but they peter out pretty quickly once you cross the M25 and you start hitting semi-rural areas.
There are also people who don't work well remotely, especially if the salaries don't increase enough to rent a big enough apartment with decent lighting, or if the employee has children who constantly distract them, among others.
> We get the whole company together once a year for seven days so that Automatticians can create bonds that influence them all year long. So far we’ve done Grand Meetups in San Francisco, California; La Paz, Mexico; Oracle, Arizona; Breckenridge, Colorado; Mont-Sainte-Anne, Québec; Seaside, Florida; Budapest, Hungary; San Diego, California; Santa Cruz, California; Park City, Utah; Whistler, Canada; and Orlando, Florida.
> In addition to our all-company Grand Meetup, teams meet for five to seven days to brainstorm team-level strategy and bond in locales ranging from Boulder to Buenos Aires, Las Vegas to Lisbon, Montréal to Mexico City, and Vienna to Vietnam. If you join our merry band, expect to travel three to four weeks per year.
> As a distributed company we also know how to connect with each other from afar, and consider day-to-day social communication at least as important as breaking bread in person.
https://automattic.com/how-we-work/