I think something to say about remote-but-local companies. Close enough to travel to a central location every few weeks/month, but far enough to let people live in cheaper, larger housing you wouldn't find within 10 miles of a city office.
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.
Yeah, I like that. I think having an office with flexibility to be there anywhere from occasionally to every day is a good thing.
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.
> 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.
[0] https://automattic.com/sustainability/
[1] https://automattic.com/about/