Why making remote working permanent should be high on your agenda

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

The worldwide remote work experiment has made two things abundantly clear:

1) Remote work is possible for large segments of the economy
2) Daily commutes contribute to massive concentrations of nitrogen dioxide in cities

Which then brings us to this:

“No single activity contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than driving to and from work. Transportation is the number one source of emissions in the United States, and light-duty vehicles contribute the lion’s share of all carbon emissions. The most common mile travelled by households operating light-duty vehicles is the one to and from work.” (Remote work is a huge opportunity for high-impact climate policy)

With current technology and know-how, we can immediately end these emissions by mandating remote work. There is absolutely no excuse not to do this based on what we have just experienced.

Those leadership teams that get ahead of this by using the current crisis as a springboard to evolve their workplaces into work from anywhere environments are going to experience way less disruption than those that don’t.

Carbon emission lockdowns are in our future.