On Earth Day we might do well to target corporate “hot air” as much as CO2 emissions. After all, isn’t it ironic when companies preach green but practice grey?
Consider Disney—a company I love.
Disney didn’t just do something for Earth Day, the house of mouse doubled-down by declaring an Earth month.
The company’s vice president of environmental sustainability declared: “Disney is committed to putting possibility into practice and inspiring optimism for a brighter, cleaner, and more environmentally sustainable future.”
I nearly choked on my coffee on April 1st, thinking Disney’s press release was a prank. No “gotcha” followed. It hit me that they were dead serious. How can they claim green credentials while chaining their employees to a four-day-a-week carbon-churning commute?
Disney’s CEO Bob Iger defended his decision: “In a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe, and create with peers that comes from being physically together, nor the opportunity to grow professionally by learning from leaders and mentors.”
Iger is not alone in defending return-to-office policies.
Speaking to CNBC, Nike CEO John Donahoe blamed working from home (WFH) for his company’s innovation slowdown: “In hindsight, it turns out, it’s really hard to do bold, disruptive innovation, to develop a boldly disruptive shoe on Zoom. Our teams came back together 18 months ago in person, and we recognize this. So we realigned our company, and over the last year we have been ruthlessly focused on rebuilding our disruptive innovation pipeline along with our iterative innovation pipeline.”
At first blush, it seems like a compelling argument: Without being in-person, employees at Nike are just incapable of innovation.
This rationale raises an important question: If office presence is directly proportional to innovation, why did Nokia, Sony, and Motorola, all office-centric, fail to keep pace with Apple during the smartphone revolution?
Or . . . is Nike, which regularly rolls out a line of Earth Day sneakers, just looking for a scapegoat?
While innovation is an intangible aspect to measure, some of the starchiest economists have determined there is no difference in productivity between working in offices vs. homes.
There is however a huge difference to the environment when it comes to where you work. That’s because the environmental problems of return-to-office mandates are not just due to commuting. They’re also due to the energy consumption of commercial buildings along with the typical office waste they generate, such as paper and single-use plastics.
Just one day of office work creates an average carbon footprint of around 25.6 pounds of CO2 (independently calculated from a variety of sources). That doesn’t seem like a “brighter, cleaner, and more environmentally sustainable” future.
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science demonstrates that if people commit to working from home full-time they can reduce their carbon footprint by more than half. Hybrid workers can cut their carbon footprint by 11% to 29%. But working from home one day per week (like Disney) only cuts the carbon footprint by 2%.
Americans overwhelmingly understand the environmental benefits of working from home since most of us tried it during the pandemic.
Working from home encourages more Earth-friendly behaviors. My company recently surveyed over 1,000 American adults and found that 95% of us admitted we were more eco-friendly when we worked from home.
Here’s a look at the top reasons:
- 55%: Eating more at home vs. ordering in
- 48%: Recycling and composting
- 47%: Using more natural light or energy-efficient lights
- 42%: Eliminating single-use plastics
Taking this further, two-thirds (66%) of us who worked from home have taken proactive measures to reduce our carbon footprint. Twenty-five percent started eating more locally produced or organic foods, reduced food waste, took fewer showers, and/or paid closer attention to water use.
This led to more than three-fourths (77%) of Americans concluding that working from home is better for the planet.
The contradictory optics of enforcing return-to-office policies while declaring you’re Earth-friendly have not been lost on people. Fifty-eight percent of Gen Zers and 52% of millennials believe that celebrating Earth Day while requiring employees to commute to work is hypocritical.
For the younger generation, there is a growing impatience with the excuses preventing us from changing the tide of a preventable environmental apocalypse. They’re not celebrating Earth Day out of some misplaced woo-woo, hippy-dippy love for our planet, but rather for the self-interested reason of averting a planetary apocalypse that will have to endure.
We can’t act soon enough. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we need to halve our carbon footprint by 2030.
Perhaps I’m being simplistic, but it does seem that for many of us, there is an easy-to-implement solution to do just that.
Corporate giants need to step up their game. It’s not enough to produce the next trendy sneaker or blockbuster movie if the cost is our planet’s future. It’s high time they match their office policies with their Earth Day cheers.
Remember, every unnecessary commute is a step backward for our environment. This Earth Day, it’s time to step up by sitting down—at home.
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