ABSTRACT
The growth in remote and hybrid work catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic could have significant environmental implications. We assess the greenhouse gas emissions of this transition, considering factors including information and communication technology, commuting, noncommute travel, and office and residential energy use. We find that, in the United States, switching from working onsite to working from home can reduce up to 58% of work's carbon footprint, and the impacts of IT usage are negligible, while office energy use and noncommute travel impacts are important. Our study also suggests that achieving the environmental benefits of remote work requires proper setup of people's lifestyle, including their vehicle choice, travel behavior, and the configuration of home and work environment.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Teleworking , Humans , Pandemics/prevention & control , COVID-19/epidemiology , COVID-19/prevention & control , Workplace , Life StyleABSTRACT
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused a rapid shift to full-time remote work for many information workers. Viewing this shift as a natural experiment in which some workers were already working remotely before the pandemic enables us to separate the effects of firm-wide remote work from other pandemic-related confounding factors. Here, we use rich data on the emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls and workweek hours of 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020 to estimate the causal effects of firm-wide remote work on collaboration and communication. Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts. Furthermore, there was a decrease in synchronous communication and an increase in asynchronous communication. Together, these effects may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information across the network.
Subject(s)
COVID-19/prevention & control , Communication , Cooperative Behavior , Employment , Information Technology , Teleworking , Communicable Disease Control , Humans , Organizational Policy , SARS-CoV-2ABSTRACT
In this preview, we highlight what we believe to be the major contributions of the review and discuss opportunities to build on the work, including by closely examining the incentive structures that contribute to our dataset culture and by further engaging with other disciplines.
