Telecommuting could create huge benefits for California workers and the environment

With California’s freeways squeezed ever tighter and the need to reduce our carbon footprint more pressing than ever, it’s hard to imagine why the state has not made telecommuting a cornerstone of its transportation and environmental policies.

Of course, state officials can’t go about ordering employers to allow more people to work from home at least part of the time, and it doesn’t work for many types of work. But they could do more to set an example by allowing and encouraging telecommuting with state employees. They can also promote it as a wise policy for other employers and create incentives for doing more of it.

People don’t need to work remotely five days a week; there’s some evidence that always working from home is too isolating. But imagine if, on average, California car commuters spent one less day per week on the road. Traffic would loosen. Significantly less in the way of greenhouse gases would be spewed into the air. People would regain time for something other than cursing out other drivers.

Yet early California policy on climate change, formed under the Brown administration, pretty much left telecommuting out of the picture. The reason, officials said, was that it didn’t appear to improve the carbon footprint of workers much, if at all. People who might have shared air conditioned office buildings in summer, or heated ones in winter, would now be cooling or heating a space just for themselves. They might jump in the car to run local errands during the day, reducing the benefit.

On the other hand, offices can be inefficient users of energy as well. They often light, heat or cool spaces that aren’t used much, doing it throughout the work day and into the evening, as well as during weekends with skeleton crews of employees.

By now, various studies have indicated that overall, remote work would benefit the environment. A 2017 study of the area near Ottawa, Canada, published in the medical journal Lancet, found that telecommuting could reduce pollution as well as improve workers’ health. In California, where indoor heating is less needed than in many other areas, the up sides could be particularly large.

And aside from climate impacts, reducing the use of cars means lowering levels of air pollution such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Businesses have been slowly getting on board over the past several years. Not all jobs are remote-friendly, of course. Construction workers and physical therapists can’t take advantage of telecommuting. But Fast Company reported in January that more California businesses are showing interest in allowing at least some remote work and that’s expected to amp up as climate change worsens.

Right now, the movement is fed by other elements than environmental ones, though, such as how popular remote work is with employees. It’s a way to attract and keep staff.

There’s another factor that weighs heavily on the side of telecommuting, one that the state’s early cost-benefit analysis failed to take into account but that employers are seeing now: continued sprawl and the expense of living in the state. The Bay Area has become so costly that workers are moving to places as far flung as Stockton in search of affordable housing. In Southern California, Los Angeles workers move to remote areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Suddenly, the equation changes. That’s a lot of cars stuck in traffic for a lot of miles, outweighing whatever electricity might be used to work at home.

It also helps that repeated studies have found that employers don’t lose employee productivity when their staffers aren’t right under their noses. Productivity actually increases with telecommuting. It enables parents to be near their children and take time for exercise, time that otherwise would be spent behind the wheel. A two-year study out of Stanford University found that the gains in productivity were remarkable.

Employees also benefit financially in the form of far lower gasoline costs and less wear and tear on their vehicles.

Fewer cars negotiating the freeways means less strain on public roads as well.

In fact, telecommuting could be the cheapest, quickest and most pragmatic way to combat climate change from car use, both short term and long term, improve Californians’ well-being and reduce traffic. And it would save the state money. Too bad that the problem-plagued bullet train became the emblem of former Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate legacy.

Kudos to private business for forging ahead, however incrementally. But the movement needs a heavy prod to have a significant impact on traffic and pollution, and it’s not too late for the state to get involved. Telecommuting is a small-scale, car-by-car method of improving the lives of Californians as well as the environment but, with some attention, it could become a very big deal.

This story was originally published February 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM.