CHAPTER 7

The Space to Choose

THE LAST COUPLE OF CHAPTERS WERE ABOUT TIME – how having freedom of time can produce enormous productivity benefits. Those benefits can then be used to promote (and accept) types of flexibility such as flexitime, part-time work, reduced hours with full pay, results-only work environments (ROWE), and so on.

This chapter is about location: remote work, or telecommuting, or working anywhere, or whatever other name you give this famous form of flexibility. It’s about having the freedom to choose where to work, and how this can eliminate a vast amount of waste and distraction, allow for deeper flow states of productivity, save money on travelling and eating out, and various other good stuff. Remote work is its own special and amazing beast, but it also has its own challenges that need to be taken seriously, hence its own chapter.

But where do you even start when you talk about remote work? What hasn’t been covered in the thousands of articles and books and podcasts on the topic? I’m going to take a human-centered perspective on the practice to show why it’s in such high demand and why working away from the office boosts productivity and creativity.

I’ll also talk about how to implement the practice and the environmental impacts (which are good). And at risk of attaining a new level of narcissism of which I didn’t know I was capable, I’m going to talk about myself … again.

But first, some science.

Professor Nicholas and His Surprising Experiment

Currently there is only one randomized, controlled trial that sought to determine what happens to productivity when people work remotely. This experiment took place at Ctrip.com International (now Trip.com Group), one of the largest travel agencies in China, with offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and a workforce of sixteen-thousand people.

The CEO and cofounder of the company, James Liang, as fortune would have it, was in a Stanford economics class taught by Nicholas Bloom. He told Bloom that his company was considering allowing its Shanghai employees to work from home, for two reasons: to reduce office space in Shanghai, where rental costs were skyrocketing, and to reduce attrition rates of workers who were getting priced out of living near the office and had long commutes.¹

But “executives were worried that allowing employees to work at home, away from the supervision of their team leaders, would lead to a large increase in shirking.”² They were uncertain about the effects that home working would have on productivity, wondering if it would offset the savings they might find in real-estate costs. That is, it was assumed that productivity would drop; the question was by how much.

Bloom, who I assume licked his lips at the opportunity to have access to such a large sample of remote workers and “exceptional access not only to data but also to Ctrip.com management’s thinking about the experiment and its results,”³ was more than happy to help. He and a team of researchers, including Liang, designed and ran the experiment.

Volunteers from two divisions put their names forward to work from home during the trial. Out of the 996 employees in these divisions, about half (503) volunteered. (In later interviews, it was found that those who hadn’t volunteered anticipated high levels of isolation and loneliness, and that their chances of being promoted might decrease.)

Of the 503 volunteers, 249 met eligibility requirements (tenure of six months or more, broadband internet at home, appropriate workspace), and these people were randomly divided into the treatment (work at home) and control (remain in office) groups.

For nine months the treatment group worked from home four days per week and came into the office to work one day per week, while the control group worked all five days from the office.

The results were surprising, and good.

Since researchers measured productivity because the managers were worried about how much it would drop for the home workers, clearly no one was expecting the opposite to occur.

But over the course of the initial trial, the people who worked from home had a “13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment).”4

This result doesn’t include any of the elements of true productivity described in Chapter 5, such as the level of creativity and innovation of employees, the amount of rework (e.g., calling back to fix an error), efforts to improve work (e.g., by reducing time spent on administration), or the level of influence each worker had in improving other people’s work. But even using the standard “how many calls were made per day” as the measure of productivity, this is impressive.

Even more impressive is the fact that it was obtained without any formal training on best-practice methods of working from home, without training for managers on how to manage a remote team, without any forethought about how to manage potential issues (such as feelings of isolation), without a gradual ramp-up to allow people to get used to working from home this many days per week, and without formal selection based on “ideal” traits of home workers. The only preparation for the trial was to set up the necessary equipment in employees’ homes.

The study busted the myth about “bad” employees not being able to work remotely. Both the top fifty percent and bottom fifty percent of workers (based on pre-trial performance) who worked from home performed better, to a similar degree, during the trial.⁵

Another surprisingly good result was the difference in attrition rates between the control and treatment groups. During the trial, the group that remained in the office lost 35 percent of its employees (about standard for the business), and the work-from-home group lost 17 percent of theirs, 51 percent lower than the control group.⁶

Financially, the average savings for Ctrip.com for each remote worker was $1,900 per year. These savings comprised a $1,400 reduction in office and IT costs (the initial reason for the trial), $230 in productivity improvement, and $260 in reduced turnover costs.⁷ This may not sound like a lot, but for context, the average yearly wage (including bonuses) for Ctrip.com employees at that time was about $3,840 per year.⁸

Due to these savings, Ctrip.com made the easy decision to roll out working from home for the entire company. The people who wanted to work from home but didn’t get a chance during the trial could do so. And the people in the treatment group who wanted to come back to the office because they didn’t like working from home could do just that.

The researchers continued to measure the productivity of workers after the company-wide implementation, and what they found was even more surprising. This time, the productivity of the home workers was 22 percent better than that of workers in the office.⁹ They were producing an entire extra day’s work per week compared to the office workers.

Bloom attributed this improvement to a “learning and selection effect”: people figured out for themselves whether they worked best in the office or home environment, and then chose that location. Working from home had the potential to provide higher levels of productivity than those found in the initial trial, but the people who didn’t do well in that environment held back the overall gains in performance.

When people were allowed to choose, the full might of working remotely was unleashed. That’s why this chapter is called “The Space to Choose”: having the freedom to decide whether to use flexibility, and how to use it, is just as important as having access to flexibility in the first place.

For those wondering about the employees themselves: yes, they did benefit personally from working remotely!

Researchers found that workers in the treatment group were more satisfied with their jobs and the business (as demonstrated by the reduced attrition rate and surveys), they were healthier, they had more time with their families, and they saved a hell of a lot of money.

A survey of these home workers showed that:¹⁰

•  Sixty-five percent got more sleep nightly.

•  Fifty-five percent spent more time with family.

•  Forty-four percent had more leisure time.

•  The top reason why working from home was attractive to them was that they were able to change their lifestyle – eating, sleeping, shopping, etc. (29 percent gave this answer).

•  Cutting their commute helped them save about 17 percent of their salaries (on direct commuting costs and saved time). Some employees also saved money on housing by moving further away from the office to cheaper locations.*

These numbers show that employee energy buckets were being filled in multiple ways. No wonder turnover and sick leave dropped so substantially for the treatment group! With more time, energy, and money to look after themselves, the sustainability of their daily lives increased dramatically.

There wasn’t much preparation for this trial, which caused problems, the biggest of which was social isolation.

People who had been working five days a week in an office and commuting an average of eighty minutes per day obtained most of their social contact from the workplace. Their affection and participation needs mostly relied on coming into work. Then, suddenly, for the treatment group, this satisfier of social needs dropped to one day a week.

This was a huge shift, so of course “feeling lonely” was the most common negative comment from both the home workers (23 percent said this made home working less attractive) and those who chose not to participate in the trial and further rollouts. They anticipated and felt poverties of fundamental needs.

So, half the employees who initially worked from home changed their minds at the end of the trial and came back to the office. Two-thirds of the control group realized that they too would become lonely without the human contact provided by their workplace and decided to remain where they were.

In Part Three: How to Flex, I recommend ways that managers can structure and roll out a trial that uncovers and resolves issues such as this. For example, if managers and staff had collaborated in the development of the trial, the managers at Ctrip.com would have realized that four days working from home, without preparation or training, would result in isolation and loneliness; they might have decided that two or three days per week, or a gradual scale-up, would be better. This would have delayed the company’s savings on office space, but in the long term they would have found more employees who were happy to work from home, and the employees would have handled the change better.

The lesson of this Ctrip.com experiment is more than “productivity improves with remote working.” There are practical lessons, ones that I’ve experienced when I work remotely: balance is key, and it takes time to adapt. There are huge benefits to working remotely, but the potential drawbacks need to be taken seriously. I’ll provide recommendations later in this chapter on how to reduce or avoid the negatives and boost the positives.

A Day in the Life

The Ctrip.com experiment showed us that improvements in productivity and job satisfaction are possible with remote work, even with the straightforward job of picking up a phone and talking to travel customers. But, as discussed in previous chapters, we can assume that the standard eight-hour shifts of the company’s call-center operators weren’t optimal for their productivity levels. The operators were assumed to be just as productive at nine as at four (linear productivity).

But because we know that productivity isn’t linear, we know that the quality of their calls and the care-factor dropped off as the day progressed – they were still answering the phone and doing their job, but they were just going through the motions and not using their full productive and creative potential. What innovations and improvements could Ctrip.com be missing out on from its employees in this scenario?

Which brings us to this question: what happens when someone can combine freedom of location and freedom of time? When they can work from home or anywhere else, and structure their own workday? What if they have the space to choose exactly how they want to work?

I’ve been working with full flexibility for a few years now, and in that time, I’ve experimented with what works and what doesn’t work (for me). I want to show what’s possible when people are afforded this level of freedom, as well as some of the spectacular pitfalls that I’ve experienced.

Figure 7.1. Example of the productivity of a human who works flexibly; in this case, they’re working remotely and can choose when to do their work. This person is still expected to work seven to eight hours a day, but this isn’t tracked or policed by management.

I’ll start with the good stuff.

In Chapter 5, I talked about a person’s productivity when they’re afforded the flexibility of time and location – they could choose what times to work, and they could work mostly from home, so they could pretty much structure their day however they wanted to. That person (surprise, surprise) was me. The figure above shows, again, the average day.

I wake up at about six in the morning, do fifteen minutes of journaling, get some sunlight and exercise, come back home, shower, make coffee, then jump straight into my work by about eight.

I stay pretty much on task all morning, with a few short breaks to walk around, do some stretches, annoy my dog, or message a friend, until about one or two in the afternoon. I have a high level of productivity, which slowly drops off, or even slowly increases, over the morning.

I have a long, relaxing lunch. I make my own food, put on the TV, chill out, and eat. Then I have a short nap, or talk to a friend, or read, or play guitar, or meditate, or whatever else I feel like doing.

Then, if I need to, I’ll do a couple more hours of work from about three or four in the afternoon. This is fully recharged work, which can sometimes be more productive and creative than my morning efforts.

Perhaps the smaller time block reduces the Parkinson’s Law effect (work expands to fill the time available for completion) even further. Perhaps the morning work followed by good recovery time allows my brain to fully awaken. Perhaps it’s the melodic death metal music I put on at this time of day that erases any mental inhibitions.

This structure (which changes if it needs to, e.g., if I have to take my dog to the vet) works well for me. And even though the activities described above sound like a nightmare come true for managers who might be considering allowing employees to work remotely, I’ve produced superior work with this degree of flexibility, in both quality and quantity. And many other people who have this freedom of location attest to how much more productive and creative they are when they work remotely.

Not every day is like this, though. Some days I won’t have that productive second wind in the afternoon. Some days it takes all morning to get into the right flow, and I might not be productive until a sudden burst between eleven and two. This can sometimes happen when depression pops up from nowhere, and I can’t get out of bed till nine or ten. But then I’ll have a long shower, make some coffee, and still end up having at least a few productive hours – the entire day is rarely lost.

That’s life.

Life is different every day. Our energy levels are different every day.

Full flexibility, being able to structure and control our own workday, fits beautifully into the realities of life. It’s a much more honest way of working and living than trying to push through eight or more hours and pretending to be busy when we can no longer push and our buckets are empty.

This way of working also puts the emphasis on real results. My publisher didn’t care how many hours a day I worked on this book, only that another chapter was completed. My clients don’t care if I’m editing their work at a café or in a coworking space or in my home office, only that their work is error-free and looking pretty by the time they need it. The actual product, the value I provide, is the only thing that matters.

This way of working also allows me to live sustainably.

But none of this happened straight away.

It Takes Time

It took a while for me to acclimate to working with full flexibility. In fact, I didn’t really learn how to optimize its use, for my sustainable well-being and for maximum productivity, until one or two years after I started, and I’m still improving.

That was longer than it needed to take, but I had no idea what I was doing, having been thrust into that lifestyle to survive; everything I learned was through trial and error (and there were some big errors). But it was also a huge opportunity to experiment with what works and what doesn’t – for me, but also for others.

One of my top recommendations, for anyone looking to implement remote work, or any type of flexibility, at their business: give it time to work properly. There are multiple reasons for this.

The first is practicality. It takes time to get used to new software or other technology (e.g., Zoom for videocalls to the rest of the team). It takes time to set up a home office and to ensure that distractions are minimized. It takes time to find a good coworking place or café for those days when you need to get out of the home office. It takes time to learn how to communicate, work together, and have effective meetings. And there are many other practicalities that take time to discover and address.

Another reason that getting used to flexible work takes time is that you need to experiment to find what works for optimum productivity and sustainable living. What sort of music helps you to concentrate? How long should time blocks be? How long should breaks be, and what should you do during a break? What’s the best lighting? These are practicalities, but they’re important on a personal level, too, because they determine how well flexibility works for each individual.

The last reason that the transition takes time, and why it took so long for me, is the personal work required to become whole again.

I’m about to reach beyond my grasp and get abstract, but something incredible happens with remote work and with flexibility in general. That extra freedom gives us the time, energy, and space to do those things that make us feel more whole as humans. But to use that time, energy, and space effectively, we need to become better at doing those things that make us whole humans. And we need to fix and develop ourselves in the process.

Don’t reread that paragraph – let me give you a story instead.

Becoming Human

I’ve talked about how flexibility enabled me to get on top of my depression. But it took time. It was a multifaceted journey of healing, during which I fell over – a lot.

I used to cope (and still do on occasion) with depression and bad feelings by partaking in harmful addictions, the main ones being videogames, porn, fast food, and bingeing on Netflix.

No, these are not the worst addictions one can have, they’re not alcohol, heroin, or gambling, but they have inflicted damage on my health and life in so many ways. They have been my escape from poverties and from pain.

When I left my old career and suddenly had full flexibility – all the freedom in the world – I went crazy. My addictions were unleashed. I’d spend a whole day playing videogames without blinking. I’d get through a whole series of whatever Netflix recommended in less than a week. And then I’d eat away the shame of wasting entire days on videogames and porn and TV by visiting the McDonald’s or Subway situated about one hundred yards from home.

Like the Ctrip.com people, I was also extremely lonely after leaving the normal workplace, so I had an extra couple of poverties (affection and participation) that I was trying to cover up and escape from.

These addictions, and their underlying causes, were there before I had flexibility. But the burden of extra time and freedom allowed me to indulge in my problems in full, unadulterated, high-resolution glory.

Yet it was the extra time and freedom that made it possible for me to improve my life and outgrow my addictions. I could finally confront them and do something about the causes. And I started to fill my energy bucket in small ways:

•  Walking my dog or exercising in the mornings

•  Spending time in the sun and out in nature

•  Seeing a therapist

•  Cooking better food to make it harder to justify crappy takeaway

•  Taking Latin dance classes

•  Developing broader social circles and connecting more deeply with others

•  Refocusing on passions, goals, and learning new things

•  Meditating in the afternoons to re-center my mind

•  Structuring my days to optimize these things and get my work done

My health, my well-being, my goals, my life all slowly started to look very different. Leaving behind addictions was only a side effect of my overall ascension to better levels of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, levels that I’m sure I never would have attained while stuck in the normal workplace. I would have continued to go through the motions of life as a robot: unconscious, on autopilot, suffering without realizing what I was missing, without realizing that things could be different, never reaching my potential.

After exiting the rigid grind, I could finally heal and grow.

Full flexibility required me to become more human, but it also enabled me to become more human. It took time to shake off my old, robot self, but eventually I healed and became whole and alive.

Perhaps the employees at Ctrip.com could have comfortably worked from home four days a week, or even five, without encountering the effects of abject loneliness. But the trial should have started smaller and gradually scaled up.

The employees needed to learn how to work away from the office. They needed time to increase social connections outside of work (e.g., co-working spaces, volunteering, dance classes). They needed time to build greater connections with themselves by being alone, which doesn’t necessarily equate to loneliness. Working from home takes practice, a focus on personal growth and fulfilling other needs, and the other good stuff I mentioned.

They needed time to become more whole and human.

In the traffic example in Chapter 4, I purposely gave Rahul only three days of working from home. If he had had more days to begin with, the benefits would have come at the cost of being socially isolated; he could have ended up in poverties of participation and affection, resulting in poor mental health and low engagement with his work.

But, with time, as Rahul got used to the practice and filled out his life in other ways, he could increase to four or five days of working remotely.

The same concept goes for non-imaginary people.

Recommendations for Remote Workers

I’ll talk more about the manager’s role in creating flexible work programs and trials in the next part of this book. But here are the most important recommendations for anyone who has the opportunity to work remotely.

There are entire books dedicated to working from home or working remotely,* but these are my rules for success (and avoidance of pain), based on my experience and research. Leaders can use this information to help develop ground rules and methods with their teams and as guidance for their own remote working practices.

1.  Create boundaries. Without boundaries – temporal, physical, and mental – the lines between home and work can be blurred or erased completely. You may find yourself forever in work mode, never able to switch off and relax; conversely, you may always feel like you’re in home mode, never able to fully switch on; or, more likely, you’ll be in some purgatorial in-between, where you’re not able to give your full self to anything. It’s essential to create boundaries.

I recommend the following:

Temporal

•  Create and stick to routine start and finish times (but, of course, keep these flexible as required). This takes the effort out of deciding each day when to start and finish, and it makes it far easier to step in and out of work mode. There will be less need for daily efforts at discipline and motivation, because work is just what you do at that particular time.

•  Time block a certain number of hours for deep, concentrated work. Switch off notifications for social media and even for work-related emails and instant messages.

•  Have set times (before and after work, and during breaks) when you’re not working or doing any work-related stuff. Ensure that your team and manager are aware of these times – after all, you’ve created ground rules and expectations with each other.

Physical

•  Have a dedicated office for work that’s separate from living areas and bedrooms. Don’t allow your business notes and folders and laptop to spill out into the dining room or living room – they don’t belong there.

•  Leave your office after work times, and don’t use it too much during nonwork times, except for study or something similar. Otherwise, you’ll quickly get sick of being in that space and sitting in that chair.

•  Ensure that family members know that they’re not supposed to be in your office during work hours (as much as you can, anyway, but with the coronavirus pandemic, I think we’ve became more used to seeing kids in the background of our workspace, which can be refreshing).

Mental

•  Do something that helps define when your workday has ended. For example, I put on some heavy metal music, or take my dog for a walk, or go to my dance class, or start cooking, or some combination of these. (Most importantly, I leave my office!)

•  If you’re working regularly from home, make sure that you go and work somewhere that’s not your home office at least one or two days a week. Find a café, shopping center (with a café), library, botanical garden, or coworking space, and work there for at least half the day. Many remote workers swear by the “coffee shop effect,” where the buzz of activity around them and the difference in location give them creative and productive highs.11 I’ve found this highly rejuvenating and energizing, and it helps me avoid cabin fever.

•  Create and stick to times of the day and days of the week when you will and won’t respond to messages. This can challenge people you work with who are used to being responded to all the time, but with clear boundaries and expectations, they’ll get used to it quickly.

2.  Use your extra time and energy with purpose. It’s not hard to create a perfect Parkinson’s Law trap for yourself when working from home. If you don’t have a good reason to get your work done with gusto, you can end up using your entire day building up to writing that first sentence and doing so by going through every new You-Tube video.

What you need to do is incorporate other activities into your days. The best ones have set times and external accountability, such as activities that you do with someone else, or activities that you pay for, such as taking a class. Take a salsa class on Mondays at six, or see Michelle for morning coffee on Wednesday at ten, or read to the kids at the local school on Fridays at two.

These activities give you things to look forward to outside of work, add structure to your week, and push you to work with purpose so that you have the freedom to do these things. They also help fill the energy bucket and shift you to a highly sustainable way of living!

3.  Experiment, and remember that it takes time. Experiment with background sound – what works best for you (e.g., silence, classical music, ocean sounds), at what time, and for what type of work. Try out self-accountability and motivation methods, such as lists, diaries, project tracking software, and reminders. Find out how often you need to socialize, in what ways, and with whom. Determine the best times for meditation, exercise, hobbies, and/or napping. Try different types of lighting.

I want to re-emphasise that it takes time to get this right. Be kind to yourself. Don’t feel shame or guilt because you’re not great at working remotely right away. And give yourself time to recover and heal from all that commuting and rigidity.

4.  Stick to the expectations and rules that you’ve agreed to. It’s still an unfortunate foible of remote work that trust from managers and colleagues needs to be earned. Employees need to demonstrate that they can get work done and communicate effectively so that no one needs to wonder whether they’re going to reach deadlines or maintain productivity levels.

Be like a cheerleader and hit your moves: execute everything that you said you would, such as meeting work deadlines, contacting people when necessary, and dialling in on time for meetings. Coworkers will see that you’re reliable and fully capable of working remotely.

5.  Communicate, communicate, communicate. This is also a reminder to myself, because I still suck at it. However much you think you should communicate with your manager and colleagues, it’s probably not enough, especially if you haven’t built up their trust in your dependability.

Set reminders for yourself to call your boss at regular intervals, which can lengthen as trust builds. You can also have daily catchups with the team over Zoom or Skype. You can use Slack to ask quick questions or provide quick answers. And there’s always email.

Work out, as a team, rules about communication, and stick with them. And then communicate a little bit more. (I swear I’ll try too.)

6.  Focus on health and well-being. I’ve already harped on about health and well-being, but here we go again! Use this situation to your advantage, in as many ways as possible. Learn about your own health. Learn about your needs and the best ways to fill your bucket.

Look into physical, mental, emotional, psychological, sexual, social, and spiritual aspects of health – truly holistic healing. This is a case of not knowing what you don’t know until you know it, but when you start knowing, and start seeing unbelievable results, then you’ll begin to understand what’s possible.

Cutting the Commute

I sometimes like to jump in my car and drive to the city during peak hour. It’s a sharp and tactile reminder of why I’m writing this book. Not many things in our daily lives take so much from us and give so little, and I like to be reminded of this needless pain that I’ve been fortunate enough to escape, at least for a while. If I can help even one person see the joy of removing traffic jams from their daily routine, then writing this book was worthwhile.

But something I forget to remember is that by driving much less, I’ve cut my personal carbon emissions significantly. This is something that many of us forget when we talk about remote work. But cutting one, or two, or any number of trips out of our weekly travel makes a significant difference to total emissions, and it’s not a difficult or fancy way to fight climate change.

A report from the U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP) found that motorized transport produces 23 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, and it’s the fastest-growing sector of greenhouse gas emissions. The report also said this sector “will be responsible for a third of CO₂ emissions by 2050 at current rates.”12

Passenger vehicles account for more miles than any other vehicle types. Travel for work – getting to and from work and trips “for business purposes” – makes up a large percentage of these miles.¹³

Working remotely can make a significant impact on the distance we travel by car and consequently the emissions we produce. A 2012 congestion reduction program in Minnesota, called eWorkPlace, resulted in a significant reduction in the number of daily trips and distance travelled by employees when they worked remotely.

The program, which involved over four-thousand employees, assisted forty-eight businesses to set up and formalize their remote and flexible work initiatives. The results were measured by the University of Minnesota over a period of nine months.¹⁴

On average, participants worked from home 1.31 days per week.* On those days, employees took two fewer peak-hour trips, as you might expect when you eliminate the round trip to and from the office, and they saved 27.96 miles of travel compared to their in-office days. (Sixty-three percent of the respondents didn’t leave home at all while telecommuting.)

In total, over the nine months, participants in the program saved 7.46 million vehicle miles of travel, and 8.14 million pounds of CO₂ emissions. The report adds that, of “tolls, transit, technology and telecommuting, [telecommuting] requires the least amount of infrastructure input” (i.e., it doesn’t require any infrastructure).

The reason, I think, that we don’t think much about the environmental benefits of working remotely is that they’re not visible. In fact, they’re completely invisible. Not travelling is the absence of something. There’s nothing to look at. It’s not a sexy solution to reduce emissions. It’s not a shiny new electric car from Tesla, or a row of wind turbines that you can point at and say, “Wow, that’s definitely reducing emissions!”

When travel has been eliminated, the only thing to see are numbers and graphs of how many miles and how many tons of CO₂ have been avoided.

It’s not exciting.

But the complete elimination of something is always more impressive than improvements in efficiency – it’s a 100-percent improvement in efficiency, no matter how efficient your vehicle is! Leaving your car in the garage for an entire day while you work from home is a 100-percent reduction in distance travelled and CO₂ emissions emitted.

I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty sexy.

Walking the Dog vs. Commuting

One thing that I’m eternally grateful for when I don’t need to commute is that once a day, either in the morning or the afternoon, I get to take my dog, a beautiful black Labrador called Bear, for a walk in the bush near my home.

Not a rushed squeezing-in-a-quick-nighttime-walk-after-getting-home, but a relaxed one or two hours in the sun. This, above all my other weekly activities, keeps me centered and whole. It does so by filling every single compartment in my Bucket: affection (seeing Bear happily pursue a scent, eat grass, and do other doggy things), protection (exercise), understanding (observing trees, animals, and the world outside), participation (coming across other people walking their dogs or playing with their families – being part of the community), leisure (I leave my phone at home), creation (experiencing the beauty and chaos of sunsets, storms, green grass, a spider building its web), identity (letting go of ego and realizing, in the words of Tolkien, that I’m “only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all”),15 freedom (I’m free to go wherever I choose, and so is Bear), and nature!

The times that we walk are usually when I’d be sitting in a car going to or from work in my previous rigid jobs, and that makes me feel even luckier. Table 7.2 on the next page offers a side-by-side comparison of my feelings about commuting vs. walking a dog.

I think the winner is clear.

Commuting	Walking the Dog
One of the top four stressful things we do every day	Reduces stress (except when picking up sloppy poop)
Lowers the chance of exercising for that day	Exercise!
Adds over a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere per year	Prevents up to a ton or more of CO2 from entering the atmosphere per year
Tailgating douchebags	Tail-wagging fur-kids
Chance of dying increases (e.g., by car accident)	Chance of being mindful and emotionally centered increases
Listening to honking, revving, and shouting	Listening to twittering, buzzing, and rustling

Table 7.2. Commuting vs. walking the dog – a side-by-side comparison.

Is that Flight Necessary?

We currently take over four billion individual passenger flights globally.16

It’s become normal to fly.

It’s so easy to just hop on a flight to the other side of the country, or even to other countries or continents, that we hardly even think about it. And we certainly don’t think much about the damage it’s doing to the planet. (Or, because we’re only one of hundreds of passengers on a flight, we don’t think that our individual contribution matters.)

From a macro view, the “global aviation industry produces 2% of all human-induced CO₂ emissions,” and the industry is “responsible for 12% of CO₂ emissions from all transport sources (compared to 74% from road transport).”¹⁷

From the perspective of one traveller, you can blow all your CO₂ savings realized by not driving to work with just one flight. For example, on a standard domestic flight, 254 grams of CO₂-equivalent emissions^* are produced per kilometer per passenger.¹⁸ So on a round trip from Brisbane to Melbourne – 2,750 kilometers – 700 kilograms of CO₂ are produced per passenger.

For a North American frame of reference, “Take one round-trip flight between New York and California and you’ve generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.”¹⁹

What does working remotely have to do with all this?

In the United States, for example, 29 percent of all flights are for business purposes.20 The point to ponder here, which we’ve been forced to examine thoroughly during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, is how many of those millions of flights for business purposes are truly required?

Is it possible that at least a portion of these trips are frivolous and unnecessary, like having a meeting that could have easily been done over our new friend Zoom (or put in an email), but we’re simply too lazy to consider alternative means of conducting business?

And is it possible that a large portion of these business trips are in fact a way for people to boost their egos by being treated to all the trappings of interstate or international travel just because they can? One survey of millennials and their travel behavior found that most of them “found business travel to be a perk of the job, and 65% of them see it as a status symbol.”²¹

I am speaking from experience. I remember feeling like a king during my first few business trips in my “normal” career. Free travel! Fancy hire car! Room service! Hotel room with two queen-size beds! Bragging rights: “Oh yeah, I’ve made it!”

But I also remember wondering, how necessary was it for me to be there in person? Did I really need to fly across one of the largest countries on the planet just to show my face, be shown a new machine, motivate people to work on a project, and chit chat with a plant manager over a coffee?

No. The answer is no.

Again, the coronavirus pandemic is helping us to realize with blistering speed that flying is often unnecessary. We can build connections, socialize with coworkers, close deals, work together on complex stuff, show our faces, and many other business-y things without producing 700 kilograms of CO₂ on a needless return flight. We can work remotely now with people anywhere on the planet.

With my current work, I have major clients I’ve not met in person once. But we’ve talked on the phone and had enough video calls and sent enough emails that we’ve developed deep and rich relationships – professionally and personally – and we’ve collaborated on huge projects. We’ve also made substantial business deals with each other without needing to meet face to face.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fly at all. Travelling is in our blood, and the wonder of being able to see the other side of the world in less than a day can’t be overstated. And yes, some business trips might be necessary. But when the airlines are running again, perhaps we can remember to use some moderation.

Someone might argue that their flight was going to happen whether they were on it or not, thus they’re not responsible for the flight happening or the CO₂ emissions generated by that flight. But the more people fly, the more flights are needed. Each person takes up just one seat on a flight, but so does the person next to them, and the person next to them. Each of them has created the demand for that flight. And the more popular a flight becomes, the higher the chances that a new flight will be added to accommodate the demand.

Business travellers especially are more responsible than the average traveller for increases in demand because they tend to travel during peak times (mornings and evenings). At these times, planes are fuller, and one extra flyer has a greater chance of causing airlines to add a new flight to their schedule.

Choosing to work remotely – including, in this case, working from your local office – instead of flying for business reduces the demand for flights during these busy times. It does make a difference.

In Conclusion

Feeling in control over your own existence is one of the most valuable benefits of flexibility, and that fulfills one of our fundamental human needs: freedom. If you can give that to your people, they’ll look after the rest of their needs, and your business, by themselves.

Whether people work from home, or from Jupiter, or long hours or short hours or part time, most of the benefits – all of the important ones – come from having the space – the freedom – to choose. That freedom includes being able to choose which types of flexibility to use and how they’re used.

This is an important idea for the next part of the book, where we look at the practicalities of implementing flexible work programs. It’s critically important to work closely with employees and managers to ensure that everyone feels ownership of the program, giving it the best chance of succeeding.

* The average commuting time of employees was eighty minutes per day, with 21.3 percent having a commute time of over 120 minutes per day. On top of the health and financial benefits to employees, this also helped reduce Shanghai’s traffic and pollution.

* Of interest to the Ctrip.com study earlier concerning what is the “ideal” number of days working from home, these employees felt that “to do their job the best” they would prefer to work remotely 2.29 days (on average) per week.

* Includes both CO2 emissions and “secondary effects” on global warming called “radiative forcing”

* A great book on this topic is The Tracksuit Economy by Emma Heuston.