The Great Resig … never mind.
In the last two weeks, Netflix, Meta, Robinhood and Uber all initiated hiring freezes or layoffs. Privately backed startups like Cameo and Mural laid off big chunks of their workforce. And Amazon, Alphabet and Apple joined Netflix and Meta with disappointing earnings reports and corresponding stock sell-offs.
For the first time in nearly two years, the narrative around Big Tech’s latest boom is starting to look shaky. And with it, software engineers and tech workers who’ve gotten used to the thrill of a white-hot job market are starting to ask if their halcyon employment market is fading. Could the extraordinary hiring efforts of companies like Meta — a company that was battling to hire as many engineers as possible only a year ago — have accidentally necessitated a correction in the opposite direction?
In some ways, the answer is yes. The days of three competing offers and doubling salary for most engineers who so much as glance at a new job might be coming to an end over the next few months as some tech companies slow hiring.
But it’s still comfortably safe to assume that every decent engineer will always have a good job available. While specific companies and industries will have to reckon with investors shifting their expectations, the underlying trends that have made tech jobs reliably well-paying and consistently available are only going to continue.
Experts at recruiting firms Robert Half and Kelly Science, Engineering, Technology & Telecom told Protocol that they feel confident that demand will remain stable. And recruiters for large tech companies and startups alike — granted anonymity because their employers would not allow them to speak on the record — said that while individual financial circumstances of specific tech companies concern them, they remain confident in the overall job market.
“Let’s assume that late last year going into early this year, that was a 10. I’ve been recruiting for seven years; I’ve never seen anything like that in terms of competition,” one recruiter told Protocol. “Whereas now, it’s probably still like an eight or nine. So there is a slowdown, just compared to how hectic things were like six months ago.”
"I think the revenue outlook is ambiguous, so people are going to assume the worst and start pulling back on spending, if you will. And as people do that, in general across the economy [it] will have this ripple effect. I think that you'll see more tightening,” Will Price, a founder and general partner at Next Frontier Capital, told Protocol.
But even with that tightening, the overall unemployment landscape in the United States still heavily favors workers. The Department of Labor announced last week that in March, the number of available jobs hit the country’s all-time record (11.5 million), meaning that The Great Resignation is far from over.
Those numbers are even more favorable for software engineers and cybersecurity professionals, whose unemployment rates sit somewhere between 0.1% and 0.6%, according to Ryan Sutton, a district president for Robert Half. Sutton considers any unemployment rate between 2% and 4% as exceptionally favorable for workers, meaning that numbers even lower indicate persistent demand.
“It really comes down to the continued pent-up demand that existed before the pandemic, coupled with companies restaffing to catch up to the growth rates, coupled with The Great Resignation, especially with the most in-demand skills, like emerging technologies, cloud engineering, web architects, database administrators,” he said.
For Sutton, the hiring news at companies like Netflix and Meta has more to do with individual companies’ financial circumstances and issues: Netflix’s password-sharing and user-licensing problems, for example, or Meta’s need to maximize its efficiency.
“The traditional trends that tell us the talent demand indicators — average number of offers per candidate, how long it takes us to get a candidate placed, percentage of counter-offers a candidate is facing on a regular basis — those three buckets, we’re still seeing it,” he said.
One former Facebook recruiter said this is actually an advantageous moment for savvy recruiters at companies battling a decline in their stock value. “You are going to make 30[%], 40%, 50% investment there by joining at an advantageous time. You’ll say, ‘Hey, I know our stock is this price: If it rebounds in six months, that means that you are going to make quite a bit more money,’” he said.
That same recruiter said that the tech companies that have remained very aggressive in their strategies and aren’t battling investor doubt are also going to be able to capitalize on this moment by trying to hire those who’ve been laid off over the last few weeks. He cited companies like DoorDash, where he’s seen recruiting and hiring remain very competitive.
“If I'm gauging on a scale of one to 10 in terms of how concerned I am, I’m probably at a four right now, and it was at two yesterday. There is some concern, but I think for the most part I don't see any dread,” the same recruiter said. “Ask me again next week; I might have a different answer for you. I want to keep my finger on the pulse here, but I’m not in a panic.”
With additional reporting by Sarah Roach.
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
People are searching more often for how to electrify their lives, from induction stoves to e-bikes.
From “induction stove” to “home EV charging,” search interest is rising.
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
Feeling cynical about the state of the climate? Well, it’s hardly a guarantee of a liveable climate, but a peek at Google Trends might provide a glimmer of hope.
People are increasingly ready for the all-electric future at home and on the road. From “induction stove” to “home EV charging,” search interest is rising. And while climate change is certainly not up to the individual to solve — that’s mainly on governments and corporations — shifts in public tastes can bring about policy changes. Fast. (See: outdoor dining in major cities; marriage equality.)
Protocol took a look at the past five years of search interest for a number of electrification hacks. Google Trends uses a scale from one to 100 to measure interest over time, with 100 marking the peak popularity for the search term in a given region and a given time period. For the bulk of the home and transport electrification terms that Protocol reviewed, the peak hit in the last year, if not in the last few months.
Let’s take induction stoves as an example. A type of electric cooktop, they transfer heat directly to a pan via electromagnetism, rather than first heating up the stove itself. They are by far the most energy-efficient option to heat things up. Switching from gas to induction not only speeds up cooking, but it lowers the health and safety risks of piping and burning methane gas in your house.
Induction stoves are more expensive than gas ranges. They also only account for 1% of all stoves in the U.S. While searches for both “electric stove” and “gas stove” still far outstrip those for “induction stove,” search interest has built steadily in recent years, peaking in November 2021. (In fact, interest tends to jump every November, perhaps reflecting Thanksgiving turkey — or Tofurkey — cooking concerns or stove problems.)
Interest in heat pumps, the still obscure but mighty alternative to traditional energy-intensive HVAC systems, has built as well, though more subtly. There have been major spikes around the time of major storms and hot and cold snaps. That includes peaks around January 2018’s enormous and widespread blizzard and February 2021’s cold snap that wiped out power in much of Texas. Still, search interest has noticeably increased in the past five years.
The increase in interest in electric transportation options has been much steeper than in induction stoves and heat pumps, though. This speaks in part to the fact that people tend to look into new cars and new bikes more regularly than major household appliances, as well as to the fact that EVs suddenly seem to be everywhere: in Super Bowl commercials, in President Joe Biden’s speeches, even in delivery fleets.
Electric bikes, for instance, saw a major jump in interest around the time that the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020. While it initially leveled off in the pandemic’s first year, interest has continued to build throughout the past year, peaking last autumn.
And interest in the terms “home EV charging” and “EV for sale” have also built in recent years, particularly after January 2021. It has paralleled a surge of new EV models and the Biden administration’s forays into electrifying transit. Interest hit its peak in March of this year, soaring in dramatic fashion as gas prices hit record heights and made conventional vehicles more expensive in comparison.
Clearly the cost of both gas and electricity has been on searchers’ minds as well. Google saw a rush of searches for “electricity price” during last year’s Texas storm, and another in March of this year, in tandem with soaring fuel prices and geopolitical upheaval that left energy prices in disarray worldwide.
Search interest is an imperfect proxy for public taste, of course, but it does give us a rough sense of what people are interested in. With Google Trends showing people are looking at more electric options amid worries about rising energy prices, it’s now on companies and policymakers to deliver.
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
Imagine: You’re the leader of a real estate team at a restaurant brand looking to open a new location in Manhattan. You have two options you’re evaluating: one site in SoHo, and another site in the Flatiron neighborhood. Which do you choose?
Companies that need to make these types of decisions leverage foot traffic patterns coupled with additional data sources to build a sound approach to real estate and investment decisions. Below, we take a closer look at points of interest and foot traffic patterns to demonstrate how location data can be leveraged to inform better site selection strategies.
Here’s how foot traffic data can impact site selection or real-estate decisions.
Look at your competitive set: Identify current venues in a neighborhood or area to determine where there might be white space and to quantify the competitive landscape. Analyze your overall competitive set (e.g., in this report we looked at all restaurants) as well as more specific, relevant categories of venues (e.g., in this report we looked at cafes). Know which places your prospective customers go now, and where you might have an opportunity to take market share or position yourself alongside businesses that provide synergies.
Know whether your consumer traffic would come from tourists, or locals: Classify tourists versus locals by looking at individuals with home ZIP codes more than 120 miles away in your analysis to better understand the catchment area (i.e., where consumers are coming from).
Know more about consumers in your neighborhood: Analyze the demographics of consumers in a particular neighborhood to understand the types of people a prospective site might draw so that you can select the optimal location based on your target audience.
Uncover changes in visit patterns over time, and within a typical week: Look at a particular neighborhood over time in order to capitalize on trends, selecting a site where traffic may be on the rise. Compare visitation patterns by neighborhood to understand the traffic you might expect to see throughout the week at a given site, informing and validating (or invalidating) your projections. Know what day of week experiences the most natural footfall traffic.
Understand the trends and what your consumers like: It’s critical to know what consumers are looking for, how they spend their time and what they like now and into the future.
Use data-visualization platforms and tools to make insights easy: Data-visualization platforms make complex information and insights easier to understand and ultimately react to. You’ll see companies that adopt data visualization are empowered and can spot emerging trends and speed reaction time.
Different target audiences with different needs
SoHo: Consumers visiting restaurants in SoHo are primarily locals (83%) ages 25-34 (44%). Restaurants in this area attract super shoppers, affluent socialites, health-conscious consumers and a cultured and artsy crowd.
Flatiron: People visiting restaurants in Flatiron are primarily locals (86%) ages 25-34 (46%). Restaurants in this area attract health-conscious consumers, corporate professionals, college students and people who crave unique experiences.
Visitation patterns and staffing/hours of operation vary
Soho: A restaurant in SoHo may struggle to draw consistent foot traffic throughout the earlier part of the day and week: Restaurants in SoHo rely heavily on weekend visits (38% of total weekly visits) in the late afternoons (60% of total daily visits occur after 3 p.m.).
Flatiron: A restaurant in Flatiron may struggle to draw consistent foot traffic throughout later day-parts and weekends: Restaurants in Flatiron rely heavily on weekday visits (70% of total weekly visits) in the earlier part of the day (45% of total daily visits occur before 3 p.m.).
SoHo: A new restaurant in NYC's SoHo neighborhood will face tough competition with more than 435 restaurants in the area, including over 48 cafes. Top-visited restaurants in this area include Gitano, Prince Street Pizza and Thai Diner.
Flatiron: A new restaurant might face less competition in Manhattan's Flatiron neighborhood, with roughly 267 restaurants in the area, including only 25 cafes. Top-visited restaurants in this area include Eataly, Shake Shack and The Smith.
While a new restaurant in NYC's Flatiron neighborhood may face less competition compared to a new restaurant in SoHo, location data verifies what it takes to be successful in both neighborhoods.
In order to be successful in Flatiron, a restaurant will need to draw a weekday lunch crowd with healthy offerings and a work-friendly setting for professionals; to stand out among nearly double the restaurants in SoHo, a new restaurant should lean into arts and culture with a design-forward setting, and focus on evening and weekend offerings.
Read the full report to better understand the role of location data in uncovering trends in consumer behavior, assessing the competitive landscape and unlocking unique opportunities for venue expansion.
The answers to all the Musk-iest Twitter acquisition questions.
Keep in mind that Elon Musk isn't exactly known for telling the truth.
Owen Thomas is a senior editor at Protocol overseeing venture capital and financial technology coverage. He was previously business editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and before that editor-in-chief at ReadWrite, a technology news site. You're probably going to remind him that he was managing editor at Valleywag, Gawker Media's Silicon Valley gossip rag. He lives in San Francisco with his husband and Ramona the Love Terrier, whom you should follow on Instagram.
Elon Musk can tweet anything he likes, because he’s Elon Musk, and he’s buying Twitter, and free speech is awesome. What he can’t do is make false tweets true.
Musk said Friday that the Twitter deal was temporarily on hold while he looked into a report that spam bots and other fake accounts made up less than 5% of its users. He added, hours after his first tweet, that he was “still committed to [the] acquisition.” Investors promptly sold off shares of Twitter, thinking that Musk’s words somehow had meaning, embodied intent or otherwise had an impact on the world. They did not, eppur si muove, and yet the stock market moved.
Keep in mind that Musk is a lying liar who lies, a documented serial hyperbolist, a free-wheeling fabulist and also a person who says things that are not true, routinely.
So let’s answer a few questions you might have.
No. First, “on hold” has no meaning here. The deal must be consummated by Oct. 24, according to his agreement with the company. Between now and that date, Musk can say the deal is “on hold” or “steaming ahead” or “just scrumptious.” None of those statements would have any meaning. Under the agreement, it’s binary: Either he does the deal or he doesn’t.
He most likely won’t face trouble from either. Musk is perfectly in his rights to seek information from Twitter: That’s a normal part of any deal. What’s not normal is announcing to the world that he’s doing it.
The SEC has gone after Musk for tweeting about his companies before, but those involved specific claims about having funding secured to take Tesla private or sharing misleading details about car deliveries.
In 2013, the SEC clarified that Regulation FD, its rules for disclosures to investors, could apply to social media, provided that companies advised investors where they should look. Musk’s agreement with Twitter and his other filings specifically mention he might tweet about the deal, which seems like reasonable notice to investors that they should follow his Twitter account.
Twitter might be able to argue that declaring the deal “on hold” constituted a violation of the merger agreement. Section 6.8, Public Announcements, holds that both parties must consult with each other before making statements about the deal. However, it allows for Twitter and Musk to discuss a “dispute between the parties.”
It also offers Musk a big carve-out to tweet as he likes: “Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Equity Investor shall be permitted to issue Tweets about the Merger or the transactions contemplated hereby so long as such Tweets do not disparage the Company or any of its Representatives.”
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on Musk’s statements.
Kind of, in implying that Twitter’s regulatory filing about spam bots might have been false or misleading. But he only asked to see the “details supporting [the] calculation” that bots comprise less than 5% of Twitter’s users.
It would be a big deal if Twitter’s filing were indeed false. Besides potentially violating terms of its agreement with Musk, Twitter could face sanctions from the SEC and lawsuits by investors.
That said, Musk has actively attacked two company lawyers, Vijaya Gadde and Jim Baker, sending waves of trolls after them. Twitter hasn’t offered any public support for its executives or commented on whether it considered that a violation.
As we noted, he said Friday that he’s still “committed” to the deal. He’d have to pay Twitter $1 billion if he broke things off, and Twitter could also pursue a term called “specific performance,” basically compelling Musk to go through with the deal. Musk is also reportedly seeking more equity funding to lessen the amount he’ll have to borrow against his Tesla stake, which doesn’t seem like something he’d do if he were trying to weasel his way out.
There are very limited circumstances in which Musk can cancel the deal and have Twitter instead pay him a $1 billion breakup fee, and those mostly center around the possibility of a superior bid. With the stock market melting down, Twitter’s board is looking smart every day for taking Musk’s $54.20 per share offer; it has little incentive to bust up the deal.
The parties that might take action are Twitter investors, particularly those who sold their shares on the basis of his “on hold” statement. If the stock rebounds, they might argue that Musk caused them to take a loss based on misleading information.
The problem with that is that Musk could argue, as he did in his 2019 “pedo guy” defamation trial, that he’s just an “idiot,” and that any sensible investor would understand that he was bound by his agreement with Twitter and couldn’t actually put the deal on hold. It’s kind of like when he asked Twitter users to vote on whether he should sell some of his Tesla stake when he had actually planned the sale months before. You can’t ignore what Musk says, but you don’t have to believe it either.
Owen Thomas is a senior editor at Protocol overseeing venture capital and financial technology coverage. He was previously business editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and before that editor-in-chief at ReadWrite, a technology news site. You're probably going to remind him that he was managing editor at Valleywag, Gawker Media's Silicon Valley gossip rag. He lives in San Francisco with his husband and Ramona the Love Terrier, whom you should follow on Instagram.
Layoffs are happening in tech, and some will happen on Zoom. How can companies handle them in the least painful way?
As the market turns and more tech companies announce cuts, it’s worth asking whether firing employees en masse over Zoom is ever acceptable.
Knela Tracy woke up to an unsettling email on Tuesday. Carvana, the used car website where she was still in training to work in the underwriting department, was laying off 2,500 employees — but didn’t say who would be affected.
A few hours later, Tracy’s Gmail and Slack accounts were deactivated. One of her co-workers had to follow her on Instagram just to message her about what was going on, she said.
Then came the mass Zoom call. Carvana held more than one to notify workers of the layoffs.
“It was just, like, ‘You’re fired. Here’s your severance package. Have a good day,’” Tracy told Protocol. “There needs to be a little bit more of a human element, to make it feel like they’re actually feeling bad about it.”
A Carvana spokesperson told Protocol earlier this week that the company had “as many conversations as we could in person,” and that fewer than half of the 2,500 layoffs were announced via Zoom. But Tracy still felt “terrible” about being fired on a mass Zoom call, a sentiment that a number of her colleagues echoed on Twitter.
Layoffs are always tough, and the era of remote and hybrid work poses even more challenges when announcing staff cuts. As the market turns and more tech companies announce cuts, it’s worth asking whether firing employees en masse over Zoom — a tactic used by Better.com and TripActions before Carvana — is ever acceptable.
TripActions grabbed headlines in 2020 for its round of layoffs, though company spokesperson Kelly Soderlund pointed out that those cuts came at the beginning of the pandemic, when offices were empty and remote layoffs were uncharted territory.
“Essentially, we were the first and we took the hit in the press on that, which is fine,” Soderlund said. “But the layoffs we were forced to do in 2020 feel very different from the layoffs being enacted by companies now.”
Now, companies have more choices — and more precedent — when it comes to how they handle big cuts.
Betsy Leatherman, global president of Consulting Services for Leadership Circle, an executive coaching and assessment company, said she would avoid mass Zoom layoffs “at all costs.” Instead, Leatherman said managers should notify employees directly.
“It would be an hour and a half or two hours of chaos,” Leatherman said. “But I bet you could do that.”
Even laying off employees in groups of five or 10 is far better than telling dozens or hundreds of them at once, Leatherman said.
A former Better.com executive who spoke to Protocol on the condition of anonymity agreed that mass Zoom layoffs are never the right approach.
“It was barbaric. It was inhumane,” the former exec said of the layoffs at Better. “Being told on a mass video call, and then all of a sudden, it spreads like wildfire — I don’t think that’s the right way to do it.” Better.com did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But not everyone agrees that Zoom layoffs are necessarily a faux pas.
Sandra Sucher, a Harvard Business School professor who wrote “The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It,” said it can be OK to announce a layoff in a mass email or on a large Zoom call. This is an important opportunity for the CEO or other business leader to apologize for the layoff, explain why it’s happening and take responsibility for the decisions that led to it.
When companies go this route, employees should then get to talk directly with their managers, Sucher said.
“That gives people a chance to connect with whomever it is that they know the most — even in a remote work environment — and to hear the news on a personal basis,” Sucher said. “That also gives people a chance to ask questions.”
Carvana didn’t do any of this, according to Tracy.
“If I was able to just talk to someone for at least 10 minutes, just to get a little bit of clarity,” Tracy said. “We weren’t even told why we were being laid off, really. It was ‘restructuring,’ but obviously that just means they hired too many people.”
Hiring conservatively is one lesson that Khaled Hussein learned when he laid off almost half of his employees at Tilt, the fintech company that he sold to Airbnb in 2017. Tilt had been able to raise funding easily — at one point reaching a valuation of $400 million — and its leaders “drank the Kool-Aid” of hiring faster than the company was growing, Hussein said.
This type of over-hiring is a common story of the last couple of years. Many companies are finding that the huge surge of growth during the pandemic era is leaving them without much room to run.
When job cuts can’t be avoided, Hussein — now the co-founder and CEO of recruiting startup Betterleap — said it’s crucial for leaders to make themselves available to their employees.
“In those moments, every CEO wants to hide. It’s painful. And this is when you need to do the complete opposite: You need to be very available,” Hussein said. “You need to have the Q&A, you need to be there, you need to answer all the questions.”
In Carvana’s case, the Zoom chat function was disabled and employees had no way to ask questions, Tracy said.
“We could have at least been opened up to questions at the end,” Tracy said. “It just felt like it was very transactional.”
Even without an open Zoom chat, Carvana could have offered another way for employees to submit questions, such as a Google Form, Hussein said. Blocking communication is “painful,” Hussein said.
“I understand emotionally what they want to do, that they want to avoid the pain,” Hussein said. “But the best way is just to go through it.”
People leaders are key to handling these processes well. The former Better.com executive said the company should have involved HR, or at least some outside help, “at every aspect.” But the company didn’t have much of an HR team, the exec said.
Sucher recommends giving employees advance notice of the layoff rather than firing them on the spot. Some companies she’s studied gave as much as six months or a year of notice, but that’s in a particularly stable business environment, she said.
Giving advance notice isn’t common, but Sucher sees it as “clearly best practice” in that it allows employees to prepare.
“The notion that you owe people advance notice is both humane, respectful and a responsible way to manage,” Sucher said.
Leatherman is more sympathetic to on-the-spot layoffs. Financially driven job cuts should take place as soon as possible, she said, while layoffs for other reasons — shutting down a product line or selling off part of the business, for example — can merit more advance notice because it gives employees time to transition to another group.
But in cases where employees are leaving the company, news of a layoff can hurt morale and de-motivate employees, Leatherman said. Better.com’s performance has reportedly been hurt by the hit to morale that its series of layoffs has caused. In those situations, it likely makes sense to cut ties sooner.
“Even really, really, hardworking, great, driven employees can change,” Leatherman said. “You don’t want to taint the culture before they leave.”
Tracy is getting four weeks of severance pay from Carvana, which she said was fair, though she worries about her colleagues who are supporting families. She’s also worried about when she’ll receive her severance, because Carvana won’t issue it until employees ship back their equipment. Tracy hasn’t received her shipping box yet, she said.
“They’re notorious for not sending the boxes on time, so that money is going to be delayed for me,” Tracy said, noting that she had to delay her start date by a week because Carvana was late sending her equipment. “And financially, I kind of need that money now.”
Late or short severance payments can certainly rub salt in the wound for workers hit by layoffs. One high-profile example took place at Better.com, where laid-off employees have accused the company of underpaying their severance.
If financially feasible, Hussein recommended letting laid-off employees keep their computers, which can help them look for other jobs.
“Especially [in] low-paying jobs, that laptop would mean a lot more to that individual than to the company as an asset,” Hussein said. “It goes back to the underlying principle of being compassionate.”
This story was updated on May 13 to include a statement from TripActions and to clarify the circumstances of the Carvana layoffs.
We’re living in a hybrid work world, and companies have to think about how that affects their climate plans.
How do you calculate work-from-home carbon emissions?
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol, where she writes about management, leadership and workplace issues in tech. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at mma@protocol.com.
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
Since the pandemic began, there’s been a great debate about whether working from home is better for the climate.
Two years later, the answer is essentially no, not really. While carbon emissions did drop precipitously in 2020 as everything shut down, they’ve since rebounded as people return to somewhat normal lives, including going to the office. But it’s likely that some employees will keep working at least a few days from their dining room table indefinitely. Now, companies are taking on the task of figuring out how to make sure hybrid work doesn’t make climate change worse.
Doing so also comes with the headache of how to calculate carbon emissions in a hybrid world.
Laura Tedeschi, who heads the U.K.-based Carbon Trust’s ICT sector’s work, said that virtually no one considered emissions originating from employees outside of the office before the pandemic. While an increasing number of companies have begun to do so, it’s a challenge. Whereas office emissions are easy to calculate with a power bill, “everything that is outside of the company’s direct control becomes hard to measure,” she said.
A year ago, most office workers were spending most of their time at home, and offices could go dark for months at a time. A Carbon Trust study from June 2021 found that remote working resulted in lower emissions in all six of the European countries it analyzed. But the move to hybrid work in light of widespread vaccinations means that things are no longer quite so simple.
“We’ve kind of been in triage mode the last two and a half years,” said Kate Lister, the president of Global Workplace Analytics, a research-based consulting firm focused on flexible and distributed workplace strategies. Businesses haven’t figured out how much office space their employees actually want and need, and as a result many are running their offices as if they are operating at full capacity, keeping the lights on for a handful of people that might be coming in one or two times a week, she explained. Meanwhile, the rest of a company’s employees working at home are also keeping the lights on, running the air conditioner and otherwise doubling up on emissions.
To minimize emissions, Carbon Trust’s Tedeschi said, this can’t remain the status quo. On the office front, she said, “companies need to move to more efficient buildings that are structured in a way to have, for example, certain teams going on certain days, so that they can keep a certain level of utilization across the week.”
This could translate into a 15% to 20% reduction in office space needs, according to Lister. When businesses finally accurately estimate their office usage needs and start consolidating, that’s when the emissions savings of working from home will actually start to pay off: If full-time employees in the U.S. were to work from home half the time, “the greenhouse gas reduction would be equivalent to taking the entire New York State workforce off the road,” according to a 2021 Global Workplace Analytics analysis. (An International Energy Agency report released earlier this year found hybrid work is also a great way to reduce oil dependence.)
Hybrid work will also start to make more sense once companies learn to more efficiently anticipate and respond to energy usage in the office. Some of that technology already exists, including motion-activated sensors and energy-management systems that self-adjust. Some of Lister’s clients are using robots that clean at night based on whether or not a space has been used, and there are companies that are even starting to use AI to better predict and respond to when employees are utilizing office space. A good technology-assisted system could cut energy usage by 15% to 20%, according to Sandeep Ahuja, the co-founder and CEO of cove.tool, an Atlanta-based sustainable building design startup.
For startups that might not have the cash to afford AI technology, there’s also just good old-fashioned coordination. Ahuja’s 75-person team spends two days of the week in the office together and three days working from home. Members coordinate which two days they’ll be in together, which helps both with fostering real collaboration as well as knowing which days the office can go dark, from HVAC to computer monitors.
So far, most industry analysts believe there would be a net reduction in carbon emissions if employees were to work remotely most of the time, but it can be hard to track. And it becomes harder when hybrid schedules enter the equation. Some companies are surveying their employees to see when they drive in and when they don’t, while others are relying on badge data, which Lister said is “Big Brother” territory.
But quantifying the climate benefits from a successful hybrid work model remains elusive, in part because no standard exists across companies. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol — one of the most widespread standards for calculating emissions — has historically devoted a single line in the commuting section of its guidelines suggesting that companies include teleworking.
(Tedeschi said that rumor has it, the organization is working on an update to its methodology that will include work-from-home measurement guidelines in more detail, though the Greenhouse Gas Protocol said it could not confirm as much until after the scoping process for its coming update is complete.)
Ultimately, it’s on companies to create better policies when it comes to climate-conscious hybrid work. Leyla Acaroglu, the founder of the UnSchool of Disruptive Design and the author of a 2020 report on sustainable workplaces, said things remain “very haphazard” at the moment. It’s important that corporate leaders come up with a concrete plan that optimizes for reducing emissions and ensuring a healthy working environment, she said.
For example, driving to work is one of the most carbon-intensive parts of in-office work, but some companies are experimenting with ways to encourage employees to commute smarter.
Ahuja said her company has started reimbursing employees for any travel to the office that isn’t car-based, such as public transportation or even biking. (They use an app that tracks bike mileage to calculate the cost per ride.) She told Protocol that about 50% of employees utilize the benefit.
Companies should also consider proximity to public transit options when choosing office space, Ahuja said. Cove.tool’s office, in the heart of downtown Atlanta, was specifically chosen for its walkability and accessibility to various forms of public transit.
In addition to commuting considerations, individuals are now bearing the cost of energy when working from home, and Acaroglu recommended that companies consider compensating their workers to purchase clean energy for their homes.
Major companies are already buying carbon offsets to cover the emissions from remote work. Stephen Fukuhara, VP of Workplace and Travel at Autodesk, told Protocol that commuting and remote work make up 4% of the software company’s total carbon footprint. To compensate, Autodesk purchases corresponding amounts of renewable energy and carbon offsets, and plans to continue to do so.
Meanwhile, Google also offsets home office emissions via carbon credit purchases, the company told Reuters. Its goal of operating on solely carbon-free energy by 2030, though, does not apply to remote work.
Several tech companies — including Atlassian, Autodesk and Meta — have said that move to remote and hybrid work during the pandemic decreased their overall emissions by at least 30%, as compared with pre-pandemic.
While these reductions — and those that could happen if companies stick the climate landing as they transition to hybrid work — are great, Tedeschi pointed out that the hybrid hubbub could distract from the bigger picture.
“If we look at things from an overall carbon perspective, in the total footprint of the company, usually this category of emissions is not the biggest one,” she said, pointing out that the “employee commuting” category (which is where telework lives) is usually around 1% of a company’s emissions. Manufacturing or data centers represent much bigger shares, and that’s where companies really need to be focusing if they’re serious about reducing emissions.
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol, where she writes about management, leadership and workplace issues in tech. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at mma@protocol.com.
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