onsite work – the antiquated work model destroying our health and planet

Table of Contents

When a job can be done remotely, mandatory attendance is a decision to waste resources and other people’s lives.

September 23, 2026

At 7:10 in the morning, a software engineer sits in traffic with a laptop on the passenger seat. Their code is in a shared repository. Their first meeting is on video. One teammate is in London; another is in India. The system they support runs in data centers the engineer will never visit.

They are driving to an office anyway.

Somewhere, an executive calls this collaboration. The engineer calls it forty-five minutes they will never get back. The person living beside the road receives another stretch of rush-hour traffic. The atmosphere receives another vehicle’s exhaust. By the time the engineer reaches their desk and opens the same laptop, the organization has spent all of those resources without improving the work.

This is the question every leader defending a mandatory five-day office week should have to answer: What did the trip accomplish?

When physical presence is necessary to perform a task, the answer can be straightforward. Patients need care. Equipment needs repair. Customers sometimes need someone in the room. But if an employee can do the job effectively from home, ordering them to commute every day is a choice to impose costs on that employee and everyone affected by the journey. Calling it “our culture” does not make those costs disappear.

The pollution does not stop at the parking lot

Transportation accounts for about 28% of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That figure includes all forms of transportation, far more than office commuting. It establishes why travel policy is an environmental decision. A company cannot claim to take emissions seriously while treating thousands of avoidable car trips as too ordinary to count.

A Cornell University and Microsoft study modeled work-related travel, office energy, home energy, and other behavior. It found that fully remote workers could have a 54% smaller work-related carbon footprint than comparable on-site workers. Hybrid employees working from home two to four days a week had modeled reductions of 11% to 29%. One remote day yielded a much smaller reduction, about 2%. The results vary by commute, household, and employer. They are substantial enough to demand an answer from any leader insisting on five office days for remote-capable work.

Instead, employees are often offered slogans. They are told that sitting near one another creates energy, that attendance shows commitment, or that the office feels better when it is full. None of those claims calculates the fuel consumed to fill it. None explains why a worker must cross a city to speak to a teammate on a screen.

A busy parking lot is evidence that people arrived. It is not evidence that they needed to.

Someone else breathes the exhaust

An employer may see commuting as a private matter between worker and workplace. The people living along major roads have no such luxury. The EPA reports that people who live, work, or attend school near those roads appear to experience higher incidence or severity of health problems associated with traffic-related air pollution, including respiratory and cardiovascular conditions. (epa.gov⁠)

No credible study can point to one employer’s attendance policy and assign it a particular child’s asthma attack. That is not the claim. The claim is that traffic contributes to pollution, exposure carries health risks, and mandatory commuting adds avoidable journeys to the system. A leader who knows this cannot honestly treat the trip as affecting only the person behind the wheel.

There is risk on the road itself. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated 36,640 traffic deaths in the United States in 2025. That number includes all road travel, and remote work would not prevent all of it. Yet every required commute takes place on roads where crashes remain a serious danger. When a job does not require the journey, leadership should be able to identify the benefit that justifies asking an employee to make it repeatedly.

The health consequences also reach into the worker’s day. A National Bureau of Economic Research study drawing on 27 countries estimated an average of 72 minutes saved per day worked from home in its sample. That is time for sleep, exercise, caregiving, a meal, or simply a less frantic life. The precise saving differs among workers. Its value is no less real because it does not appear on the company’s payroll. (nber.org⁠)

An executive who requires the commute is spending employees’ time. The fact that the company does not pay for those hours may make the policy easier to defend in a budget meeting. It does not make the hours free.

The office is an energy decision, too

Sending people home does not automatically turn off an office building. If a company keeps the same floors heated, cooled, lit, and maintained while employees use more energy at home, it gives up part of the potential environmental benefit. That is a reason to manage space intelligently, not a reason to order people back to fill it.

Cornell’s research found that office configuration affects the carbon benefits of remote and hybrid work. A separate U.S. study estimated that transitioning an office worker to telework was associated, over time, with an average 44% reduction in office space required for that worker. It does not mean a business can cancel 44% of its lease tomorrow. It means long-term decisions about space can make remote work’s environmental savings more substantial.

This is where the return-to-office argument becomes particularly hard to respect. If the real concern is an expensive, half-empty building, requiring employees to commute does not solve the underlying mistake. It transfers the consequences of a real-estate decision to workers, roads, and the environment. A paid-for office is a sunk cost. Burning more fuel to make it look occupied is another cost.

Remote work has environmental limits of its own. Home heating and cooling can increase; some people make additional non-work trips. A small Canadian pilot study found considerable variation among workers, with transportation and home climate control dominating the energy it measured. Employers should account for those effects rather than claim every remote day is carbon-free. They should also stop pretending that the existence of trade-offs justifies five mandatory commutes.

The technology industry has no excuse

The five-day office rule is especially difficult to defend in software development. A developer’s work moves through repositories, testing pipelines, shared documents, and cloud systems. Their colleagues and customers may be scattered across countries. Bringing one developer into one building does not bring the rest of the team there.

A well-run engineering organization makes decisions traceable. It reviews code, tests changes, documents architecture, and gives people reliable ways to ask for help. Those practices matter in an office as well as across oceans. An in-person design session or onboarding visit may be useful. Requiring daily attendance regardless of the task is an expensive substitute for deciding when gathering will help.

For site reliability engineers, the old model is more than wasteful. It misunderstands the job. A production system can fail at midnight. Users may be affected in several regions. The response depends on monitoring, access, an on-call rotation, incident roles, documentation, and a clear handoff. The engineer’s proximity to an office kitchenette has nothing to do with restoring service.

Google’s published site reliability guidance describes the operational value of teams distributed across time zones. It recommends geographically separated on-call coverage where feasible to reduce overnight paging, and describes incident-command handoffs between locations by phone or video. This does not mean SRE teams should never meet. It means that reliability is built around a global service and the people qualified to support it—not around proving everyone can occupy a local office during local business hours. (sre.google⁠, sre.google⁠, sre.google⁠)

Imagine an SRE responding to an incident overnight and then being told to drive in the next morning for “visibility.” That is not a serious reliability strategy. It is a sign that someone has mistaken supervision for operational judgment. A leader responsible for global systems should understand the value of rest, time-zone coverage, and effective handoffs.

Presence is an easy number to measure

Why does the mandate persist? In part because attendance is simple to count. A badge swipe produces a report. A full room makes a manager feel the team is close at hand. Neither tells us whether the software is sound, customers are served, incidents are resolved, or workers intend to stay.

In a randomized trial involving 1,612 employees at a technology company, working from home two days a week improved job satisfaction and reduced quitting without a measured drop in performance. The finding does not prove that every fully remote arrangement succeeds. It does mean leaders cannot simply assert that flexibility ruins productivity and expect the assertion to stand in for evidence. (nature.com⁠)

A serious executive asks what an office day is meant to achieve. If the answer is mentoring, plan the mentoring. If it is a difficult design decision, gather the people who need to make it. If it is customer service that requires presence, staff that work properly. Then measure whether the gathering helped.

“Because I like everyone where I can see them” is a preference. It is a poor basis for imposing years of cumulative travel on a workforce.

Remote work also needs boundaries. The five-day workweek and the five-day office week are different issues. Removing the commute should not turn into an expectation that employees answer messages at every hour. The World Health Organization and International Labour Organization have linked working 55 hours or more per week with increased risks of stroke and ischemic heart disease compared with standard hours. Those findings concern overwork, not office attendance. Employers who embrace remote work must protect rest as well as flexibility. (who.int⁠)

Accountability begins when the costs are visible

The case for remote work is strongest when it is honest. Some jobs require on-site work. Some workers prefer an office. Some meetings are better face to face. Some remote arrangements increase home energy use or make collaboration harder when managed poorly. None of those facts supports a universal five-day mandate for jobs that can be done effectively elsewhere.

The mandate has a chain of costs. The executive issues a rule. The employee pays for the trip with time and money. Roads take the traffic. Nearby residents share its pollution. The organization continues operating space it may not need. Carbon emissions accumulate. No one executive creates the entire problem, but every executive who imposes an avoidable commute contributes to it.

That should be uncomfortable. A leader who demands people make those trips ought to feel the weight of explaining why. “Culture” should be supported by something more specific than an occupied chair. “Productivity” should be measured in results. “Collaboration” should mean people solving problems together, including the teammates who are already working in other time zones.

Reducing unnecessary office travel also respects workers whose jobs must be done in person. Nurses, tradespeople, service workers, and technicians still need usable roads and clean air. Asking remote-capable employees to stay off the road when their work permits it can make travel less burdensome for those who have no choice.

The old five-day office model should no longer be the default. Let people gather when gathering serves the work. Give them an effective place to work when they want or need one. Judge them by what they contribute. For software developers and site reliability engineers working across global systems, build schedules around the service, the team, and the human beings keeping both running.

The next time someone proposes mandatory daily attendance for a remote-capable team, ask them to describe the first hour of the day. Employees will leave their homes, join the traffic, spend their money, and pass through the doors. Then many will open a laptop and connect to people who were never in that building.

If leadership cannot explain what that journey made possible, it should stop demanding that everyone else pay for it.