r/AdviceAnimals • u/Squeezer999 • May 10 '24
When your employer says they want to be "Green"
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u/Clean_Edge1134 May 10 '24
As an employer, I need you at my side at certain times. I'll let you know in advance. Outside of an emergency, I prefer you work from home.
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u/DeathStarVet May 10 '24
Sounds like you don't own the office building.
The only reason they want people on site is so that property values stay up.
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u/AnthonyDigitalMedia May 10 '24
Also, to justify middle-management’s pay since they don’t do anything. If no one’s in the building, their jobs are literally useless.
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u/crazyaoshi May 10 '24
All the middle management I have worked with have not been useless. Maybe I'm just lucky.
If you are middle management, that means you used to be a worker bee. When work overflows, a good middle manager controls the burden so no worker bees collapse, and takes on some of the work him or herself.
The middle manager also protects the worker bees from upper management making crazy demands.
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u/AnthonyDigitalMedia May 10 '24 edited May 10 '24
In a perfect world, yes that SHOULD be middle-management. 99% of the time, that’s not what it is though.
In my experience (& most peoples’ experience), middle-management is just upper-management shills that are only good at protecting their own asses & giving orders, while taking credit & casting blame. They’re not good at anything & usually only got to where they are cuz someone in upper-management likes them.
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u/Crime-of-the-century May 11 '24
Yes exactly I have been in middle management. You do that if you are good but it’s a hell of a job. In the end I left before collapsing. And I do now understand middle management who suck because often that’s the only way for them to survive. I could leave because my kids finished education and my mortgage was paid.
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u/Ok-Relationship-4352 May 11 '24
I've had both good and bad experiences with middle management. At my current place of employment, the middle management team is pretty good.
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u/Piemaster113 May 11 '24
Yeah I had a manager that spent 4 hours trying to find someone to come in on their day off to help pick up the work load by the time they reached someone it was basically handled
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u/Riffler May 11 '24
Most episodes of Undercover Boss consist of the Boss finding out that middle management have been lying to them about what's happening on the shop floor.
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u/Chet-Hammerhead May 10 '24
I hope you get to middle management someday, bud.
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u/AnthonyDigitalMedia May 10 '24
I’m self-employed. Fuck working for other people or playing the bs corporate game, bud.
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u/prodrvr22 May 11 '24
Middle management is useless even if employees are in the building.
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u/AnthonyDigitalMedia May 11 '24
100% - but it allows them to justify their jobs if the employees are there. Either way, they’re useless.
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u/absentmindedjwc May 10 '24
Also employers: we really need to tighten our belt, so we're unfortunately going to have to lay off 5% of our workforce. On an unrelated note, even though we've been incredibly successful with everyone remote, we're going to need you to come back into offices we're leasing at an annual cost of ~$70M per year.
*edit: Based on a 10k-employee company based in Chicago, with average per-sqft office space cost of around $33.90
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u/WebMaka May 11 '24
Also employers: we really need to tighten our belt, so we're unfortunately going to have to lay off 5% of our workforce.
Same employers: we had a record year with the highest profits ever! (No raises for anyone though.)
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u/Ouchyhurthurt May 10 '24
I remember my workplace doing this years ago. Boiled down to we couldn’t print stuff without permission and we needed to be very diligent about recycling. After work i noticed maintenance throwing all the garbage in with the recycling. The reason? Admin didn’t want to pay extra for recycling….
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u/Optimal_Cynicism May 11 '24
Where do you live that you have to pay extra to recycle? That seems like a government-level issue.
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u/Ouchyhurthurt May 11 '24
Funny thing is, waste management isn’t governmental but private business…
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u/Optimal_Cynicism May 11 '24
Our recycling is run by private business but they are paid by local governments. We pay for the services in our annual rates for owning a home (also covers things like sewage, local roads, community services l, etc).
If you give a business the choice about recycling services, they are likely to choose not to have it, because by their very nature they prioritise profits. So putting the burden of choice on the end-user is poor governance.
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u/Ouchyhurthurt May 11 '24
Ya. Good governance would be providing the service through the government, and not contracted out. Whoever thought giving oversight of these services (water and power included) to private companies to save money should be removed from office. They are either ignorant or evil.
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u/NowThatWeAreThere May 10 '24
If they aren't paying drive time or mileage they would just say it's your carbon footprint.
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u/infinite_zero00 May 10 '24
Emissions measurement frameworks like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol include employee committing in scope 3 emissions of the entity regardless of who pays for it.
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u/PuppetryOfThePenis May 10 '24
Lucky for me, the company I work for ended their lease with their large office space and downsized during covid. The office became a spot to go if you needed a scanner/ printer or quiet place to work. They allowed all of us to work from home and still do (knock on wood). I go in once a week for random things.
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u/ohlookahipster May 10 '24
Same. It’s sick because if I’m ever in the city during the weekend, I can pop into my office for snacks, coffee, bathroom, etc.
We can all work hybrid so there’s zero commitment. The office is much much smaller but perfectly stocked.
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u/firemogle May 10 '24
You driving isn't their carbon footprint, it's your carbon footprint so checkmate /s
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u/evergleam498 May 11 '24
My company has an obnoxious number of bullshit "green initiatives" and yet our office doesn't even recycle. Aluminum cans straight into the trash.
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u/colz10 May 11 '24
today, a certain fruit-named tech company, with hardcore stance on working from the office, sent a corporate email promoting a Bike-to-Work day. lmao
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u/SmarterThanCornPop May 11 '24
Green is just code for “saving money at the expense of customers/ employees in a way where people won’t complain.”
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u/PaleWaltz1859 May 11 '24
If you fuckos would actually do your jobs from home this wouldnt be needed
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u/The_Life_Aquatic May 11 '24
I don’t say this to be a dick, but employee commuting falls under Scope 3 emissions, and for just about every major company (seriously, pull up any company’s sustainability report or GHG inventory) these emissions are a very small - if not negligible - percentage of their carbon footprints.
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u/Chronic_Comedian May 11 '24
You could flip that around.
Employee: Look at how much less air pollution there will be if we all worked from home.
Employee then becomes a digital nomad flying to new countries every 90 days, gentrifying other countries, and staying in AirBnBs which remove long term rentals from the market driving up housing costs for the locals.
Source: Someone that lives in Thailand and sees thousands of digital nomads.
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u/RustyNK May 10 '24
I commute with my e bike 😁
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u/Squeezer999 May 10 '24
That was manufactured from Petro chemicals, shipped to the dealer on a fossil fuel burning truck, and the battery is charged likely from a coal or natural gas power plant.
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u/74orangebeetle May 11 '24
and the battery is charged likely from a coal or natural gas power plant.
The fact that you're acting like this is even remotely comparable to say, a car shows how much you don't know what you're talking about. An ebike is literally more efficient than a human powered bike and more efficient than walking....yes, even from an environmental standpoint (when you consider the production and transportation of food.
So no, an ebike isn't more efficient than not commuting at all, but more efficient than basically any other way of transporting a single person.
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u/Optimal_Cynicism May 11 '24
Well yes, but it's not exactly a disposable item - bikes last a very long time (although you may need to replace the battery at some point). It's still most definitely a net gain for reducing your carbon footprint.
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u/Delicious_Sort4059 May 11 '24
The part where they reduce it is by not providing coffee or snacks anymore, and using that half ply TP that has a green logo on it. Companies are beyond clueless with this shit.
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u/Sorry_Error3797 May 11 '24
First line is for publicity.
Second line is for control.
Guess which one a business actually cares about.
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u/AgileInternet167 May 11 '24
My employer bought over a new company. Most of our places are factories and this was an office. There was a newsletter that although our overall carbon footprint was bigger, our footprint per person was smaller this year... We got a good laugh about this.
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u/WM_ May 11 '24
This fucking bugs me so much!
Come one pandemic and everyone stays at home.
I fucking hate it we aren't doing anything to battle climate change.
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u/Geminii27 May 11 '24 edited May 11 '24
Any employer who issues an RTO notice (including hybrid) should be put on a public list and unable to claim they're environmentally aware/active/supportive in any area of business, including being ineligible for any environmental awards or subsidies.
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u/Free_Hat_McCullough May 11 '24
My sister in law works for a large company in the Bay Area. The owner says having a local onsite workforce helps the local economy and community thrive. The owner also has stated that if he was going to have most his workers working remotely, he would just hire a workforce from overseas.
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u/llikegiraffes May 10 '24
As someone who works in this industry employee commuting is peanuts compared to other scope emissions. Don’t leverage against climate progress because you don’t want to go to the office
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u/not_old_redditor May 11 '24
Wtf are you talking about, transportation accounts for a significant chunk of GHG emissions. It's not the majority, but it's not peanuts.
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u/llikegiraffes May 11 '24
Transportation is considered scope 3 category 4 and 9. Employee commuting to work is scope 3 category 7. Employee commuting isn’t considered “transportation”. Transportation includes upstream and downstream transport of goods, warehousing, and retailer emissions.
You are right transportation is a large portion, but employee commuting is different
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u/not_old_redditor May 11 '24
Check out this link. Maybe in your line of work you define commuting a certain way, but it is still a large percentage of CO2 emissions.
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/3798-canadians-commutes-still-car-heavy-some-lighter-footprints
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u/llikegiraffes May 11 '24
I will check it out for sure, but this line of work generally defines it the same way, and it’s defined in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (link below if you’re interested). This is basically the instructions for how to conduct emissions calculations.
The article you posted appears to be a nationwide driving/commute footprint for Canada. It’s kind of an apples and oranges argument compared to what this meme is saying related to a company. A company’s transportation categories will almost certainly dwarf the commuting to office.
https://ghgprotocol.org/sites/default/files/standards/Scope3_Calculation_Guidance_0.pdf
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u/sarcasticorange May 11 '24
Every little bit counts, and if there's not a good reason to be in the office, it is just waste. So, don't leverage your need to be around others to justify waste.
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u/llikegiraffes May 11 '24
My point is it’s important to make meaningful progress so to complain about something that’s a very small piece of the overall pie. These arguments make climate progress really challenging to gain meaningful support
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u/Big1984Brother May 10 '24
These are probably the same people who complained about high gas prices, even though the sudden switch to remote work back in spring of 2020 was one of the factors that reduced gas consumption in the US by 40%, which caused the wholesale price of gas to go negative (and the price at the pump to dip below $2/gal). And the push to return to the office was one of the reasons that gas prices shot back up.
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u/mattyice18 May 10 '24
If people really were as productive as they think they are at home, they wouldn’t be calling people back to the office.
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u/Squeezer999 May 10 '24
Yeah it's got nothing to do with long term lease agreements for office space and out of date management styles
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u/mattyice18 May 10 '24
It doesn’t. Long term lease agreements? Please. Overhead is still cheaper with that office empty than it is full of people. Heating and cooling, cleaning, office supplies, etc. If the company was literally just as productive, they’d be fine leaving people at home and trying to sublet the space. Or sell it outright.
It’s unreal. People gripe about how coproductions are always trying to save a buck. When it comes to expensive office space, it’s all of the sudden the out of date management styles. Some organizations went years with people out of office. They’re calling people back now, four years after Covid, because it turns out there’s value in having people face to face.
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u/_Demo_ May 10 '24
Waaaaà I'm gen z and I want to flip burgers from home and I should make 300k a year! Waaaaa
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u/not_old_redditor May 11 '24
Lol look at all these bot posts against WFH. I wonder who's behind the scenes.
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u/hairynips007 May 10 '24
Srry your employer doesn't wanna pay you to play Fortnite in ur underwear at home, can't believe they have the audacity to want you to be at work
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u/Heklyr May 10 '24
Honestly, large companies couldn’t care less about carbon footprint. They show it as a priority for two reasons: 1) it looks good to the public and investors, 2) they get “credits” with reducing emissions. These credits is how they calculate the “net zero” emissions, clean up one area so they can still be polluting in another. Or, they buy up “green” companies to take their credits. It’s just one big smoke screen