• A study published this week reveals that there are small gains to be made as regards climate change mitigation practices when looking at work-from-home policies.
• WFH policies can reduce the carbon emissions from traffic but these can be offset by an employee’s energy use at home.
• The fact of the matter is that businesses need to gauge whether employees working from home would offset their overall emissions but there are easier ways to reach that point.

When COVID-19 forced us to stay at home and avoid other people a revolution in work took place. All of a sudden companies had to institute work from home (WFH) policies and make provisions to allow employees to keep the corporate wheels turning.

However, no sooner than governments had dropped mask mandates and declared COVID-19 was no longer as big of a threat as it was at the dawn of 2020, were companies backtracking on those WFH provisions. While this was bad for employees, it may also have been bad for the environment, at least in the US.

This is according to the paper “Climate mitigation potentials of teleworking are sensitive to changes in lifestyle and workplace rather than ICT usage” published in PNAS this week. The paper was penned by seven authors.

We should disclose that six of those authors work at Microsoft which creates digital solutions that facilitate WFH and collaboration so the company has an interest in more folks working from home and using the likes of Microsoft Teams.

With that having been said, the findings are very interesting.

Let’s start with hybrid work where employers require an employee to be in the office a few times a week. For employees who work from home one day a week, the authors found that the carbon footprint of these individuals was only reduced by two percent. This is because despite the fact the employee isn’t going into the office they are still likely to travel somewhere and their energy use at home offsets the energy saved by the office.

“Specifically, we observe substantially more total travel miles for remote workers to drop off/pick up friends, conduct recreational activities, visit healthcare facilities, visit friends/relatives, and exercise. While the mean trip distance was 37% lower for remote workers, their average number of trips was about 1.6 times higher,” the authors write.

The paper also reports that the more an employee works from home, the more their greenhouse gas emissions would increase, and if the office were to decarbonise its energy needs, that could make remote work more carbon intensive, erasing the gains made at the office.

While WFH can help to reduce carbon emissions in traffic these gains are often offset in other ways such as a remote worker needing to fly in from their home or travelling a long distance to attend a meeting.

“While remote work shows potential in reducing carbon footprint, careful consideration of commuting patterns, building energy consumption, vehicle ownership, and non-commute-related travel is essential to fully realize its environmental benefits,” the authors conclude.

Frankly speaking then, most companies will likely focus their climate change mitigation efforts elsewhere rather than trying to balance an employee’s energy consumption against its own measures.

With that having been said, if properly implemented, remote work may unlock some benefits for employers looking to be more environmentally conscious, those employers need to a lot of work to make that a reality though and the fact of the matter is that there are easier ways to offset carbon emissions.

[Image – Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash]