How to Make a Green Working Culture
In this month’s Green Corridor I wanted to talk about the emissions of society physically going to work. In working out the carbon footprint of businesses that I have dealings with, there is always a section in Scope 3 emissions for the staff getting to work. For businesses, the added activity of driving across town or flying out to visit clients creates even larger amounts of emissions.
When we as individuals are going to and from work, we experience physically the emitting of greenhouse gasses by our transportation sector. We can see the exhaust coming out of tailpipes from cars and trucks. We can hear the jet engines overhead. We can smell the pollution while walking near our busy roadways (sometimes covering our faces). We can touc
h it when wiping soot from our eyes and skin.
So what if everything was different? What if technology came into the picture that allowed for far less moving about in fossil fuel burning transport? The recent pandemic offered a historic opportunity to see what a dramatic change in workspace cultures could have for our planet.
Researchers at University of Warwick, U.K. were able to take the emission numbers from pre-COVID 2019 (over 17.4 million tons of Green House Gas) and compare them to the emissions when work at home became the norm in 2020. The reduction to emissions generated was tremendous which should come as no surprise. For 2 IT companies in the Warwick study commuter emissions were actually reduced up to 97% during the year of 2020.
But even when it has been proven that productivity and worker output was not impacted by where people worked, there are bosses that want people to get back to the office. Why?
The mind-set challenge for all businesses today is to recognise the following:
1. That commuter and business travel miles are a significant source of planet damaging GHG emissions.
2. There are work life balance advantages to working remotely.
3. Working remotely was proven to be as productive as working in offices thanks to the remote working technology in place today.
4. There are cost savings when office space is reduced as a result of staff working remotely.
Many jobs require people to be at their workplace. In the USA for example it is estimated that 57% of the workforce is considered as “front-line” meaning that they would need to commute a fairly significant amount, with little opportunity to use IT in order to work remotely.
In these situations, interventions for companies that want to reduce commuter and business travel carbon emissions:
1. Continue to keep air business travel to a minimum and track it closely
2. Keep remote working as part of your business culture
3. Stagger work hours to allow that employees are not stuck in traffic congestion. This reduces emissions and un-necessary stress.
4. For sales staff that travel to clients – lease electric transport in place of ICE transport either for your employees directly or for car services you are using
5. Incentiviz
e public transport use amongst staff to reduce commuting emissions
Working in offices for set hours is not an activity that has been around for thousands of years. Only early industrialization made set hours for work a standard for efficient manufacturing. We have an opportunity now to reset what will be the working culture for our post-industrial workforces. Let’s make sure the reduction of emissions is primary to what work culture we make going forward.
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