Section 3 – Homeworking

Please work out the total FTE spent working at home and write it in the text box. Where hybrid working happened, we only need to know about the time spent WFH. Other energy and water emissions not from working from home should be included in question 2.2.

As an example:
Organisation A has one full-time staff member who works from home three days a week and another full-time staff member who always works from the office. They have one part-time staff member who works two days a week, one from home, one from the office. In the last three months of the reporting period, they hired three part-time staff to work one day a week from home.

Total FTE = 0.6 + 0 + 0.2 + (0.25 x 3 x 0.2) = 0.95

If you answer 0, the rest of this section will be hidden.

Reason for question

As organisations are increasingly operating remotely or with elements of working from home, it is crucial to capture the impact of this work, potentially allowing us to compare the impacts of home working vs office working.

However, people’s individual home working set-ups and circumstances vary hugely so gathering accurate data around home working consumption has the potential to take a lot of time that could be spent finding more significant emissions reductions elsewhere.

Therefore, we offer the option to just provide a value for the total FTE staff working from home so that we can calculate and estimation of this value for your organisation.

Calculation methodology

We use your FTE value to calculate an estimate for working from home emissions assuming a working area of around 9m2, 230 working days per year and a working day of 7.5 hours for one FTE. These assumptions result in 345 kWhs of electricity, 644 kWh of gas, and 11 m3 of water per year for one FTE.

We multiply these values by your FTE value and then multiply by the UK government emissions factor for each source for 2023/24 to get the total kgCO2e value.

This is calculated automatically for you in the survey.

Supporting resources

Guide to measuring impact on emissions from home working

Options available:

• Our FTE figure for working from home is accurate
• Our FTE figure is an estimate based on regular working patterns
• Our working patterns haven’t been regular so our FTE figure is an estimate to the best of our knowledge

Please select the option that best describes the accuracy of the FTE figure you have provided in question 3.1.

You will see this question if you enter any values in 3.1.

Reason for question

We know that working from home and hybrid working have sometimes evolved in ways that aren’t easy to capture so it is useful for us to understand how accurate this figure is. If it is clear that most organisations aren’t providing accurate information, we could provide further guidance and support in recording this.

If you can provide figures for the energy and water consumption from your organisation’s staff working from home (their electricity, gas, water etc. consumption as a result of them working at home), please select ‘Yes’. Otherwise, select ‘No’.

You will not see this question if your answer to 1.6 is less than 5.

If you select ‘Yes’ in this question, you will be shown 3.2a.

Reason for question

It is likely that consumption data will be more accurate than our estimates so we would like to give you the opportunity to provide this if you can.

Provide the figures for each energy/water source as appropriate in the text boxes below. Be sure to double check the units for each source. If you are estimating the figures provided, please only provide these figures if they are more accurate than the methodology described in 3.1. Please describe your methodology in 3.3.

The sources we ask for are:

• WFH – Electricity consumption in kWh
• WFH – Gas consumption in kWh
• WFH – Water in m3
• WFH – Biomass in kWh
• WFH – LPG in litres
• WFH – Domestic wood burning stove in kWh

You will see this question if you select ‘Yes’ in 3.2.

Reason for question

It is likely that consumption data will be more accurate than our estimates so we would like to give you the opportunity to provide this if you can.

Give a brief explanation of why you are unable to provide a figure for FTE homeworking and what actions you are taking to ensure you are able to report this next year.

This is a mandatory question for all organisations that it is shown to.

You will see this question if you have not entered any values in 3.1 or 3.2a.

Reason for question

We encourage all organisations to report their FTE homeworking data, even if it is an estimate. Therefore, if an organisation is unable to provide this information, we would like to understand what we can do to enable them to provide this data next year.

If you have anything else you wish to mention, please write it in the text box.

Reason for question

This gives you space to explain any other figures provided above or to add any additional information you think is required.