Section 3 – Homeworking

Organisations are increasingly operating remotely or with elements of working from home (WFH). To reflect this change, we’re asking for an estimate of emissions from WFH to provided a more realistic picture of an organisation’s energy and water consumption. These emissions will not be included in your overall footprint given these emissions are outside your control. They will be summarised in section 7 as part of your ‘additional emissions’.

This section gives you the opportunity to provide information about homeworking as number of FTE staff working from home. The survey then automatically converts this into an estimate for emissions in kgCO2e.

3.1. Please provide the number of FTE staff working from home in the past year.

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

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 2024/25 to get the total kgCO2e value.

This is calculated automatically for you in the survey.