Home front: Covid's footprint on the workplace

Fraser Millar says he has had a huge improvement in his quality of life.

The environment analyst used to commute for an hour each way between his Glasgow home and his Stirling workplace.

Since last year, his office has been off the hallway of his home in Robroyston.

He's saving up to £70 a week in petrol and other motoring expenses, and gave up his car when the lease ended.

Told by his employer that he can now be permanently based at home, it gave him the flexibility to get a dog, "like everyone else in Scotland".

Without the commute, the former Aberdeen police officer has energy in the evening which he used to lack, so he looks forward to being able to get out and socialise.

At his desk, Fraser has been at work on an audit of carbon emissions from the sudden shift last year to working from home. This was limited to his employer, Zero Waste Scotland, the public sector agency that advises firms on reducing their environmental impact.

Its 170 staff were surveyed for their commuting and home arrangements - perhaps more intrusively than other employers might permit.

Out went the impact of commuting, and reduced heating costs at the Stirling office.

In came the additional cost of home heating and lighting. And with many employers providing new IT equipment, there was the "embedded" carbon involved in its manufacture.

We took the two scenarios and ran the numbers, says Fraser, and found that a day worked at home by a Zero Waste Scotland employee generated an average 2.3kg of carbon dioxide or equivalent.

A day spent at the office, and with corporate travel to meetings, came to an average of 8kg.

That's the average over a year, he adds.

In winter, the cost of home heating goes up, so the two options are closer.

But in summer, without much heating on, the gap is much wider. And with offices often using air conditioning, when homes do not, it widens further.

Zero Waste Scotland advises other firms on their own audits, with modelling that is still being developed. There are many moving parts, depending on the type of business.

And that is what has surprised Dave Reay, professor of carbon management and education, and director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute.

He is nearing the end of the daunting task of modelling the Scottish economy for this working-from-home audit, and has been surprised at the complexity of people's lives.

"We know the types of housing in Scotland, how far, on average, people are from the main work places, and we know about access to public transport," he says.

But the professor adds that "you have to talk to people" about their experience of home-working and what employers have been doing.

For example, have they been keeping the office heating on, what are their plans for the future and are they going to go back to the norm or their old ways, of commuting? Or are they going to do something different?

Surveying people's behaviour and carbon footprint has thrown up a lot of additional considerations.

If the whole house is heated and not just a room, that can multiply the carbon impact by five or so, making the commute less of a problem.

What if there was going to be someone in another part of the house anyway, requiring heating and lighting that cannot be attributed to an employer?

And if the commute is on foot, bike or public transport, that's a very different calculation to the car.

As cars become battery-powered, drawing from renewable energy, the commute becomes less of a concern, while home heating has been more resistant to change.

That, too, can shift the balance back to the office.

There's also the secondary effect: if you're saving money by not commuting, what do you do with that saved money? Save up to take a high-octane aircraft to your holiday destination?

Prof Reay is not yet saying what his results look like, but he sounds much more equivocal than the reckoning at Zero Waste Scotland.

The question of what employers are going to do about this is slowly becoming clearer.

A few business leaders have started public discussions about a hybrid model of working some days in the office and some days at home.

Hardly any of the 50 big employers contacted by the BBC expect to return to office work as normal. Forty-three said they expect to go hybrid.

Some talk about an additional element of encouraging staff to go into smaller hub offices near their homes, at least as an option if they lack space at home.

Some are talking about the consequent fall in demand for space.

A survey of more than 500 Scottish firms by the Fraser of Allander economic institute, with the Addleshaw Goddard law firm, found 27% expected to reduce their office footprint.

They put cabled connectivity as by far their highest priority, above the location of the office.

And 41% say their office space will have to become more flexible for collaboration when office workers eventually get together.

Mairi Spowage, director of the Fraser of Allander Institute, observes that the problems of getting Zoom and Teams meetings to work in the past year may be less challenging than future hybrid working, where some people are in a real meeting room, and some are not.

This move to make working from home a permanent feature for some staff is despite a lot of concerns about its impact over the past year.

Nearly half say that home working has had an impact on productivity. This is not what many expected, of workers shirking and being beyond reach.

The ability to monitor workers, down to every keystroke and webpage visited, is assured.

Instead, the concern is that productivity dips where people are not socialising and trying ideas out on each other, the water-cooler chance encounters and informal chats before and after meetings.

Some 61% of firms told the Strathclyde University economists that home working has had an impact on workplace innovation and culture. And isolation is a mental health concern where people are stuck on their own all day.

It's clearly not for everybody, and many jobs need to be near customers or manufacturing equipment that cannot be at home.

But for many people and firms, home-working is shaping up to be one of the biggest lasting legacies of Covid-19.