4 Ways to Reduce Office Carbon Footprint by Understanding Workplace Occupancy
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Reducing office carbon footprint might seem like yet another spanner thrown into the works as hybrid work policies and return-to-office mandates surge ahead.
Large businesses in the EU and the UK are now legally required to report on their environmental and climate impact, with talk of similar regulations underway in the US.
In this context, balancing the environmental costs of having more employees in the office with achieving targets like net zero carbon status by 2050 can seem like a difficult one to strike.
39% of global carbon emissions come from real estate. And while 11% of these emissions are from building materials, the other 28% are a result of operating the buildings themselves.
Moving your offices into greener real estate is easier said than done, especially in cities like London, where real estate with sustainability ratings is now 26% pricier than everything else.
What’s needed is a way to reduce office carbon footprint that’s less drastic than moving into an expensive new office next month, but more impactful than putting recycling bins in the kitchen.
As the adage we all know and love goes, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why mandating companies to measure and report on their workplace carbon footprints creates a pathway to reducing them.
Similarly, measuring and quantifying the ways people occupy the office creates a pathway to reducing your workplace’s carbon footprint. That’s because monitoring occupancy identifies the most impactful areas to cut your workplace’s carbon footprint every day.
Here are four ways to reduce office carbon footprint across your real estate portfolio by understanding workplace occupancy.
1) Identify underused workspaces and cut energy use
Throttling back energy use in the workplace has to be carefully balanced with the impact it may have on employees. That’s why underused workspaces are prime targets for reducing workplace carbon emissions. Change can be made immediately, with little to no impact on employees if hardly anyone is occupying the space to begin with.
Keeping tabs on space utilization rates across the entire real estate portfolio in real time is the best place to start. From there, identify where utilization rates are low. This could be happening in certain areas only on specific days (looking at you, Fridays) or consistently across the board.
These are areas where you can cut back on use of heating, cooling and lighting.
For example, if data shows that a floor has less than 5% utilization rate on Fridays, the floor could be closed down on Fridays only. The few brave souls who usually venture onto that floor could be reallocated to other floors by managing occupancy.
When this is replicated across a large corporate real estate portfolio, the reduction in energy use really starts to add up.
5 Space Utilization Metrics for a Better Workplace in 2024
2) Manage occupancy to reduce waste
Managing workplace occupancy is the process of directing employees to the right resources at the right times through tools and policies. Resources include desks, meeting rooms, equipment and even parking spaces.
By managing workplace occupancy, you can shift occupancy patterns and funnel employees out of areas that are increasing carbon footprint – without impacting or sacrificing their employee experience.
Let’s jump back to our example in the previous point about shutting down a floor on Fridays. By using a booking system to manage occupancy, desks and meeting rooms on that floor would not be bookable on Fridays.
Occupancy management can also be used to avoid unintentional waste from employees using workspaces with more equipment and resources than they actually need.
An informal two-person meeting in a 20 person meeting room is a prime example of this. There’s excess use of lighting, heating, cooling and ventilation, the TV is switched on for a full two hours, and the room needs cleaning afterwards. In a scenario like this, a two-person pod or small meeting room would have sufficed.
By managing occupancy with a meeting room booking system, large conference rooms could only be bookable by groups of ten or more, so the resources (and energy required to keep them running) don’t go to waste.
What’s more, everyone gets a better workplace experience since the resources they need can be reserved in advance.
Companies can reduce their office carbon footprint by making sure all employees have exactly what they need to do their best work in the office. Providing any less than this creates a negative employee experience that makes people hate coming into the office. Providing more than what employees actually use creates waste that drives up carbon emissions.
Workplace scheduling can also manage occupancy (and cut use of utilities) by taking advantage of natural lightning. Meeting rooms on the east side of the office could be bookable in the morning, for instance, and meeting rooms on the west side could be bookable in the afternoon.
Read more: How to choose a meeting room booking system
3) Rightsize use of facilities management and services
Facilities management teams are the ones who make it happen when it comes to slashing workplace carbon footprint. That’s because they operate each asset in your corporate real estate portfolio, every day.
Rightsizing facilities management and servicing of different workspaces within the office so they’re proportionate to occupancy levels is a key way FM teams can impact the office’s carbon footprint.
Maintenance, repairs and servicing workspaces can all be very carbon intensive.
Repairs are costlier than maintenance, both for the business and for the environment. Proactive and regular inspection of equipment makes it less likely FM teams will have to make repairs that incur a higher environmental cost.
On the flipside, equipment in heavily occupied areas of the office is more likely to need repair. By increasing inspection frequency in areas with higher utilization rates, FM teams can reduce the risk of equipment needing sudden repairs.
Similarly, by tracking workplace occupancy and overlaying this with floor plans, you can visualize which areas your janitorial team needs to pay the most attention to and which areas they can service less frequently.
The same is also true for other services like restocking vending machines and catering. By looking at occupancy patterns and trends over time, you can predict how many employees will turn up and want food or snacks and order the correct amount.
That means less spend on catering and vending, less food waste and a reduced carbon footprint.
Read more: Sustainable Facilities Management: The Vital Role FMs Can Play
4) Use predicted occupancy rate to make real estate decisions that lower carbon footprint
Predicted occupancy is a data-driven prediction of how workspace utilization rates will increase, decrease or stay the same, based on past and present patterns and trends.
Measuring predicted occupancy rates for each asset in your corporate real estate portfolio is the basis for making sure any new buildings, floors and zones aren’t acquired unless they’ll actually be used.
Leasing a new floor for a growing workforce, renting out a new building and especially constructing one from scratch all come with risks of a higher carbon footprint that will need to be mitigated. If employees aren’t occupying newly acquired spaces, the impact on carbon footprint and the financial cost for the business are effectively sunk costs.
The same is true of deciding to let go of real estate. What might seem like a cost-effective decision could end up increasing carbon footprint if the environmental cost of office space skyrockets as a result of overcrowding.
Measuring predicted occupancy reduces workplace carbon emissions because it backs up future real estate decisions. On a broader scale, it makes sure the business will actually get ROI out of the real estate portfolio.
Predicted occupancy can also inform decisions to repurpose office space or change functionality. Knowing this in advance means changes can be made in ways that reduce the impact on the environment – for example, not overbuying on office furniture.
Read more: How to Get Your Corporate Real Estate Resize Right
Hubstar helps you reduce your office carbon footprint by understanding workplace occupancy.
Hubstar’s space utilization software helps CRE leaders monitor occupancy and reduce waste from underused spaces.
