DO YOU love your home enough to spend all day in it? It's an increasingly relevant question as more employers encourage their staff to give up the idea of travelling to the office and work from where they live instead.
Homeworking, as it is known, is becoming more popular as companies, public-sector organisations and charities work to save money and at the same time freshen up their green business credentials. New legislation also means that anyone with a child u
nder 16 can now request to be considered for flexible working.
Working from home can help the environment in a number of ways. Perhaps the most important one is that it cuts down dramatically on travel, and so on carbon emissions. A recent study by computing giant Sun Microsystems, which employs more than 35,000 people worldwide and encourages flexible working, showed that commuting was responsible for 98 per cent of an average member of staff's carbon footprint.
It also revealed that energy consumption by equipment in its offices was twice that of equipment used at home. The average fuel saving by an employee working from home for two and a half days a week came to more than £1,000 a year.
In the UK, more than 3.4 million people – that's about 12 per cent of the working population – now work from home. This is good for the environment in many ways. Cutting down on commuting and the associated carbon emissions is the obvious one, but there are beneficial secondary effects too.
Because most people travel to work at peak times, commuting can be slow, and consequently higher levels of pollutants are emitted. Reducing the number of vehicles parked in car parks also potentially reduces the amount of land which has to be turned over to asphalt.
Homeworkers often have more scope to make their own purchasing decisions, and generally they don't need the large pieces of business equipment which frequently fill offices – large high-output photocopiers, heavy-duty fax machines, large computer servers and so on.
This means staff tend to get by with much smaller pieces of equipment – or, indeed, manage without them at all.
Home computers are becoming ever more efficient in energy terms, particularly if they are switched off at night – something which can't be done with corporate servers, which have to be kept running on a 24/7 basis. Some workers will also have the option of using laptops, which take up less space, are unlikely to use as many heavy metals and chemicals in their construction, and are even more energy efficient.
Because homeworkers can't reach as quickly and as easily for the company stationery cupboard, they are more inclined to think carefully about what they do use – another saving of the planet's resources. They may even actively seek out green office supplies such as chlorine-free recycled paper, ozone-free correction fluid and soy-based ink cartridges.
Having to buy your own office consumables and claim the money back may also encourage homeworkers to use less – by storing records digitally, for instance, rather than on paper. This is especially the case if you have to liaise with other homeworkers or head office – no longer can you just walk with a piece of paper to someone else's desk. You have to e-mail digital files instead.
So it can be greener working from home, but no-one can automatically assume that doing so will be more environmentally friendly. Avoiding commuting is a big plus – but if homeworkers don't use their heat and light judiciously, they could end up actually producing more than if they were working in an office in the conventional way.
Research carried out by an independent consultancy in 2007 found that the real problem was in winter, when people working alone at home often switched on their central heating all day long. This meant that over the course of a year, their carbon footprint could be almost double that of someone doing their job conventionally in an office.
One expert in the subject, Professor David Banister of Oxford University, says it is important that changes in behaviour accompany the move to homeworking. "This would include providing secure and efficient technology to facilitate collaboration as well as properly managing heating at the employee's end and the reduction of office space and heating costs at the employer's end," he adds.
The use of efficient and cost-effective technology in particular is vital to successful and green homeworking. Ricky Nicol, who is chief executive of the Scottish information and communications technology provider Commsworld, says a good communications infrastructure can cut down hugely on travel costs.
"It means you don't have to travel between offices and homes for meetings – we have three offices in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen and people who work from home. By using videoconferencing, we find that our power costs are lower and, of course, our travel overheads are significantly reduced."
Communication via the internet is now more efficient and cost-effective than dial-up technology used to be, he adds. "With a conventional telecoms network, every time you used it, you incurred an additional cost for every second or minute you were online.
"Today's networks offers real opportunities for homeworkers. We had a situation about a year ago in our own Edinburgh offices where there was a gas leak nearby and the buildings had to be emptied and staff sent home. It didn't cause us any problems as our systems meant they could keep making and receiving calls there."
The full article contains 932 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
