Hybrid work is not great for you but even worse for the planet
26% of people are still working from home while a further 11% are hybrid working
The duplication of stuff
Interviews with 17 UK households, selected for their diverse professional backgrounds, ages, and sizes, uncovered how and why some people went from working at kitchen tables and on sofas, expecting lockdown to last a few weeks, to creating more permanent and higher quality set-ups.
To accommodate this and recreate offices at home, workers bought tech and furnishings which were often transported across the globe. Worldwide sales of laptops and desktops increased by11.2%between April and June 2020, with 72.3 million units shipping. Monitor sales also spiked and webcams weretemporarily sold outacross the UK.Online searchesfor office desks and chairs increased by 438% and 300% respectively in the previous year. Office equipment and furniture purchases peaked during the first lockdown, but demand is likely to remain high.Five times more peoplenow want to work from home compared to 2019.
And making offices at home with new chairs, computers, monitors, desks, and stands has also driven desire for bigger houses.
The demand for bigger homes
Our research revealed how working from home meant more people wanting homes with bigger kitchens, spare rooms, offices, garages, and gardens. Whether it was the embarrassment of your partner’s colleagues spotting you in your yoga shorts or the horror of dashing offscreen to chase after your naked son, lockdown led to a collective reassessment of what one needs from a home. A sense of quiet and privacy tends to be lost when multiple people share a room. And although many offices are in essence co-working spaces, it has proved difficult to work in the same room as another doing different work – especially when making audio or video calls.
Since the first lockdown house sales haveshot up, with June seeing themost sales since records began.
Much of these sales have involved people moving out of cities and into suburbs and the countryside, where homes tend to offermore space. This, sadly, is bad news for sustainability. More domestic space per person canincrease energy consumptionand suburban households typically havehigher carbon footprints. Even people who might have moved to the countryside to work from home more often may ultimately emit more carbon per commute due to less frequent, butlonger distance travel.
Possible responses
The duplication of equipment and the simultaneous need for heating and lighting in offices and homes that arise from workers splitting time across both is a particularly unsustainable arrangement.
While some workplaces allowed employees to take their office setups home during the first lockdown, the difficulty in acquiring a webcam and long wait times for office equipment showed how most failed to adequately redistribute resources or support workers. Businesses that are currentlydownsizing their officescould offer discounts on spare itemslike Hootsuite did. Or, they could reject the hybrid model and encourage home or office working only.
The movement out of cities andsmaller accommodationwas arguably bolstered by the UK government’s stamp duty holiday, too. The decision to temporarily raise the threshold at which this property tax kicked inis creditedwith sparking a frenzy of buying. Housing policies are alsoclimate policies, and the UK government, as a self-proclaimedclimate leaderand host of the 2021 UN climate talks, should be more sensitive to the implications of all policies for climate change.
The hybrid model of working is still emerging, and so it can be made more sustainable. That means appropriate policies to support people moving out of cities and navigating flexible working arrangements.
Article byKatherine Ellsworth-Krebs, Senior Research Associate in Sustainability,Lancaster University;Carolynne Lord, Senior Researcher, Sociology; Research Associate, School of Computing and Communications,Lancaster University, andTorik Holmes, Research Associate, Sustainable Consumption Institute and Sustainable Innovation Hub.,University of Manchester
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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