Note: after you've read, don't forget to try our employee survey to measure your own emissions from homeworking!

How to Measure Emissions from Homeworking

Homeworking used to be an afterthought for business carbon footprinting - but since Covid-19, it's become central.

At the height of lockdowns, nearly half of UK employees were working from home​. Even now, with hybrid work becoming the norm, it's become impossible to complete a comprehensive carbon footprinting without taking homeworking into account

What Are Homeworking Emissions?

‍Homeworking emissions are the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the energy we use at home for work. When you work remotely, you’re essentially running a mini-office in your house, which uses energy for heating (or cooling), lighting, and powering your devices.

The main sources are typically:

• Heating your home workspace.
• Electricity for your computer, monitors, and other equipment.
• Any lighting you use during work hours.​
• In some cases, air conditioning or fans are also a factor (for those in hot climates who need cooling)​.

Among these, heating tends to contribute the most to emissions – especially for UK employees, in winter months – because keeping a room warm can consume a lot of energy​. Lighting and electronics usually draw less power by comparison, but they still add up over time. So, in short, homeworking emissions = energy for your home office.

What Are the Main Drivers of Homeworking Emissions?

What makes one person’s homeworking footprint higher or lower than another’s? It comes down to a few key factors.

Heating system and usage

‍How you heat your home workspace is critical. If you have a gas or oil boiler, burning that fuel produces CO₂, whereas an efficient electric heat pump (especially one running on renewable electricity) can have a much lower carbon impact. A biomass heater (like a wood pellet stove) would emit less carbon as well.

Also, consider how much of the home is being heated – heating a whole house for one person vs. just one room makes a big difference. Some remote workers save energy by only heating their office room and turning off radiators in other rooms​. The size of your space, the insulation of your home, and the efficiency of your heating system (e.g. an old furnace vs. a modern one) all influence how much energy it takes to stay warm​.

In a well-insulated small room, you might use very little heating, whereas a drafty large home will need a lot more fuel to reach a comfortable temperature.

Lighting and equipment

For lighting, using energy-efficient bulbs (LEDs) instead of old incandescent or halogen bulbs can drastically cut energy use. LED lights produce the same brightness with a fraction of the power, so your home office lighting might be a minor factor if you’ve swapped to LEDs (and if you’re good about switching lights off when not needed).

Your computer setup, however, can vary in energy use – a high-end desktop tower with multiple monitors draws much more power than a modest laptop. Laptops generally consume far less electricity than desktop PCs – in fact, a laptop can use between one-fifth and one-third as much energy as a typical desktop computer performing the same tasks​. So, a person working on a lightweight laptop with an efficient LED lamp will have a smaller footprint than someone working on a powerful desktop workstation with two big screens and old light bulbs.

Everyday energy habits

‍Personal habits play a huge role in homeworking emissions. Two people with the same equipment and home could have very different carbon footprints depending on how they use them. For example, do you leave your computer and printer on 24/7, or do you shut them down when you’re done? Turning devices off (rather than leaving them in standby) can save a lot of energy – some electronics in standby mode can draw up to 40% of the power they use when active​!

Similarly, do you only heat your office during working hours, or is the heat cranked up all day even when you’re elsewhere? Maybe you prefer wearing a cozy sweater and setting the thermostat a bit lower, whereas someone else might heat their home to summer-like warmth. These choices – big and small – add up. Conscious behaviors like switching off lights and equipment when not in use, heating only when (and where) necessary, and avoiding wasteful habits can significantly reduce an employee’s homeworking emissions footprint.

How Important Are Homeworking Emissions?

The significance of homeworking emissions in a company’s overall carbon footprint depends a lot on the working pattern of its employees.

For a fully remote company (with no central office at all), homeworking emissions are essentially the replacement for office energy usage – which means they could be a substantial part of the company’s Scope 3 emissions. Every employee’s home energy use for work is contributing to the business’s footprint.

On the other hand, for some businesses, such as those in hospitality or manufacturing, it's essential for employees to be on-site. Homeworking emissions would be almost zero (since people aren’t working from home at all in that scenario).

Most businesses today fall somewhere in between – typically the hybrid model, where people work from home some days and in the office on others. In these cases, homeworking emissions are a regular piece of the puzzle. On the days your staff work from home, your company is effectively outsourcing its energy consumption to all those home offices. A hybrid company might have, say, half its workforce at home on any given day, which means those emissions occur consistently. This has become common practice: for instance, in one survey over 90% of employees expressed interest in continuing with hybrid work arrangements in the future​.

So for most businesses now, homeworking emissions are not negligible at all – they’re a growing part of the overall footprint that needs to be accounted for.

How to Measure Your Homeworking Emissions

Measuring homeworking emissions might sound tricky – after all, you’re essentially trying to count energy use in many individual homes. But there are a couple of approaches to tackle this:‍

Use published averages

The quickest method is to apply a standard emissions figure per home-worker, per hour. For example, the UK government’s DEFRA guidelines provide an average emission factor for home working based on typical energy use per hour. It works out to roughly 0.334 kg CO₂e per hour per person working from home​. This factor accounts for an average mix of heating and electricity usage for an employee working at home. Using such averages, a company can estimate emissions by multiplying by the number of remote working hours or employees.

These averages are a handy starting point – they’ll give you a ballpark figure of your team’s homeworking carbon footprint with minimal effort. However, they are broad-brush estimates. Real-world emissions can vary widely; one employee’s home setup could be much cleaner or dirtier than another’s. So while government/EcoAct averages are useful, they might not capture the specifics of your situation.

Survey your employees for actual data‍

A more accurate (and engaging) way to measure homeworking emissions is to go straight to the source – ask your employees!

By running a simple homeworking emissions survey, you can collect information on how each person works at home. For example, you’d ask things like: What type of heating do you use (gas, electric, etc.)? Do you heat the whole home or just your office room? About how many hours a day do you work from home? What kind of computer and how many monitors do you use? Do you often use any high-power devices (like an electric heater or AC)?

With a short questionnaire covering these basics, you can gather the data needed to calculate each person’s emissions pretty accurately. It might sound like a lot of work to survey everyone, but tools (like Seedling’s homeworking emissions survey) make it pretty painless​.

By surveying your staff, you get tailored results based on actual behaviors rather than assumptions. This not only improves accuracy, but also gets your employees thinking about their own energy use, which can be a great engagement opportunity. Bottom line: if you want the best insight into your homeworking footprint, go beyond the averages and collect some real data from your people.

How to Reduce Homeworking Emissions

Measuring your homeworking emissions is step one. Step two is doing something about them! The challenge (and beauty) of homeworking emissions is that they’re influenced by individual behavior – which means employees can play a big role in reducing them. With the right support and awareness, home workers can adopt habits and make changes to shrink their own carbon footprint. Here are some practical tips (many of these are from Seedling’s Sustainable Homeworking Policy guidelines) to help reduce homeworking emissions through employee engagement.

Heating

‍Encourage employees to heat their workspace efficiently. This means, if possible, only heat the room they’re working in rather than the whole house​. They should also keep the thermostat at a reasonable level – around 18–21 °C is a comfortable range that avoids excessive energy use​.

Little things help too: making sure the home office is well-insulated (no draughty windows or gaps under doors) will prevent heat loss. And if they have control over their heating system, regular maintenance (like keeping the boiler or heat pump in good shape and bleeding radiators) ensures it runs efficiently rather than wasting fuel.

Lights

‍Promote good lighting habits. In daytime, make the most of natural light – set up your workspace near a window if you can. When lights are needed, switch to LED bulbs if you haven’t already​. LEDs use dramatically less electricity than old incandescent or even CFL bulbs for the same brightness.

And the simplest habit: turn off the lights when you leave the room or no longer need them​.

‍Equipment and devices‍

Help employees adopt energy-saving practices with their IT equipment. For example, they should switch off computers and monitors when not in use (especially overnight) – don’t just let everything idle in sleep mode constantly. Even setting devices to sleep or low-power mode during shorter breaks is better than leaving them running. (Many devices have power-saving settings – encourage using them​!). It’s also worth adjusting screen brightness down to a comfortable but lower level, as brighter screens draw more power​.

If employees are purchasing their own office tech, advise them to look for energy-efficient models (look for labels like ENERGY STAR) and even consider buying quality second-hand/refurbished equipment instead of new​. A modern laptop or an efficient all-in-one PC will use far less electricity than an old power-hungry desktop. And unplug chargers or devices when they’re fully charged or not needed – even idle adapters can draw a trickle of power.

Clean energy choices

‍One way to cut the carbon impact of home working is to use clean energy to begin with. Employees could switch their home electricity supply to a 100% renewable energy tariff​, if available.

For homeowners, there are also bigger steps to consider: installing solar panels on the roof, for instance, or upgrading an old gas boiler to a low-carbon heating system like an electric heat pump. These are larger investments, but programs and grants are often available to help (for example, government grants for heat pump installations​ or incentives like tax credits/0% VAT for home solar panels​). While not every employee can do these, it’s good to share the information and encourage those who can to explore it. Over time, as more home workers adopt renewable energy and efficient heating, the overall homeworking emissions will fall.

By implementing these kinds of measures – from simple habit changes to tech upgrades – employees can significantly reduce their homeworking emissions. The key is engagement: make sure your team knows why these actions matter and how to do them. Consider sharing tips (like the ones above, e.g. using our Sustainable Homeworking Policy or training) and celebrating improvements. When employees feel supported to make green choices at home, it benefits the environment and often saves them money on energy bills, a win-win!

Does working from home reduce your carbon footprint?

One big question remains: is working from home actually greener than coming into the office?

We’ve hinted that “it depends,” and indeed the answer isn’t one-size-fits-all. There’s a trade-off between commuting emissions and home energy emissions. If someone has a long, car-based commute, then skipping that commute by working from home can save a lot of carbon. Conversely, if someone lives very close to the office or uses very low-carbon transport, and their home is inefficient to heat, coming into the office might result in lower emissions overall.

Let’s consider a couple of scenarios. Imagine an employee who normally drives 30 miles (about 50 km) round-trip to work each day in a petrol car – by working from home, they avoid all those transportation emissions. In this case, it’s quite likely that the emissions from a bit of home heating and electricity are less than what would’ve been emitted from the car, so working from home is greener for that person.

Now take another employee who usually takes a 15-minute walk or a bike ride to an office, and that office is a well-optimized building with efficient heating and cooling. If that person instead works from a poorly insulated house and turns the heating on just for themselves, they might end up causing more emissions at home than if they had just gone into the office (since their commute was negligible, and it's more efficient to power a single office for everyone than multiple homes).

So, does homeworking save emissions? Sometimes yes, sometimes no – it depends on the context. For many, especially those with long car commutes, remote work can indeed reduce overall emissions. For others, especially those with green commutes or energy-intensive homes, working at the office might be better.

This is why it’s so valuable to actually measure and analyze your specific situation. By surveying your team’s home setups and commutes (as mentioned earlier), you can determine whether remote work is helping or hindering. The answer may well be employee-dependent – perhaps homeworking is beneficial for certain staff but not for others! Armed with that knowledge, you can make informed decisions.

Ready to Get Started?

Now that you understand why homeworking emissions matter and how to measure them, it’s time to take action. Managing these emissions doesn’t have to be daunting – in fact, it can be an opportunity to engage your team and boost your sustainability efforts.

If you haven’t already, consider using Seedling’s employee survey to survey your team and start measuring your homeworking emissions today.