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over the last year there has been a lot of conversation a lot of discussion and research that's gone into understanding the environmental impact the change of that impact that has come about from our change of behavior when it comes to commuting to and from offices versus working from home this is a very complicated equation to solve because there are many factors so when i found ian baiser from the university of zurich was actually studying a phd in conducting a phd in this particular area i thought i had to speak with him so jan is a doctor at zurich university he's currently residing in stockholm sweden and he's a researcher and lecturer in digital technologies and the impact on the environment so i asked jan to join me and briefly explain what he does and the research that he has recently conducted i'm working actually at the university of zurich in a research group called informatics and sustainability research in which we try to understand what impacts digital technologies have specifically on the environment and how it can be utilized in order to create benefits for the environment and in my case i specifically looked at telecommuting or working from home or other places which are not your employer's office um actually already before the pandemic but of course increased its significance tremendously during the pandemic and whether telecommuting as an application of digital technologies for example of widow conferencing and cloud services actually contributes to a reduction of environmental impact specifically energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and what is always assumed that it does it's always assumed that it does because our commuting um specifically when it's done with motorized transport causes a lot of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions specifically if you sit alone in a car every day and drive to work and back so this can potentially be saved if you work from home however there are also other impacts which you need to consider for example i might increase my energy consumption at home i might have more time or more money for other activities because i saved this time you i usually spend on commuting every day and depending on what i do with this time which i saved i can cause other environmental impacts for example if i decide to sleep a little bit longer every morning i probably don't have the biggest impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions unless i like to sleep at 40 or 50 degrees celsius and my heating system works with oil but usually that's that's not the problem but if i for example use to save time to to and spend it on additional leisure trip or private trip in the evening to visit a frame to visit a friend which i which i do by car um then it might cause additional impacts and well we were trying to understand how um well what's the bottom line so it's an incredibly difficult thing to understand isn't it because like you said there's so many different ways that people could change their behavior there's so many different variables in you know one person's living arrangement let's talk about working from home and you know maybe they don't always work from home maybe they work from a catholic or somewhere else how did you how did you kind of baseline that how because in order to model it and understand you've got to kind of come up with some kind of baseline haven't you yeah um what we did in in one case which is a project going on in in stockholm at kth stockholm where a co-working living lab was actually set up in the south of stockholm which was kind of an office space which allowed people who live close by to this office space to work from the space on several days per week instead of traveling to the more distant employers office and what we did there is we we gathered data on their common commuting behavior behavior when people travel to their employer's office did they go by public transport they drive by car did they drive by bike and so on and compared it with their use of transport modes when they worked either from home or from the co-working space which is which was close to their home so we first established the baseline the baseline is basically what do i do when i go to my employer's office and then we compare it with what people do when they work from home or from an office closer to their home and this was i think normalized by understanding it from the point of how people decide and manage their time was that correct exactly you can either say you look at the at the transport components only how far do people travel every day and which transfers most do they use but we argue that um not only the transport impacts of working from home or closer to home are relevant but also all the other activities i do during an average 24 hours days because not only transport but also leisure activities can cause environmental impacts or just doing nothing at home can cause environmental impacts or causes environmental in principle because i need to heat my home i need to light my home when i'm there so we kind of looked at uh we used time use diaries to to record what people did on a day when they worked from home as compared to when they worked from the employer's office for example and then so i guess the big point of this is what did you what did you discover what does it mean well um we we saw several things actually so the first and the most important thing i think is that when people worked from home they in fact spent less time in transport so they didn't compensate the commute with additional travel for private for private purposes or for any other purposes which is good already we also saw that people when they worked from home and when they worked from home or specifically from this co-working space which was closer to their homes than their employers office they increasingly used more environmentally friendly transport modes like biking or walking instead of using the car which was the common transport mode or public transport to go to the employer's office and the fact that this we saw some sort of change in this direction was only possible because this working space was closer to their was so close to their homes that they could actually work or that they could actually buy

which is uh a difference to other studies in this field where also the the impacts of the co-working space were investigated but the co-working space or the the work hub was too far away in order for by being biking or walking being a really feasible alternative to to to driving there so this is good news actually because transport is in general a very um if you think about greenhouse gas emissions or energy consumption per unit of time i spend on an activity transport is one specifically motorized transport one of the most environmentally unfriendly activities i can i can i can conduct so this was a was a good shift actually we saw also and this was not surprising that people had more time for for leisure and um maintenance activities for example household care like vacuum cleaning or or similar things and when they were from home which is i said not surprising it's a bit difficult to to to estimate what are environmental consequences of this because we did not know which exact activities they performed we just knew that they were doing more housework and so on but in principle i would assume substituting motorized transport of housework is usually a good substitution in terms of the environment or energy consumption and yeah but still what could happen is that of course people in general consume more energy when they're at home for heating the house or for cooling the house or for for for um

for lighting the house for example they need to cook at home and this also requires a lot of energy we could not find estimate that but it's certainly a risk for increasing energy consumption at home this means if people decide or if companies decide to adopt a home office policy where people increasingly work from home they should at the same they should know about the risk that now more energy might be consumed at home that means they should adopt additional energy saving measures at their offices this means try to reduce the office space in order to reduce your heating energy consumption or your cooling and lighting energy consumption is one measure and also try to ensure that your employees do not use the safe commuting time for other environmentally unfriendly specifically transport activities for example maybe they can be equipped with a public transport path so they so they do not use the to they use the car less for for private purpose or

any other potential measures which would avoid that um so one needs to think about all the potential negative impacts and think about in a creative way about measures to to reduce these these negative side impacts which are certainly not intended but are a risk

very interesting so there's still a lot of open questions and still a lot of assumptions that need to be fleshed out and challenged and yeah investigated from your from your study um and you may not have the answer to this but from the study is working from home better or worse than working in centralized offices for the environment

that's a very good question i do not i do not have the fd final answer to that but i would rather see it from a different perspective i would first suggest that our current commuting patterns are not sustainable from from various perspectives we spend a lot of time commuting which is our living time and if we can avoid that i think it can create a lot of benefits and at the same time this this let's call it waste the time to exaggerate a little bit um also causes negative environmental impacts so this whole process of the heavy commuting five days per week to a far away employer's office uh has various side effects so we should aim at solutions that can avoid that or reduce it at least at the same time working five days per week from home might not be a preferable alternative for for many people because they do not have the the the right facilities at home to work properly because they cannot concentrate because people want to leave their houses every once in a while and do not spend 24 7 in their houses so in this case a co-working space or work cup which is close to my home might be a convenient alternative where and in the future an employee can for example flexibly decide i maybe need to see my colleagues in my employer's office one or two days per week on one or two days per week i can't work at home without feeling feeling that the the ceiling is falling on my head and on the other days i can work from the close by co-working space and still avoid these lengthy commutes and environmentally undefinedly commits to office so i think we need to pro in order to really um create a change which is on the one side good for the environment but on the other side meets the needs of every individual we need to create these combined possibilities of working from home or working close to home and of of course the required meetings of our personal meetings with colleagues and officers which might be farther away this idea of a community-based work hub is something that keeps coming up in several conversations and even the employers um maybe um role in sponsoring that and making that possible um it's a very interesting idea now that's that's fantastic so based on on what you said and you know i i didn't think you'd come out with a definitive answer of it's better or worse thank you for at least trying the question i was asking is what is working from home better or worse um environment instead of working from a centralized office and when i say working from home i mean working in a decentralized way distributed way yeah um so if we wanted to get to that definitive answer is it better or worse i.e should we be supporting it or not um taking your research and understanding that your research is a piece of that answer what else do you think should be done um what other questions should be asked and how do you want to be involved in that what do you plan if you plan anything um well i think what what there are a lot of studies about the environmental impacts of decentralized flexible work already which all all grasp certain aspects still there's a lot of uncertainty about the bottom line environmental impacts also because they can be different for every individual so it's difficult to come up with a definite answer but i think what is certainly required is more long-term studies because on the one side we have short-term effects of of flexible work models or these are decentralized working schemes that on certain days i do not have to commute but i spent more time at home and might increase managed consumption there for example but on the other side there are long-term effects um in the long term if i as an employee can expect that i only need to commute to my employer's office every once per week or so i might accept living further away from it where housing prices are for example cheaper but i might also consider getting more a larger apartment or a larger house because i need a separate office uh from which i can work on these are a lot of long-term effects where there's still a lot of uncertainty about and so i i propose to make more long-term studies on these effects and try to understand what characteristics of individuals uh how how individuals differ different characteristics like job type like family type income type and so on and how these characteristics influence the long-term impact

excellent thank you yes i'm background noise yeah i suppose unavoidable when i'm working from home exactly that's where the benefits of the of the co-working spaces come in yeah although they can be quite noisy too