With the registration deadline for the Carbon Reduction Commitment coming in next month, energy management is top of many firm’s agendas. But while the latest energy-saving gadgets are flying off the shelves, businesses are failing to grasp the potential environmental (and economic) savings of agile working argues Andrew Mawson.
Right now lighting suppliers, building control suppliers and energy consultants are having a field day promoting products that use less energy or manage energy better as organisations start to pay attention to the need to reduce energy consumption in offices.
Landlords are busily investing in green buildings to differentiate them from the competition and for the existing stock of buildings, that far out-way the new, ‘green refurbishment’ seems to be the order of the day. But, shhhhhhh nobody is talking about agile working…
To achieve the government’s target to reduce CO2 to 26 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 we’re all going to have to work a lot harder at reducing the energy generated in running our lives. Offices have a big part to play, given that they account for some something close to 50 per cent of the UK’s CO2 which comes to 6.8 million tonnes, so there’s a lot organisations could and should do to drive down energy consumption and CO2.
Recently I’ve made myself very unpopular attending sustainability and environment conferences by asking some awkward questions. I’ve heard people talking about the virtues of new low energy lighting systems, natural ventilation, green buildings, better energy management, using degree days and so on. While I applaud people who promote these technological and management developments I’ve become absolutely infuriated by the total lack of mention of agile working as a solution to the CO2 problem. And no, I’m not talking about home working.
Sometimes when we talk about agile working, people get the impression we’re talking about shutting the office and having everyone working from home. Sure for some organisations this might be a sensible solution but for the vast majority of large organisations in the public and private sectors the office is still where work is done, sometimes because of custom and practice and sometimes because there are regulatory, cultural or operational issues that make it difficult to go down the utopian flexible model.
Much of our work over the last few years has been supporting real estate and IT leaders in building the evidence to support a change to agile working and helping people in large organisations understand and learn to get used to these new ways of working until they become natural. Most of this has been within the office NOT involving home working.
But for me driving out waste is as much a part of reducing CO2 as introducing new lighting systems, materials and controls and there is waste galore when we start to look at the use of buildings. It’s pretty well accepted these days that most desks in most offices are only occupied around 50 per cent of the time — or a grand 60 or so hours they are available for occupation every week out of 168.
That is waste on a grand scale. We know that in most offices we can improve both the effectiveness of the working environment, the efficiency of working practices AND reduce the waste in building capacity by increasing the number of people that use the building by 25 per cent to 30 per cent. We do this by getting people to work differently in the office and providing a range of the right IT tools and spaces to help people do their jobs better.
We know from our studies people are not as happy as you’d think with the traditional workplace. People complain of distraction and not being able to find a suitable space to do tasks needing quiet or confidentiality. In fact about ?50 per cent of people complain about distraction and an inability to find an appropriate space.
So there has to be a better way of designing and using office buildings to get a better and more sustainable situation.
Imagine an organisation that has five buildings of a similar size in a city or area it could easily, (lease breaks permitting) retrofit agile working into four buildings and dispose of the fifth. With a fully loaded typical workstation costing anything between £9,000 and £22,000 this could be a large amount of saving in cash for even a medium-sized organisation.
But the biggest secret of all is the sustainability dimension, and not even the environmentalists have cottoned on to it yet. So let’s imagine you take my advice and dispose of one of the five buildings and retain the other four. You have immediately reduced your energy consumption and therefore CO2 emissions by 20 per cent at a stroke. If you are smart you would have introduced agile working in the other buildings spending some capital budget creating a more scientifically constructed workplace suited to professional tasks and mobility, re-stacked the buildings and implemented a change programme to make sure people are prepared for the changes that agile working brings.
So what about the increase in energy consumption in the other four buildings because of their more intense usage? Well there is not much real research in the public domain on this at present, but the anecdotal evidence from some of our clients in the public and private sector is that increasing the intensity of occupancy from 50 per cent utilisation to 75 per cent-80 per cent has only had a marginal impact on energy consumption probably between 4 per cent and 6 per cent.
The experts have pointed out to me that all buildings have a base load. In other words the amount of energy they consume whether they have 1 or 1,000 people occupying them. That base load is generally pretty big and so it takes a lot of increased demand to create any additional power consumption beyond the base load. So in my earlier example, each of the retained buildings were being lit, cooled and powered 100 per cent even when they were only being used at a 50 per cent utilisation level. So, increasing the number of people working from the building appears to have a very limited impact on energy consumption.
Going back to the example, let’s say each of the buildings when operated in a traditional fashion had 500 workstations and people, then on a conservative estimate the closing of one building will save £5m per annum (assuming a £10,000 per year cost of a workstation). We might spend £3m to augment the retained buildings with new meeting spaces and quiet spaces, upgraded IT and telephone systems and possibly invest in new energy efficient building controls and lamps and we’ve got our money back almost immediately. We’ve saved £3m year one and over a five-year period £22m AND saved probably around 15 per cent in carbon emissions per annum.
I’m not knocking organisations that are trying to make their buildings greener. We all have to attack CO2 reduction with whatever tools we can. But we can achieve more CO2 and cost savings faster by introducing agile working as part of a green occupancy programme.
Of course such a change to green occupancy, requires lots of people who have engrained attitudes and behaviours to change their ways, but a great many organisations have made the change and their businesses are operating effectively. Getting people to work in a mobile, agile way within the office takes leadership and commitment and a carefully constructed change programme to prepare people for change but there is a science emerging that allows these changes to be achieved without any loss of business focus or motivation.
So next time you are talking to your colleagues about sustainability, ask them why they are not considering agile working and green occupancy as a key part of their sustainability programmes. There really is no reason why the link between agile working and sustainability should be secret.
Andrew Mawson is managing director of Advanced Workplace Associates
