4 Ways to Reduce Office Carbon Footprint by Understanding Occupancy

As we enter the last three months of 2024 and net zero deadlines loom even closer on the horizon, corporations around the world are feeling increasing pressure to decrease their carbon footprint, and fast.

39% of global carbon emissions come from real estate. And while 11% of these emissions are from building materials, the other 28% are a result of operating the buildings themselves.

Moving your offices into greener real estate is easier said than done. 30% of predicted demand for low carbon office space in 21 cities globally won’t be met by 2025. That leaves organizations struggling to meet their ESG targets in a real bind.

We need a way to reduce office carbon footprint that’s less drastic than buying more real estate, but more impactful than putting recycling bins in the kitchen.

As the adage we all know and love goes, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why mandating companies to measure and report on their workplace carbon footprints creates a pathway to reducing them.

Similarly, measuring and quantifying the ways people occupy the office creates a pathway to reducing your workplace’s carbon footprint. That’s because monitoring occupancy identifies the most impactful areas to cut your workplace’s carbon footprint every day.

Here are four ways to reduce office carbon footprint across your real estate portfolio by understanding workplace occupancy.

1)Identify underused workspaces and cut energy use

Throttling back energy use in the workplace has to be carefully balanced with the impact it has on employees. That’s why underused workspaces are prime targets for reducing workplace carbon emissions. If hardly anyone is occupying the space to begin with, changes won’t impact workplace experience.

Keeping tabs on space utilization rates in real time is the best place to start. From there, identify where utilization rates are low. This could be happening in specific zones and neighborhoods on specific days (looking at you, Fridays) or consistently across the board.

These are areas where you can cut back on use of heating, cooling and lighting.

For example, by closing down a floor with less than 5% utilization rate on Fridays. The few brave souls who usually venture onto that floor could be reallocated to other floors by managing occupancy.

Replicating this across a large corporate real estate portfolio, the reduction in energy use really starts to add up.

2) Manage occupancy to reduce waste

Managing workplace occupancy is the process of directing employees to the right spaces at the right times through tools and policies. Resources include desks, meeting rooms, equipment and even parking spaces.

A US-based study by the National Academy of Sciences found that hybrid employees working remotely two or four days a week reduce their carbon emissions by up to 29% versus full time in-office workers. This makes a strong case for maintaining hybrid work patterns, even as behemoths like Amazon mandate employees back in the office five days per week.

However, the unintentional impact of hybrid work patterns is the creation unnecessary emissions from over or undercrowding. In other words, everyone coming in at the same time with ghost towns on the emptier days.

Managing workplace occupancy shifts occupancy out of areas that increase emissions without impacting or sacrificing employee experience.

Let’s jump back to our example in the previous point about shutting down a floor on Fridays. By using a booking system to manage occupancy, desks and meeting rooms on that floor would not be bookable on Fridays.

Occupancy management also reduces unintentional waste from employees using workspaces with more equipment and resources than they actually need.

An informal two-person meeting in a 20 person meeting room is a prime example of this. There’s excess use of lighting, heating, cooling and ventilation, the TV is switched on for a full two hours, and the room needs cleaning afterwards. In a scenario like this, a two-person pod or small meeting room would have sufficed.

Managing occupancy with a meeting room booking system makes sure the number of employees is proportionate to the room’s capacity.

What’s more, everyone gets a better workplace experience since they can reserve the resources they need in advance.

Companies can reduce their carbon footprint by ensuring all employees have exactly what they need to do their best work. Providing any less than this creates a negative employee experience that decreases attendance – even with RTO mandates. Providing more space than employees actually use creates waste and drives up carbon emissions.

Workplace scheduling can also manage occupancy (and cut use of utilities) by taking advantage of natural lightning. Meeting rooms on the east side of the office could be bookable in the morning, for instance, and meeting rooms on the west side could be bookable in the afternoon.

Read more: How to choose a meeting room booking system

3) Rightsize use of facilities management and services

Facilities management teams are the ones who make it happen when it comes to slashing workplace carbon footprint. That’s because they operate each asset in your corporate real estate portfolio, every day.

FM teams can make a big dent in an office’s carbon footprint by rightsizing servicing of workspaces depending on occupancy levels.

Maintenance, repairs and servicing workspaces can all be very carbon intensive.

Repairs are costlier than maintenance, both for the business and for the environment. Proactive and regular inspection of equipment makes it less likely FM teams will have to make repairs that incur a higher environmental cost.

On the flipside, equipment in heavily occupied areas of the office is more likely to need repair. By increasing inspection frequency in areas with higher utilization rates, FM teams can reduce the risk of equipment needing sudden repairs.

Similarly, by tracking workplace occupancy and overlaying this with floor plans, you can visualize which areas your janitorial team needs to pay the most attention to and which areas they can service less frequently.

The same is also true for other services like restocking vending machines and catering. By looking at occupancy patterns and trends over time, you can predict how much food employees will want.

That means less spend on catering and vending, less food waste and a reduced carbon footprint.

Read more: Sustainable Facilities Management: The Vital Role FMs Can Play

4) Predicting occupancy to reduce CRE portfolio size

Predicted occupancy is a data-driven assessment of how workspace utilization rates will increase, decrease or stay the same, based on past and present patterns and trends.

Measuring predicted occupancy rates is the basis for eliminating underused space through leasing decisions or repurposing.

On the flip side, what might seem like a cost-effective decision to downsize could end up increasing carbon footprint if the environmental cost of office space skyrockets as a result of overcrowding.

Measuring predicted occupancy reduces workplace carbon emissions because it backs up future real estate decisions. On a broader scale, it makes sure the business will actually get ROI out of the real estate portfolio.

Predicted occupancy can also inform decisions to repurpose office space or change functionality. This opens up new sustainability initiatives – for example, not overbuying on office furniture.

Reducing CRE portfolio square footage makes a huge dent in your organization’s carbon footprint, but can be tricky to do without disrupting business operations or workplace experience. Here’s how a Fortune 500 firm used H₂O, HubStar’s dynamic workplace management platform, to reduce their CRE portfolio by 40% while boosting efficiency and improving hybrid experience.