Turn that Light Off: Behavioural Science and Sustainable WFH

A few weeks before lockdown, the BBC published an article on the environmental sustainability of working from home. Surprisingly, they reported that the carbon footprint benefits of decreased transport use might be undermined by increased energy and heating use at home. Many months later, office workers are comfortable with the idea of WFH and the trend for flexible working seems here to stay. But shouldn’t we be more concerned about the environmental impact of this huge social trend?

“There has never been a better time to engage employees with the sustainability agenda and help them create the conditions for a 'best-case' scenario when WFH.”

The issue

Imagine yourself working from home on a cold day. You wake up and turn the heating up to 22 °C. Then you sit down to your laptop to work, with your monitor and charger plugged in, leaving the lights on as it’s gloomy outside. At the end of the day, you just put your laptop on standby, so you can go back to it tomorrow morning and not hassle around. You watch some more TV and go to bed around 11pm. You turn down the heating only then, but maybe leave it on because you don’t like cold feet at night.

This year, two critical review papers were published on the worrying environmental effect of telecommuting [1, 2]. The above might not seem much of an extra consumption, but both papers concluded that WFH can result in rebound effects that might eventually increase our carbon footprint compared to when we work at the office. Ditching that morning car ride probably won’t do it for saving the planet.

As in our thought experiment, the issues arose in two areas: increased heating use and energy use. This shows that while employers can control the sustainability of office buildings, CSR teams need to consider how they can achieve carbon neutrality through encouraging individual employee responsibility. This is where behavioural science and MoreThanNow can help.

“It is widely acknowledged that the rebound effects of home-working are plentiful, and the problem is complex.”

– Liam O’Brien & Frestheh Yazdani Aliabadi (2020)

The Solution: Behavioural Science

Combatting the complex issue of unsustainable behaviours has been a popular research topic in behavioural science. Just as policy makers can get inspired by these experiments, organisations can expand their toolkits as well. Nudges and behavioural design help you to create pro-environmental behaviour at home in an easy way. Here are some amazing examples.

Social norms

We are highly influenced by what others are doing, so we’re more likely to adopt a behaviour when we think that the majority of people do it or an increasing number of our peers are shifting towards it. Wesley Schultz's research team [3] gave households' information about their neighbours’ carbon footprint, coupled with personalised feedback. It resulted in a significant, long-term decrease in energy use.

Inspired by this research, employers can set up internal competitions using their intranet to encourage fun and pro-environmental competition among employees. In fact, IKEA did just the same in collaboration with Ducky - a company specialising in emission decreasing programmes. They created an internal challenge between warehouses to see who can decrease their CO2 emission the most over 3 weeks. Overall, IKEA saved 18 000 Kg of CO2 and the programme had a huge success among their employees.

Commitment devices

Feeling a responsibility to do something “for” someone else can be a strong motivator. Along this principle, Wokje Abrahamse and her colleagues [4] created an online tool that provided energy-saving advice to participating households based on a questionnaire. They found that tailored advice, pledging to decrease energy use by a certain date, and information on global warming resulted in a 5.1% decrease in energy consumption.

As an (almost) workplace-related example, Baca-Motes and colleagues [5] found that when hotel guests made a brief but specific commitment at check-in, and received a lapel pin to symbolise their commitment, they were over 25% more likely to hang at least one towel for reuse, and this increased the total number of towels hung by over 40% 

Finally, NatWest designed a carbon footprint calculator for their employees with personalised commitments to make at the end of the process. Although we don’t know the results of this experiment, the science suggests it probably worked really well.

Defaults

We don’t like change. This is because we don’t engage consciously with many of our daily decisions, or we lack the motivation to take a different course of action. Defaults are also often perceived as a “safe bet” or an implicit recommendation. Exploiting this bias, Christopher Henkel and his team [6] used defaults to encourage use of the Blackle search engine, which has a lower screen brightness. When participants were asked to find answers to a set of questions, the eco-friendly search engine was set up as the baseline, with an option to opt for Google instead. Only 8% of the participants decided to switch, which was significantly different from the control group who had to explicitly choose their search engine. 

Putting this into practice, employers can set up deals with renewable energy suppliers and provide discounts or automatic enrolment for their employees. As a close example, Nationwide Building Society has just started to offer to its employees a free subscription to Switchd, a company that automatically switches people’s energy supplier to ensure they are always on the best deal.

The Bottom line

Behavioural science can help nudge sustainable home-working, but we need to adapt and test its tools in an organisational context. The environmental impact of WFH is not clear cut. The lower levels of commuting caused by home-working can be offset by a range of 'rebound effects', including lower energy and heating efficiency in the home. At MoreThanNow, we see this as both an opportunity and a threat. Home-working has the potential to benefit people, organisations and the environment, but only if responsible employers engage with the research and take meaningful action.

We’ve teamed up with LSE Consulting and two FTSE100 employers, BT and Phoneix Group, to define the WFH home behaviours that matter most, and what we can do about them in the months and years to come. Read more and get involved using the link below.

References

[1] Hook, A., Sovacool, B., & Sorrell, S. (2020). A systematic review of the energy and climate impacts of teleworking. Environmental Research Letters.

[2] O'Brien, W., & Aliabadi, F. Y. (2020). Does telecommuting save energy? A critical review of quantitative studies and their research methods. Energy and Buildings.

[3] Schultz, P. W., Nolan, J. M., Cialdini, R. B., Goldstein, N. J., & Griskevicius, V. (2007). The constructive, destructive, and reconstructive power of social norms. Psychological science.

[4] Abrahamse, W., Steg, L., Vlek, C., & Rothengatter, T. (2007). The effect of tailored information, goal setting, and tailored feedback on household energy use, energy-related behaviors, and behavioral antecedents. Journal of environmental psychology.

[5] Baca-Motes, K., Brown, A., Gneezy, A., Keenan, E. A., & Nelson, L. D. (2013). Commitment and behavior change: Evidence from the field. Journal of Consumer Research.

[6] Henkel, C., Seidler, A. R., Kranz, J., & Fiedler, M. (2019). How to nudge pro-environmental behaviour: An experimental study.