Office Work: Transforming Energy Demand and Practice

Office work: transforming energy demand and practice
Jemma Cliff - Lancaster University

My project examines the ways in which office work is changing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods of responding to lockdown and to the demands of social distancing have challenged many long-standing assumptions about how, when and where office work can and "should" be performed. New questions have arisen about what office work entails, about the costs and benefits of flexible working and the future of daily commuting. My project is designed to understand what effect the spatial and institutional reconfiguration of office work has on the extent, timing and location of energy demand.

The method is to focus on the social and geographical organisation of office work, treating this as an extended site of enquiry that cuts across conventional distinctions, for example between energy use in the domestic and the non-domestic sector, and between transport, commuting and digital communication. The proposed strategy reveals opportunities for shaping related patterns of demand that would not be identified from conventional and separate sectoral analyses and comparisons.

Two partner organisations will be involved in the research. Both are financial consultancy firms that are actively re-thinking the way in which office work is organised and are doing so with a view to carbon reduction. Through using a combination of desk analysis and interviews, the research will identify and evaluate a limited number of lower-carbon 'formats' to be considered and debated within the partner organisations. In the first year of the project I aim to build close working relationships with the partner organisations and hold a series of meetings designed to inform the detail of my research and maximise its practical benefit. As part of this work I intend to review existing methods of representing the carbon and energy consequences of different working practices. In the second and third year of the research I aim to co-produce a number of workshops, designed with managers and other staff from the partner organisations. These will focus on what office work is, where office work is done, and what this means for working practices now and in the years ahead. Insights from these events, together with the results of the interview-based parts of the study will feed back into the project, and will be captured in the form of two project reports, one for each partner.

My integrative project intends to demonstrate what a conceptual focus on 'office working' brings to the energy field. It will also serve to contribute towards otherwise separate debates about energy and the digital, energy in buildings, energy in the home, and energy-demand relating to transport.