Our Environment

Understanding the future workplace

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Making sense of changing work behaviours and adapting our practices is essential to the ongoing evolution of the workplace. With this in mind, we invited our staff to complete a work from home survey in Autumn 2020, in order to gain greater insight into the environmental implications of remote working.

A third (34%) of our employees submitted their responses, providing invaluable data on homeworking carbon emissions across the firm. Under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol standards, homeworking is an optional disclosure. To date, many firms have not included those associated emissions in their overall sustainability reporting due to the lack of a clear methodology on which to base emissions calculations and the associated data collection challenges.

However, a homeworking emissions whitepaper produced in 2020 by international climate change consultancy EcoAct, in partnership with Lloyds Banking Group and NatWest Group, suggests that this stance will be difficult to maintain following the changes to working practices that have emerged since the COVID-19 crisis began. As a firm, we are acutely aware that our emissions output since 2020 cannot be fully accurate without accounting for homeworking emissions. Consequently, we are exploring the environmental impact of hybrid working practices at the Firm – and how we can collectively mitigate it.

The majority of our staff worked from home 90% or more of the time during the pandemic and the survey revealed that 70% of respondents working from home were accompanied by at least one other person. Although this allows us to factor in other homeworkers when considering the carbon footprint of our employees, we are working with sustainability consultancy Achill to help staff undertake a full assessment of their work from home carbon footprints.

We are confident that this will give our employees a better understanding of their areas of carbon output and help them to work in a more environmentally friendly and efficient way while providing us with essential data to support our 2030 net zero carbon commitment.

of respondents working from home in 2020 were accompanied by at least one other person Source: Charles Russell Speechlys Work From Home Survey

The Chancery Lane Project: Tackling climate change together

The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP) is a collaborative effort by a whole range of lawyers and firms to create an open source depository of contract clauses that seek to establish carbon reduction commitments in supply chains and in different sectors including property, construction, banking & finance, employment and corporate affairs.

Over the last two years, Charles Russell Speechlys has participated in the project to help drive sustainable behaviour in business and our communities – see our Responsible Business Report 2020 for more details.

TCLP is founded on the understanding that the commercial world is a vast interconnected web of contractual relationships. Feeding carbon reduction commitments into that web will cause those commitments to filter down and across the whole network. As one business contracts with various suppliers and those suppliers in turn contract with others, the chain expands. We’re keen to help spread the good news of this free-to-use resource and give guidance on its application – see TCLP for more information and in particular the incredibly useful Net Zero Toolkit.

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