Cognitive Adds WFH Emissions Reporting for Net Zero Initiatives
Such capabilities could become important for future expected SEC reporting requirements.
Workplace optimization software vendor Cognitive Corp., in partnership with Verum Consulting, announced the addition of work-from-home metrics for environmental reporting. Given the twin demands of many employees pushing to work from home and SEC regulatory focus on ESG reporting, with a significant emphasis on the environmental part, this sort of information in the future could become more important.
The last few years have changed the reporting landscape. As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has previously estimated, 13% of full-time workers were ready for remote work as of 2017, with three-quarters being in managerial and technical occupations and service workers, including sales, making up another 14%.
But the pandemic forced enormous changes in the numbers of people working from home. The WFH contingent’s size seems to be stabilizing, although still at much higher numbers than in the past.
That’s where working from home collides with potential ESG reporting, and not just for direct regulatory reporting but also for the interests and needs of investors. In its 2022 Global Investor Outlook Report and other research, Colliers has found that “sustainability is no longer a ‘nice to have.’”
Estimating the emissions impact of a facility is far easier when the whole workforce is in a set of buildings, making estimates much easier to produce. When many people are out of the building, emissions estimations and reporting get much harder.
Cognitive is using Verum Consulting as a source of information. “Utilizing the Verum Remote Work Index, companies can now have visibility into the impact their remote and hybrid workforce has on Net Zero attainment,” Cognitive says.
According to Cognitive, the Verum Remote Work Index is “a calculation by a company’s human resources department of the level of flexibility inherent to each role based on internal data collected during the pandemic. Thus, a position assigned an RWI of 65 means that the position allows up to 65% of functions to be performed outside of the office. Every single future job description could contain an RWI so candidates can search job opportunities based on their preference for working from home or working from anywhere.”
The consulting services determine an RWI score for everyone working for a company. But it isn’t clear how that ultimately enables either company to perform the calculations that would seem to be necessary—an estimation of the emissions that someone working at home generates and which could be attributed to the employer.