How flexible offices are supporting ESG: Q&A with Work.life

As part of our series to find out how flexible office providers are addressing ESG (Environmental Social Governance) within their spaces we caught up with Ana Bernardo, Area Manager & Sustainability Lead at Work.life. to find out more.

Tell us a bit about your business / offer  

Work.Life was founded in 2015 by David Kosky and Elliot Gold because they believed everyone should feel happy in their work-lives. They learned the hard way that a greying office cubicle isn’t ideal grounds for productive, engaged or happy working. And so, Work.Life Camden was born.   

Today we are home to over 6500 happy members; from freelancers to big businesses and from every industry imaginable. With 17 coworking and managed offices across the UK and a 60-strong team of brilliantly diverse, talented individuals, our mission remains the same: to make work people’s work-lives happier.  

Are you addressing sustainability in the way you operate your business, and if yes what does this include for you?  

We’ve always been passionate about our social and environmental impact and in 2022 we became B Corp Certified. B Corporations are companies who value purpose as much as profit. They “meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability.” There are currently 7122+ B Corp certified companies worldwide.  

 At Work.Life, the B Corp certification has enabled us to use this framework as our first step to embed sustainability in our business model, to go beyond business as usual and pursue a more impactful way to deliver our mission to create happier workspaces.

Are you addressing environmental, social and governance issues equally or focusing more on one of these areas?  

We are working on five Impact areas: Workers, Governance, Community, Customers and Environment, using B Corp as a framework.  In the past year, we have further improved areas in the businesses where we were already performing well, which allowed us to start tackling complex areas of our business where we can improve our practices.  

We’ve defined a 3-year Sustainability Strategy in line with our recertification timeline with the aim to make improvements in all areas. Due to the nature of our business the Environment area is the one where we’ve seen the most challenges but also the one where we have invested the most to make the biggest improvements. We’ve documented our progress which anyone can read in more detail in our latest Impact Report here.

As a part of your work on sustainability, have you set a net zero target? If yes what does your commitment include and what have been the main challenges so far?    

Tackling climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time and businesses play a fundamental role to drive change in this area looking at reducing their emissions and support our path to Net Zero. In most of the buildings we currently operate, we lease only a part of the building, making it difficult for us to collate water, energy and waste data from different landlords.     

After collating most of the data for the last year, we are now in the process of calculating our carbon footprint for Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 via a certified partner and we aim to define improvement targets and strategies to deliver those targets.   

Is consideration of sustainability affecting your long-term strategic planning e.g. site selection?  

The process to collate utilities data in the past year, has taught us that the acquisition phase of our buildings is critical in this process. And therefore, instead of only looking at the operational stage we started reviewing our acquisition criteria for future buildings.  

 We’ve also started working with our suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of our fit-outs by looking at the embedded carbon of the materials and how we can use materials that have a lower impact.

Are any of your clients/occupiers asking you about sustainability? If yes what are they asking about?  

 1 in 6 of our current members works for a purpose driven organisation and sustainability is an important criteria for them when choosing their workspace. We house 57 purposed driven organisations and 13 of them are B Corp, most of these organisations want to have access to our carbon data to support their own sustainability journeys.   

 Our members also take an active role on key sustainability initiatives that take place in our spaces such as recycling drive and charity fundraises as well on feeding back to us, as a provider, where we can continue to improve our sustainability practices and that is super valuable to us.   

Do you think sustainability has been fully embraced by the flexible office sector? If not, what do you think are the barriers?  

We’ve seen business in all sectors embracing sustainability and our sector is no exception. In the last years we have seen more providers working on their sustainability credentials and certifications which have helped them establish more consistent strategies that include green leases, facilities that promote sustainable travel, data collection as well as improving energy efficiency.   

According to peer reviewed studies, the built environment generates 40% of annual global CO2 emissions. Of those total emissions, building operations are responsible for 27% annually. Considering the impact of our sector in carbon emissions, there are a lot of opportunities to continue to drive a sustainability agenda and reduce the impact on carbon emissions and support a Net Zero economy. 

Explore Work.life's workspaces in Farringdon, Fitzrovia, and Holborn.