The emissions produced as your staff travel between home and work can be a meaningful contributor to your organisation’s carbon footprint. This guide gives you practical steps to understand and reduce emissions from employee commuting. It covers promoting lower-carbon travel options, introducing flexible working, and motivating staff to make sustainable choices.

How this helps your business

Reduces costs: Lowering commuting emissions can often result in lower business costs, for example by having to provide fewer car parking spaces and potential tax benefits through cycle-to-work and public transport salary sacrifice schemes.
Improves staff wellbeing and retention: Active commuting options like cycling and walking benefit employee health. Flexible and remote working reduces commuting stress and is consistently ranked highly by employees as a workplace benefit.
Strengthens your sustainability story: Customers and staff increasingly expect businesses to take emissions seriously across all areas of their operations. Commuting is a visible and relatable category that staff can engage with directly.
Reduces emissions quicky: Promoting sustainable commuting is a relatively simple and fast way to reduce your organisation’s emissions.

Is this right for you?

Reducing commuting emissions is relevant to almost all businesses with employees who regularly travel to a fixed workplace. It will have the biggest impact if you:

Have a team where most staff commute by car, particularly in petrol or diesel vehicles.
Are based in or near a town or city with reasonable public transport links.
Have flexibility to offer hybrid or remote working for some or all your team.
Currently provide free or subsidised car parking, which inadvertently encourages driving.

It will have less impact if your business is already largely remote, your team already commutes primarily by public transport or active travel, or the nature of the work means flexible working is not practical.

Note: Employee commuting is a separate emissions category to business travel. Commuting covers how staff get to and from their normal place of work.

How to reduce emissions from employee commuting

✅Understand current commuting patterns

Get a clear sense of how your staff currently travel to work. Some key things to find out are:

What modes of transport do staff use (e.g. car, train, bus, cycle, walking, motorbike)?
- For car users: what type of vehicle (petrol, diesel, hybrid, electric)?
What is the approximate distance each employee travels to and from work?
How many days per week does each employee commute to the workplace?
How many days are employees working from home?
Are any staff already car sharing?

You don’t need precise data to get started: a rough breakdown by mode is enough to identify where the biggest opportunities are. Creating a commuting survey with tools like Google Forms or Microsoft Forms is free and easy to do.

✅ Flexible working

Flexible and hybrid working is the most impactful lever for reducing commuting emissions, because it eliminates the commute altogether on the days staff work from home. Consider:

Setting a clear hybrid working policy that allows staff to work from home on agreed days.
Allowing staff to work from a co-working space or satellite office closer to their home, reducing journey distances even when they are not at the main office.
Ensuring home-working employees have what they need to work effectively remotely, so working from home is productive.
Home working also generates emissions from heating, lighting, and equipment, so it’s good to encourage energy-efficient home-working habits too.

✅ Promote low-carbon commuting options

There are meaningful choices to be made about how your staff get to work. You can nudge them towards lower-carbon options by making them easier, cheaper, or more attractive than driving.

Cycle-to-work scheme: The UK government's Cycle to Work scheme allows employees to save 25-39% on the cost of a bike and accessories through salary sacrifice. It's free for employers to set up and costs nothing to run.
Adapting the workplace: Consider installing secure bike storage, showers, and lockers to make cycling or running/walking a practical option.
Public transport support: Consider subsidising rail or bus season tickets, or offering a salary sacrifice scheme for public transport costs. Even a modest contribution can make the train or bus a more attractive option.
Carpooling: Encourage and facilitate car sharing. Simple tools like a shared spreadsheet or a free platform like Liftshare can match drivers with passengers. Car sharing halves the per-person emissions of a car journey immediately.
EV transition: For staff who need to drive, switching from petrol or diesel to an electric vehicle significantly reduces emissions. Consider offering EV salary sacrifice schemes and installing EV charging points at your premises.

✅Reduce parking options at work

Free car parking at work is one of the biggest hidden incentives to drive. It signals that driving is the default, and makes alternatives seem less convenient by comparison. Options to consider include:

Reallocating some car parking spaces for bike storage, EV charging, or car-share priority bays.
Introducing a parking levy where staff pay a modest amount to park, with proceeds used to fund sustainable travel incentives.
Reducing the number of parking spaces available or introducing a booking system that limits daily availability.

This is a sensitive area that will require careful communication, particularly if public transport options are limited. Start by understanding your team’s situation before making changes.

✅Engage your team

Change works best when employees understand the reasons behind it and feel involved in the process. Start by sharing the results of your commuting survey with your team and explaining why you’re looking at this area. Then:

Invite staff to suggest ideas for making lower-carbon commuting easier or more attractive.
Try a commuting challenge, e.g. give a prize to the team who logs the most car-free days in a month.
Share regular updates on progress, so staff can see the impact of their choices.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

❌ Expecting change without giving support: For many employees, driving is the only realistic option, especially in rural areas or for those with caring responsibilities, irregular hours, or disabilities. Before introducing incentives (or disincentives), it’s important understand your team’s actual situation. A generic approach is unlikely to work and may cause resentment.

❌ Ignoring home-working emissions: Working from home reduces commuting emissions but increases energy use at home. Whilst home working almost always results in a net reduction over commuting, it’s worth acknowledging and helping staff adopt energy-efficient habits at home.

❌ Waiting for perfect data before acting: You don't need all the data before you can start reducing emissions. Introducing a cycle-to-work scheme, promoting car-sharing, or extending home-working options will help regardless of whether you have a complete carbon footprint or not. Start acting while you gather better data.

Cost and Effort

Cost: Low to moderate

Most actions cost little or nothing beyond staff time. Financial incentives like cycle-to-work schemes and public transport subsidies can involve modest ongoing spend, but typically generate savings through reduced car parking costs, lower mileage claims, and improved staff wellbeing and retention.

Effort: Low to medium

Initial setup: 2–4 hours to run a commuting survey, review results, and create policies.

Ongoing: less than 1 hour per month to track participation in any incentive schemes and check in with staff.

Conclusion

Commuting emissions are a personal part of a business’s carbon footprint, shaped by daily employee choices. With the right incentives, even small changes across your team can significantly cut emissions. Assess how staff travel, then target relevant solutions like flexible working, cycle-to-work schemes, or car-sharing. The aim is not to dictate behaviour but to make lower-carbon options easier and more appealing.