The Modern Work Toolkit: How to Work Sustainably in the Office and Remotely

Just under ten percent of employed people in the European Union work from home on a normal day. There is no question that it saves time, money and CO2 emissions. Many offices have gone paperless in recent decades, making them more environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, employers subsidise free public transport tickets or bicycles for their teams. But while some adjustments are being made, other important aspects are falling by the wayside.

Did you know that, according to experts, data centres could account for the majority of CO2 emissions from digitalisation in the future? It’s high time for a truly sustainable digital transformation of the labour market.

Advantages of a sustainable digital strategy, or “How to convince my boss to work more sustainably”

If this topic interests you, there’s a high chance you are familiar with the concept of Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR). This framework provides a robust framework and compelling arguments for businesses to adopt more sustainable practices.

At its core, CDR is the idea of integrating social and ecological sustainability as a primary business objective. This is typically achieved through a voluntary self-commitment on the part of the company, which is then regularly assessed and documented in an internal CDR report.

Sustainable practices can increase employee satisfaction and have become an important selection criterion for many customers when searching for service providers or products. They’re also usually linked to topics such as digital independence and data protection. Before we dive too deep into the subject, we have a detailed article on corporate digital responsibility where you can find all the arguments.

Sustainable hosting and alternative cloud services

Let’s start with one of the most significant levers for sustainable operations: Which provider do I use for digital work?

Large tech companies like Google or Microsoft offer attractive, all-in-one solutions for businesses that need a digital infrastructure but lack their own IT department. For example, Google’s enterprise suite provides personalised email addresses and online storage that can be optionally expanded to over a terabyte of space. Additionally, it includes tools for collaborative document work and the video conferencing service, Google Meet.

For companies seeking the simplest path to digital transformation, this appears to be the perfect solution. However, while these tools are easy and reliable, they are also considered relatively carbon-intensive. For instance, working on a document in the cloud requires a constant connection to a server. Furthermore, affordable storage options tempt users to fill cloud storage with data, thereby consuming unnecessarily large amounts of energy.

Ultimately, everything we store in the cloud drives up the energy demand of data centres. Ralph Hintemann, an expert on data centres at the Borderstep Institute, attributes the largest share of digitalisation’s CO2 emissions to data centres in the coming years. Accordingly, it is becoming increasingly important to consider where we store our data. This necessity is further amplified by geopolitical shifts.

For collaborative work at RESET, we switched to the open-source alternative Nextcloud via the IT service provider infra.run. This is operated by an independent IT cluster on German servers, which in turn are certified to run on green electricity. In addition to infra.run, other European alternatives for cloud storage offer Nextcloud. Naturally, there are also proprietary solutions, such as those from Hetzner, 1&1 Ionos, or Strato. These company packages typically also include email functions and personalised domains.

Besides better data protection, these companies are usually more transparent regarding the “supply chain” of the green electricity they use. At the same time, they do not yet rely heavily on AI integrations—a topic we will explore in more detail shortly.

Avoid language models or host them yourself

Since around 2020, the new capabilities of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others have become a major talking point. In the race to advance their AI technologies, large tech companies have since been overturning their sustainability goals just to remain part of the AI boom.

What seems to work like magic in your browser, in reality, comes with a number of negative consequences. Large Language Models (LLMs) require data centres operating with hundreds or thousands of GPUs for their training and inference (i.e., their daily operation).

We have therefore examined the enormous energy and water consumption of Large Language Models, as well as the problem of e-waste from older AI data centres, in several articles.

The result: large and complex language models carry a huge CO2 backpack. And yet they are still used inflationarily as a universal solution, as Stefan Kaufmann from Wikimedia explained to us in an interview.

Besides Stefan Kaufmann’s “When-is-GenAI-Useful-Toolkit,” we have summarised further ways to use language models more sustainably in a guide. However, it can be particularly beneficial for companies to operate LLMs locally and make them available to employees for their work. The Digitalzentrum Hamburg has summarised the initial steps for this in a set of instructions.

A secure and independent AI infrastructure offers several advantages. For example, it can be better optimised for energy efficiency, provides research opportunities for digital companies, and ensures that the processed data genuinely remains protected. Yet, even these systems consume a lot of electricity—so: Less is more!

Looking at the entire life cycle: Tips for more sustainable AI development and use

AI users and developers can influence the sustainability of an AI model.

Green coding for web and tools

Every time you access a website on the internet, stream a video on YouTube or Netflix, or load an advertisement banner, a server must transfer data to an end device. To optimise website performance—for instance, to rank better on Google—numerous tools are available online. And these tools can also give us a first indication of how energy-efficient a website is.

According to the “SEO-Studio” website, the homepage of Spiegel Online, one of Germany’s highest-reach online magazines, weighs in at about two megabytes digitally. Every device that visits the site receives this data, which consists of text, images, HTML elements, and advertisements. While this might initially sound small, according to Statista, around 70 million people visited the magazine’s online version in May 2025.

There are many strategies for websites and programmes to reduce the size of the transferred data. This area is encompassed by website optimisation or “Green Coding.” For example, we regularly optimise the RESET homepage for a lean website size. For our project “Digital & Green – Strategies for Sustainable Digitalisation,” we additionally convert our images into a particularly space-saving format. As a result, the RESET homepage weighs in at just under 100 kilobytes, according to the “Website Scale,” and consequently consumes less electricity on the green-energy-powered servers of our hoster, Hetzner. If you are unsure whether your own homepage or your employer’s website runs on green electricity, the Green Web Foundation offers a practical tool; the foundation provides an online check for just this purpose.

The significant impact sustainable programming can have was revealed to us by Maria and Jiri from the Sustainable Games Alliance. This association advises development studios on how to program computer games, video games and mobile games in the most resource-efficient way possible. Since a surprisingly large number of people play video games, this offers enormous potential for saving CO2 emissions or CO2 equivalents.

Establishing sustainable practices: digital data cleaning, dark mode and refurbishing

The relocation of one’s company to a green host or the development of a proprietary AI infrastructure are larger projects that should be carefully planned. At the same time, these are initiatives that can be launched by employees, but the ultimate decision-making power rests with leaders and involves costs.

Finally, we therefore want to address possibilities for action that anyone can easily implement in their everyday work life.

Economy in video calls

Much like streaming is one of the CO2 giants in the entertainment industry, video calls are particularly data-intensive in everyday working life. Many video calling platforms, such as Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, now offer telephony in HD quality—when many people participate in a call, a massive amount of data is generated.

In addition, there are AI functions here too, for the transcription of spoken language or creative filters, which are processed on the server side. While automatically generated transcripts can be practical in many situations, they are certainly not needed in every meeting.

Open-source alternatives like Jitsi Meet or the Nextcloud-compatible “Big Blue Button” are ways to keep the data traffic in meetings low. Regardless, they offer settings controls for video quality or allow meetings to be held without video. Here, too, sustainable usage goes hand-in-hand with better data protection!

Digital data cleaning

The CDR Initiative calls for a Digital Data Clean-Up once a year. This is because cloud services with almost unlimited storage and intelligent search functions in email programmes tempt people into no longer tidying up their digital storage.

However, every additional kilobyte in a data centre requires electricity and further resources in the form of hard drive space. Accordingly, it is more sustainable to develop an awareness again when dealing with digital rubbish. Organising a digital data clean-up within a team can also be fun! Who can delete the most data, and who ends up with the fewest emails in their mail programme?

Refurbished hardware instead of new goods

Notebooks, PCs, and servers form the basis for digital work. Through the mining of precious metals and complicated supply chains, they contribute a large part of our digital CO2 footprint. Therefore, when acquiring new hardware, both privately and in companies, it is advisable to opt for refurbished products.

Refurbishing means taking used hardware, reconditioning it, and selling it again with an extended warranty. Accordingly, customers take on fewer risks but save large amounts of CO2. Refurbished purchases are particularly recommended for business hardware, as many of the offers available online are business-grade products anyway.

Philippe Arradon from the French IT cooperative Commown explained to us why these notebooks are often more modular than products from manufacturers such as Apple or Microsoft. We also recently wrote about how to buy a notebook that is as sustainable as possible.

Dark mode and energy-saving mode

True to the saying “every little helps”, modern operating systems offer many ways to reduce the energy consumption of devices. Training courses or themed evenings can be used to establish sustainable practices for using smartphones and computers in companies.

Activating “dark modes”, i.e. darker interfaces in operating systems, reduces the power consumption of monitors, for example. And in offices in particular, there is little reason for computers to remain on at night or remain in standby mode.

The power of conscious digital choices

Many of the tips for a more conscious, sustainable everyday life can also be applied in a professional context. The main point is to keep the impact of our digital steps—on the internet and on servers—in mind. When we share a file with our colleagues, it doesn’t magically float into a cloud on the other side of the world. It is sent via a physical transmission network consisting of mobile phone masts, servers, submarine cables with amplifiers, and distribution boxes to a data centre, which in turn consumes large amounts of energy and water.

Sustainable work should therefore also include a sustainable digital strategy. And with this strategy, it doesn’t matter whether it starts “top-down” at the leadership level or as an initiative among employees.