Some emission categories may require data that you don’t already have stored in ERP systems or other databases. Surveying employees can be a way to capture this data.

This guide will explain how surveys can help collect certain data points, how to ensure success when surveying employees, and how to use Plan A's survey templates.

Data on how many of your employees work from home and how many days per week on average is required for your Organisational Data.

There are a few circumstances where you may not need to survey your employees to get this data:

If all of this is not the case, the best option to gather the required data is usually to send out a monthly survey.

Employee Commute data is hard to gain without surveying your employees on a monthly basis. In case your company subsidies monthly tickets for public transport, there might be data available, but especially for the other modes, it’s rather uncommon that the required data is available.

For Business Travel data, it is likely that the required data already exists in your databases. For example, if you use a Travel Management System (TravelPerk, TripActions, in-house, etc.), that is a great place to collect very accurate data. If you don’t use such a system (yet), another source could be your invoices or employee reimbursement receipts. If these don’t yield the expected activity data, surveying your employees on the business trips they took in each respective month, will be your best choice once more.

In general, we recommend you ask for as much information as possible in a single monthly survey, so that your survey contains all the questions you need to answer for the required data for e.g. working from home, commuting, and business travels.

Here are some guidelines on how to design the questions so you can easily transform the responses to enter them on the Plan A Platform.

Use the responses to fill in the following data points in Organisational Data:

If you survey employees from multiple facilities at the same time, include a question on which facility the surveyee belongs to, so you can filter responses later on.

Example:

In this instance, Remi should be excluded since they didn't work from home. This means that out of the 6 total employees, work-from-home employees equals 5. Of these 5, the average days per week working from home equals 2.4.

There are two methods for uploading employee commute data, so you can decide which you will collect, or both, from your employees.

Accurate Data

Use the responses to sum up the total distance commuted per commuting type for the respondents.

Averaged Data

Use the responses to fill in the respective numbers per mode of transport in Employee Commute.

What if not all of your employees respond to the survey?

What matters for the calculation of your Employee Commute emissions is the proportionality between the different modes and not the absolute numbers.

Example: You’ve got the following responses from 42 employees (see second column). What we’ll calculate to estimate your emissions is the proportionality, i.e. the share of people per commuting option (see third column).

Even if you extrapolate the numbers (let’s say you got only 42 out of 50 responses), you’ll see that the proportionality doesn’t change (see fourth and fifth column).

Of course, the higher your response rate is, the more accurate your results are, and with this, not only are your emissions totals more accurate, but your decarbonisation actions will be more effective. Learn more about the required response rates for your surveys below.

If you survey employees on the business trips they took, there are in general two options to enter the data on the platform: You can either indicate the accurate start and end points of a trip or indicate the number of short- vs. long-haul trips. Note, that we strongly recommend you go for the accurate version since the more accurate your data, the more accurate your emission calculations.

You can provide your employees with both options to indicate their trips, but make sure to emphasise that the most accurate option is the preferred option.

Depending on the survey tool you use, you might want to ask a preliminary question “Can you provide accurate travel data? (Yes/No)” and determine the subsequent questions based on the response.

We all know that filling in employee surveys can be… challenging - irrespective of whether you’re the one who ASKS for responses, or is ASKED to respond. Here are four criteria for you to assess your survey approach. This may help you to motivate more people to complete your survey.

Why is this survey reaching the employee? Why does it matter that they fill it in?

Embrace your creativity, How can your survey be entertaining and informative?

Ask only data that you really don't have. Be smart about your survey's feature tools and and let people skip inapplicable sections.

Where did the effort that people people put into.

Besides these criteria, make sure also to follow some basic rules of communication:

We hope these tips help you to reach the highest response rate possible. From a statistical point of view, here are some thresholds that you should ideally reach in terms of responses, based on the number of employees you send the survey to:

Yes. You can make a copy of our templates in Google Forms. Click the relevant button below to open the template in English, French, or German, and select 'Use template' in the top right corner of the screen.

The template is supposed to be your starting point when collecting your Employee Commute, Working from Home and/or Business Travel data.

The template is entirely customisable to your operations and the data you wish to collect. We have set it up so that data can be captured for multiple calculation methods at once to make sure that regardless of what data your employees hold about their commute or business travel, they remain engaged and complete the survey.

Within the template, we highlighted the sections that you should customise to your own business’s circumstances. Don’t hesitate to adjust any element according to your needs.

However, please keep in mind that the template has been created in a way that responses can easily be translated into data points relevant to your emissions calculation.

‍Even more importantly: Each survey you send out to your employees means that you are demanding time from them. We all know how precious time is so always make sure to only survey the essentials. Value the time your employees take to fill in your survey.

Let’s walk through the required adjustments first and some optional considerations after.

1. [COMPANY] and [MONTH] placeholders

Make sure to replace [COMPANY] with your organisation’s name. Keep in mind that the survey should ideally be sent out monthly, so make sure your recipients know what data the survey is asking for.

There are references to [MONTH and YEAR] throughout the survey that must be also be replaced.
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If you wish to collect data on a different timescale (e.g. quarterly or yearly), you will need to edit the template accordingly. In this instance, you may need to add extra questions to capture each month, or alter the questions themselves to specify that employees should give quarterly or yearly averages/most common activities (e.g. mode of transport) as their answers.
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2. Office / Facility options

Replace the options in the question “Which office do you belong to?” by all the offices or facilities that are applicable and that you do Carbon Accounting for (e.g. “Berlin”, “Paris”). If you are surveying people from a single facility only, you can of course delete this question.

Banner image

To make sure your survey is in line with your corporate identity and to increase engagement, consider adding for example your company logo or banner to the survey header.

Survey introduction

Keep in mind that your recipients might not know what Carbon Accounting is or who Plan A is. Consider adjusting this paragraph accordingly. Remember that there’s also the email or other communication way which you will use to distribute the survey! It’s important to already summarise the key information there.

Working from Home

The options in the section “Your Work-From-Home (WFH) pattern" usually don’t require an adjustment unless you are a fully remote company. In this case, just remove the section or adjust the options accordingly.

Accurate or less accurate data

For both Employee Commute and Business Travel, there are multiple calculation methods available with varying accuracy. If you have already decided to only use one type of calculation method, you can remove the questions associated for the other method.

Commuting options

You might notice that we have included an additional option, “Other”, to the survey template. This is not an accepted value when uploading emissions data. Rather, we added this option so you can identify early when employees use a significant amount of transportation modes other than those currently available on the Plan A Sustainability Platform.

If you decide to keep this extra option and notice a particular pattern in the responses, please send in a request as this will help us prioritise the development of new calculation inputs accordingly.

Business Travel

Business Travel is one of those categories that you might actually have data for via a travel management system. If that’s the case, simply delete the respective section.

The transport options of travelling for business are in line with what we can currently calculate emissions for. In case you have a no-flight policy or similar in place, then of course remove the non-applicable options. The survey asks first about data relating to journeys made before asking about any overnight stays that may be associated with Business Travel.

The survey asks employees to enter a Trip title (e.g. place/purpose) for accurate data and accommodation questions. This is optional data which can be used as a tag so that various employees travel and accommodation can be grouped on under one trip. Similarly, you can tag data per respondent so you can track business travel emissions on a person by person basis.

Survey settings

Before you send out the survey to your list of recipients, review the survey settings if they fit your organisation and use case. Pay special attention to whether you would like to

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