Meeting.ie

Environmental Impact of Business Travel

Imagine a business meeting that disrupts work to discover why work is being disrupted – it’s an insane concept. That’s not to say that business meetings don’t play a vital role in a company, but the impact of business travel needs to be considered.

Often business owners and employees fail to consider the environmental impact of business travel. Every so often a corporation will make a push for carpooling or some other minor measure for a business meeting, but this is more a cost control issue than an environmental one for the company. It seems as if the environment is usually the last thing on most corporate minds, and who can blame them? The environment doesn’t have a ready impact on the bottom line, which is where most businesses focus all of their attention. This is as it should be, since the business likely wasn’t created for the environment, but rather has to exist in it.

So how can a business use business meetings and conferences that can have an impact on the bottom line and the environment? First, the business must recognize the cost of sending attendees to an offsite meeting. Travel by plane, train or automobile has a definite impact on the environment and the bottom line. Five workers attending a meeting in five separate automobiles means five expense sheets with tolls, gas, and mileage that the company must reimburse, not to mention the pollution, the time wasted in commuting that the company isn’t being compensated for and eating out, creating additional waste, and much more. Traveling for business was necessary as the economy evolved and companies wanted to grow.

However there is a ready solution in today’s technology that not only can have a positive impact on the environment; it can have a direct effect on the company’s bottom line. You can host online business meetings using technology that keeps employees on site, minimizes travel time and reimbursement and essentially saves the world. Online meeting solutions involve teleconferencing and video conferencing which can be set up quickly and can add real savings to the corporation’s bottom line – not to mention the PR coup a company can trot out with their pledge to help improve the environment by switching over to online meetings.

Online meetings save time, save effort and helps save the environment while improving your bottom line. The new year is a great opportunity to pledge to reduce your company’s business travel in 2010!

Cork Company Fosters a New Wave of Lean, Green Business Machines

Cork Company Fosters a New Wave of Lean, Green Business Machines
Meeting.ie helps companies skip the trip to make cost and environmental savings

CORK, Ireland – In an era where companies large and small are falling prey to economic climate change, Meeting.ie Director Roland Steinmetz says it’s survival of the leanest out there. And the online meeting solutions company is feeling bullish about the future.

“More and more businesses are looking to distributed meeting solutions like video conferencing and web collaboration to save on travel costs,” he points out. “Mobile workers – the people who travel for work or telecommute – are the fastest growing workplace segment and companies are looking a lot harder at ways to bring these people together and put them in front of clients without putting them on a plane.”

The result is explosive growth in the virtual meeting industry. According to a report from Frost & Sullivan, video conferencing is poised to grow into a $4.7 billion industry worldwide by 2014. 80% of managers surveyed who have not yet deployed virtual meeting solutions plan to bring them on board over the next two to three years. Steinmetz says that according to the new figures released by Meeting.ie, his company has saved its customers more than 14,000 hours of travel time, not to mention a lot of plane fare.

“The return on investment for particular segments like sales, research and development and marketing is astronomical. We’re talking pennies for a meeting that takes minutes to set up, instead of hundreds or thousands of euros in travel costs for the participants.”

Fewer companies, claims Steinmetz, are motivated by the desire to go green, but the carbon savings made from services like web collaboration, conference calling and video conferencing are unmistakeable. His customers, he says, are poised to save nearly 2,000 metric tonnes of CO2 by the end of 2010. “That’s a lot of trees,” he points out, “Since an average tree absorbs about a ton of CO2 over it’s lifetime, it’s actually a small forest of carbon savings.”