Is your travel getting replaced by virtual meetings?
More out of curiosity than anything else, I’m interested to know if any of you have started holding more virtual meetings compared to your usual travel schedules?
The New York Times ran a story yesterday about how rising travel costs are forcing more businesses to adopt virtual meetings in place of good old fashioned I-flew-halfway-across-the-world meetings.
As just one example:
Accenture figures its consultants used virtual meetings to avoid 240 international trips and 120 domestic flights in May alone, for an annual saving of millions of dollars and countless hours of wearying travel for its workers.
So virtual meetings are definitely cheaper, not to mention if you’ve got a really good setup it can make you feel like you’re in Minority Report. Do you think that virtual meetings are going to start supplanting the travel in your schedule anytime soon?
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
My company definitely uses more online meetings, webinars, etc., rather than sending us all over the country. More efficient but not as fun!
@Cassandra absolutely less fun! I think that we’re looking at a larger trend, though, since it’s unlikely that transportation costs are going to be coming down soon, whereas digital technology, bandwidth, and display technology is becoming more and more affordable.
It’s already started with my company. Large meetings are now to be done via the web
[...] Is your travel getting replaced by virtual meetings? [...]
I think if not requiring on-site actions, virtual meeting would be more efficient. Especially with the latest communication tools, it is a good solution for companies.
It’s less fun coz business can be processed but not travel. With a virtual meeting, you can’t travel in the business destination, even when it’s short time outside business. That part of advantage in business travel is lost.
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My company has prohibited sales travel and now requires all sales presentations be done via webinars and/or telephone – I lose more sales now – I do not have the advantage of sitting before the potential customer where I know I have his undivided attention and can read his body language it gauge a response to a presentation. Also I feel that my customers are not yet to the point of sealing a deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars where they have never even met the person selling the product. While companies doing the selling perceive this as a positive step to curtail business expenses, I don’t think the customers have as of yet adopted this approach and sales suffer as a result.
I think that if a business flight is (sadly) replaced by a virtual meeting – and you
have no opportunity to veto – you should at least make sure that
an effective online meeting tool is used. This tool should suit your personal
purposes, budget, job situation etc., to make the best of your staying on the ground. There’s an interesting site that provides a vendor-independent comparison of most current conferencing solutions. Here’s the URL.
Here we go..
http://www.webconferencing-test.com
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