It is fantastic that companies are trying to go green these days and conference calls offer an easy way to reduce your carbon footprint and increase your productivity. So how do you use conference calls to go green? Some areas may may seem obvious but here are a few of the ways that using conferencing can help your company go green.
- Reduce Car Travel – Naturally the use of travel to attend a meeting is one of the biggest ways to reduce your use of resources through the use of conference calls. Usually if there is a meeting there will also be a number of attendees so the reduction in car travel is compounded by the number of attendees. And not everyone drives a Eco-friendly vehicle so the amount of emissions saved can be astounding.
- Reduce Air Travel – Now take that reduction in car travel and multiply by ten. If you have to travel by plane to a meeting you are not just taking part in the emissions from the air plane but the car resources to get to the airport and then to the meeting and everything in between. Audio conferencing eliminates the need to travel to your meeting.
- Reduce Office Resource Use – Even though the office your business is in is probably open whether you show up or not you won’t be contributing to the use of resources in the office when you are there. Just your body heat requires that much more air conditioning or heating. The lights in your office if you are in a private office can be turned off and so forth.
- Reduce Use of Office Supplies – If you do more meeting remotely you will find yourself doing more electronically. When you do a presentation using web conferencing you can still have hand outs but doing them electronically saves the paper, ink and electricity to print them. In offices there are also a lot of non-renewable waste like a coffee cup you get on the way to the office for instance. If you are home you are apt to use a coffee mug that will simply be washed and reused.
The reality is that conferencing technology has gotten to where you can hold a remote meeting with all of the resources you would use in an in person meeting including a video connection for much less than than the cost of a regular meeting. So if you simply think twice about whether your meeting is necessary to be attended in person or not you can really reduce the resources you use and save money and increase productivity while you do it.